NEW RELEASES (16.2.24)
Out of the carton and straight to your shelf (or bedside table).
Choose from the new books that arrived this week and click through to secure your copies:
Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti $36
Sheila Heti kept a record of her thoughts over a ten-year period, then arranged the sentences from A to Z. In the vein of Joe Brainard's I Remember and Edouard Levé's Autoportrait, passionate and reflective, joyful and despairing, these are the alphabetical diaries.
”A pointillist description of the raging, vacillating, euphoric, despairing turbulence of Heti’s mind. Heti has turned the pitfalls of the diary form – the relentless self-absorption, the combination of trivia and pathos – into a dazzling aesthetic virtue. Like a hologram, this book refracts an endlessly shifting light.” —Claire Allfree, Telegraph
”The resulting book is exhilarating: both intimate and withholding, repetitive and generative, undeniably self-centred and yet moving beyond the self.’ —Anna Leszkiewicz, New Statesman
”Heti's books aim to be vessels for the transformation of reader and writer. She has spoken of writing a book that would be like a Richard Serra sculpture, which a reader might walk through in the same way that the writer has undergone its creation, not knowing exactly where it is heading or how it will end... Though the formal challenges vary, Heti is always pressing at the membrane between life and art, beauty and ugliness” —Parul Sehgal, New Yorker
”Sheila Heti keeps transforming my idea of writing. Her Alphabetical Diaries isn’t just dirty and funny and poignant; it reproposes everything you thought about a self and the way time passes.” — Adam Thirlwell
Lublin by Manya Wilkinson $40
On the road to Lublin, plagued by birds that whistle like a Cossack's sword, three young lads from Mezritsh brave drought, visions, bad shoes, Russian soldiers, cohorts of abandoned women, burnt porridge, dead dogs, haemorrhoids, incessant sneezing, constipation, and bad jokes in order to seek their fortune. Elya is the lad with the vision, and Elya has the map. Ziv and Kiva aren’t so sure. The water may run out before they find the Village of Lakes. The food may run out before the flaky crescent pastries of Prune Town. They may never reach the Village of Girls (how disappointing); they may well stumble into Russian Town, rumoured to be a dangerous place for Jews (it is). As three young boys set off from Mezritsh with a case of bristle brushes to sell in the great market town of Lublin, wearing shoes of uneven quality and possessed of decidedly unequal enthusiasms, they quickly find that nothing, not Elya’s jokes nor Kiva’s prayers nor Ziv’s sublime irritatingness, can prepare them for the future as it comes barrelling down to meet them. Absurd, riveting, alarming, hilarious, the dialogue devastatingly sharp and the pacing extraordinary, Lublin is a journey to nowhere that changes everything it touches.
“A true boy's own adventure with a deep heart set against a backdrop of ferocious world events, Lublin will charm and devastate readers in equal measure with its compulsive, funny and moving prose. Manya Wilkinson has given us a fable-like story whose characters live and breathe through the ages to speak to us of childhood dreams and the inequities of war today.” —Preti Taneja
At the Drop of a Cat by Elise Fontenaille, illustrated by Violeta Lópiz (translated by Karin Snelson and Emiles Robert Wong) $35
At six years old, the child-narrator of this picture book loves nothing more than spending time with his grandpa, Luis — especially in his marvelous garden, where green beans reach as high as the sky. Luis's garden is where the little boy practices reading and writing. But just as importantly, it's also where he learns wonderful things from Luis, like the names of all the birds in the trees and new expressions that are so much fun to say. Luis's playful vocabulary is as vibrant and full of life as his garden, and phrases that are particular to his way of talking, like "at the drop of a cat" (which means right away), are soon adapted into the little boy's lexicon, too. A talented cook, artist, and gardener, Luis has much wisdom to impart and many experiences to share with his grandson — even though, as a war refugee, he never went to school himself and never learned to read and write. A loving testament to the intergenerational transmission of knowledge and the breathtaking beauty of the natural world, illustrated with evocative, multilayered art by Violeta Lópiz.
Motion Sickness by Lynne Tillman $38
For the narrator life is an unguided tour, populated with hotels and strangers, art, books, and films. Adrift in Europe, her life becomes a carousel of unusual encounters, where coincidences and luck shape la vita nuova. In London our narrator is befriended by an expatriate American Buddhist and her mysterious husband. In Paris she meets Arlette, an art historian obsessed with Velazquez's painting 'Las Meninas'. In Barcelona she meets two generations of Germans. She tours the hill towns of Italy in a London taxi with two surprising Englishmen in pursuit of art and Henry Moore. She buys postcards to send, but often tears them up, not sure of what the pictures mean. At once dreamlike and tough, hilarious and melancholic, Motion Sickness is a contemporary picaresque in which a young woman drifts and reinvents herself with every new encounter.
”A true force in American literature.” —George Saunders;
”A new thought in every sentence.” —Lydia Davs
How to Be: Life lessons from the early Greeks by Adam Nicolson $40
What is the nature of things? Must I think my own way through the world? What is justice? How can I be me? How should we treat each other?
Before the Greeks, the idea of the world was dominated by god-kings and their priests, in a life ruled by imagined metaphysical monsters. 2,500 years ago, in a succession of small eastern Mediterranean harbour-cities, that way of thinking began to change. Men (and some women) decided to cast off mental subservience and apply their own worrying and thinking minds to the conundrums of life. These great innovators shaped the beginnings of philosophy. Through the questioning voyager Odysseus, Homer explored how we might navigate our way through the world. Heraclitus in Ephesus was the first to consider the interrelatedness of things. Xenophanes of Colophon was the first champion of civility. In Lesbos, the Aegean island of Sappho and Alcaeus, the early lyric poets asked themselves 'How can I be true to myself?' In Samos, Pythagoras imagined an everlasting soul and took his ideas to Italy where they flowered again in surprising and radical forms. Hugely formative ideas emerged in these harbour-cities: fluidity of mind, the search for coherence, a need for the just city, a recognition of the mutability of things, a belief in the reality of the ideal -- all became the Greeks' legacy to the world. Born out of a rough, dynamic — and often cruel — moment in human history, it was the dawn of enquiry, where these fundamental questions about self, city and cosmos, asked for the first time, became, as they remain, the unlikely bedrock of understanding.
”Passionate, poetic, and hauntingly beautiful, Adam Nicolson's account of the west's earliest philosophers brings vividly alive the mercantile hustle and bustle of ideas traded and transformed in a web of maritime Greek cities, where men and women first questioned the nature of the universe and established what it is to be human. In this life-affirming, vital book, those ideas sing with the excitement of a new discovery.” —David Stuttard
Do You Still Have Time for Chaos? by Lynn Davidson $35
Do You Still Have Time for Chaos? tells the story of poet and teacher Lynn Davidson’s late-life decision to leave Aotearoa New Zealand, with scant resources, to build a life in Scotland. In 2020, in the frightening quiet of a Covid-emptied Edinburgh, she begins her memoir; temporarily at home at the Randell Cottage residency in Wellington, she completes it. Lynn Davidson’s long look back at what made and fractured her includes an account of single parenting with its shadows of poverty and stigma, and is interwoven with the ghostly presence of her uncontainable and courageous great aunt, and the long reach of witch hunts. Do You Still Have Time for Chaos? is a love letter to the literature of Scotland and Aotearoa New Zealand. It has an ear to the land and its stories. It is a celebration of choice. It is an act of resistance to the persistent idea that women are safer to stay at home.
”This memoir weaves together particular interests in an agile way: place, motherhood, feminism, women’s history, contemporary ideas of witchcraft and magic, art, writing and reading. I loved it.” —Claire Mabey
“This compelling memoir explores the large themes of women’s experience and history, motherhood, migration and home; unusually for a woman, not tethered to a domestic space that she herself has created. Lynn Davidson ricochets from New Zealand to Scotland and back again, vividly recreating the landscapes she has inhabited. She is a brave spirit, in search of a life that will enable her to be the family member she wants to be, while remaining true to herself as the reader and writer she must be.” —Robyn Marsack
The Coiled Serpent by Camilla Grudova $40
In Grudova's unforgettably surreal style, these stories expose the absurdities behind contemporary ideas of work, identity, and art-making, to conjure a singular, startling strangeness. A little girl throws up Gloria-Jean's teeth after an explosion at the custard factory; Pax, Alexander, and Angelo are hypnotically enthralled by a book that promises them enlightenment if they keep their semen inside their bodies; Victoria is sent to a cursed hotel for ailing girls when her period mysteriously stops. In a damp, putrid spa, the exploitative drudgery of work sparks revolt; in a Margate museum, the new Director curates a venomous garden for public consumption. A brilliant, unsettling collection that revels in the rotten and festers in the imagination.
”Camilla Grudova's books make other young writers seem meek. It's weird, dark and graphic, but as her new collection proves, it's also funny and poignant and distinctive, so inventive that it makes other writing seem uncourageous.” —Sunday Telegraph
”Angela Carter’s natural inheritor.” —Nicola Barker
Girls by Annet Schaap $30
A determined girl gives up on kissing a frog. A fearless heroine comes face-to-face with a not-so Big Bad Wolf. A monstrous princess, held captive on a deserted island, yearns to break free. Within this book are seven famous fairy tales turned into enchanting, inspiring and sometimes hair-raising stories for today's world, about girls with their own dreams and desires. These are no damsels in distress, but real young women of flesh and blood - who certainly don't need rescuing.
”A wickedly delicious book. Surprising, subversive and totally addictive.” —Sophie Anderson
Endless Flight: The genius and tragedy of Joseph Roth by Keiron Pim $33
The mercurial, self-mythologising novelist and journalist Joseph Roth, author of the 20th-century masterpiece The Radetzky March, was an outstanding observer and chronicler of his age. Endless Flight travels with Roth from his childhood in the town of Brody on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to an unsettled life spent roaming Europe between the wars, including spells in Vienna, Paris and Berlin. His decline mirrored the collapse of civilised Europe: in his last peripatetic decade, he opposed Nazism in exile from Germany, his wife succumbed to schizophrenia and he died an alcoholic on the eve of WWII. Exploring the role of Roth's absent father in his imaginings, his attitude to his Jewishness and his restless search for home, Keiron Pim's account of Roth's chaotic life speaks to us in our era of uncertainty, refugee crises and rising ethno-nationalism.
My Friends by Hisham Matar $37
Khaled and Mustafa meet at university in Edinburgh in the 1980s — two Libyan eighteen-year-olds expecting to return home after their studies. In a moment of recklessness and courage, they travel to London to join a demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy. Government officials open fire, killing a policewoman and wounding eleven Libyan demonstrators. Both friends are critically injured and their lives are forever changed. Over the years that follow, Khaled, Mustafa and their friend Hosam, a writer, are bound together by their shared history. If friendship is a space to inhabit, theirs becomes small and inhospitable when a revolution in Libya forces them to choose between the lives they have created in London and the lives they left behind.
”My Friends is a brilliant novel about innocence and experience, about friendship, family and exile. It makes clear, once more, that Hisham Matar is a supremely talented novelist.” —Colm Toibin
”I have always admired Matar's tender and compassionate but equally strong and compelling voice.” —Elif Shafak
”It is impossible to describe the profound depth and beauty of this book. My Friends is a breathtaking novel, every page a miracle and an affirmation. If there is a language of exile, My Friends is what it sounds like: exquisite and painful, compassionate and unflinching, and above all, overwhelming in its boundless hope that within exile rests a path towards a different kind of return. One that leads us back to ourselves. Hisham is one of our greatest writers, how lucky we are to be in his midst.” —Maaza Mengiste
Open Throat by Henry Hoke $40
“I've never eaten a person but today I might . . .” A lonely, lovable, queer mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Fascinated by the voices around them, the lion spends their days protecting a nearby homeless encampment, observing hikers complain about their trauma and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their own identity. When a man-made fire engulfs the encampment, the lion is forced from the hills down into the city the hikers call 'ellay'. As they confront a carousel of temptations and threats, the lion takes us on a tour that spans the cruel inequalities of Los Angeles. But even when salvation finally seems within reach, they are forced to face down the ultimate question: do they want to eat a person, or become one? Feral and vulnerable, this novel views modern life with fresh eyes.
“A slim jewel of a novel. Open Throat is what fiction should be.” —The New York Times Book Review
”A blinding spotlight beam of a book that I was completely unable and unwilling to put down.” —Catherine Lacey
Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad: A family memoir of miraculous survival by David Finkelstein $40
Daniel’s mother Mirjam Wiener was the youngest of three daughters born in Germany to Alfred and Margarete Wiener. Alfred, a decorated hero from the Great War, is now widely acknowledged to have been the first person to recognise the existential danger Hitler posed to the Jews and began, in 1933, to catalogue in detail Nazi crimes. After moving his family to Amsterdam, he relocated his library to London and was preparing to bring over his wife and children when Germany invaded Holland. Before long, the family was rounded up, robbed, humiliated, and sent to Bergen-Belsen. Daniel’s father Ludwik was born in Lwow, the only child of a prosperous Jewish family. In 1939, after Hitler and Stalin carved up Poland, the family was rounded up by the communists and sent to do hard labour in a Siberian gulag. Working as slave labourers on a collective farm, his father survived the freezing winters in a tiny house they built from cow dung. A compelling account of the combination of desperation and despair experienced by people on the receiving end of genocide.
”Powerful and beautifully written. Once the second world war breaks out the book works like a thriller, as both families race against the clock to escape certain death. But there are bigger themes running through Finkelstein's writing, elevating Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad to the status of A modern classic — and just as deserving of acclaim as Philippe Sands's East West Street or Edmund de Waal's The Hare With Amber Eyes, both of which used inventive ways to examine the Holocaust afresh.” —Observer
The Man Who Closed the Asylums: Franco Basaglia and the revolution in mental health care by John Foot $45
In 1961, when Franco Basaglia became Director of the Gorizia asylum, on the Italian border with Yugoslavia, it was a place of horror. Patients were restrained for long periods, and therapy was largely a matter of electric and insulin shocks. The corridors stank, and for many of the interned the doors were locked for life. Basaglia was expected to practise all the skills of oppression in which he had been schooled. Instead, he closed down the place by opening it up from the inside, bringing freedom and democracy to the patients, as well as to the nurses and the psychiatrists working in that 'total institution'. The first comprehensive study of his revolutionary approach to mental health care, The Man Who Closed the Asylums is an account of one of the most influential movements in twentieth-century psychiatry.
”Peopled by a cast of extraordinary characters - patients, colleagues, friends and enemies - revolving around the charismatic and now legendary psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, John Foot's sympathetic account de-mythologises the reform by uncovering little-known precedents, distancing Basaglia from anti-psychiatry and situating his work within Italian radical politics of the late 1960s. Indispensable reading for anyone interested in psychiatric reform.” —Howard Caygill