Is a River Alive? is an exhilarating exploration into an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings who should be recognised as such in imagination and law. The book flows like water from the mountains to the sea, over three major journeys. Macfarlane takes readers on these unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada — imperiled by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane's house, which flows through his own years and days.

Passionate, immersive and revelatory, Is the River Alive? is Macfarlane’s most personal and political book to date, reminding us what is vital: the recognition that our fate flows with that of rivers — and always has.

‘ A rich and visionary work of immense beauty. Macfarlane is a memory keeper. What is broken in our societies, he mends with words. Rarely does a book hold such power, passion, and poetry in its exploration of nature. Read this to feel inspired, moved, and ultimately, alive.’ — Elif Shafak

Find out more:

• ’The river is writing me’ — Q&A

• The Power of Rivers

• Poetry and Adventure

• The Rights of Nature

• Read an extract

• Can personhood recue a river?

Educator Welby Ings is concerned that our overemphasis on ‘measurability’ and the ‘correct’ recall of facts has resulted in too narrow a view of Intelligence, effectively sidelining a significant portion of the population whose minds work in different but no less gifted ways. Too often, children are ‘written off’ both by schools and by their parents even though they are naturally curious and engaged (good markers of intelligence), resulting in poor life outcomes and behaviour problems. Ings’s insightful and helpful book helps us to broaden our idea of intelligence and to support young people to flourish at school and in their wider lives. A broader and more inclusive approach to education will have benefits for us all.

• Intelligence is beautiful (part 1 and part 2).

• Many ways to demonstrate intelligence.

• On learning to read at 15.

• Why standardised testing doesn’t work.

• Why are we obsessed with assessment?

• Disobedient thinking.

• Three doors down.

• Coolness kills creativity.

• Welby Ings’s earlier book, Disobedient Teaching, is also excellent.

• Ings is also a film-maker. Watch Boy, Sparrow and Punch.

Fair is a satirical, refreshing and playful book about learning the art of translation, being a book-worker in the publishing industry, growing up, family, and class. Loosely set in an imagined book fair/art fair/fun fair, in which every stall or ride imitates a real-world scenario or dilemma which must be observed and negotiated, the book moves between personal memories and larger questions about the role of the literary translator in publishing, about fairness and hard work, about the ways we define success, and what it means — and whether it is possible — to make a living as an artist. Fair is also interested in questions of upbringing, background, support, how different people function in the workplace, and the ways in which people are excluded or made invisible in different cultural and creative industries. It connects literary translation to its siblings in other creative arts to show how creative and subjective a practice it is while upholding the ethics and politics at play when we translate someone else’s work. Blurring the lines between memoir, autofiction, satire and polemic, Fair is an inventive and illuminating book (and a lot of fun to read).

• Transmission.

• By herself, for herself.

• The human art of translation.

• Dead or living.

• Intersections between writing and translation.

• Hybrid life writing seminar.

• Inherent frustrations.

• Vehicle.

• Mind Jail (Calleja on drums).

• A few other books on translation.

• Other books from Prototype Publishing.

Lucy Mangan grew up with her nose in a book. Bookish charts her passage through a book-lined adolescence — when so much is recalibrated, including our reading — and into the wide, crowded shelves of the adult world. There is so much to recognise as (very like) your own experience in this enjoyable book — it covers everything from school set texts to the hoarding impulse, from realism to romance, from choosing novels to choosing lovers, from old favourites to new babies, from books as entry-points to the worlds of others to books as exit-points from a world that is sometimes too much. Mangan finds resonances between reading and ‘life’ at every turn, and the reader will find these resonances on every page. This book will help you love your bookcase, your bookshop, and your fellow readers more than ever.

• “Books picked me up on bad days.”

• Never lost for words.

• Bookworm dealt with Mangan’s childhood reading.

A narrator and her dog are criss-crossing the Swiss Alps. She travels with friends who share her interest in food, languages and their topographical contexts. They collect colours, even look for colourlessness, and develop the idea of a walk-in diary, a vain attempt to archive their observations. Gradually, other mountains appear in their observations and memories, as do the mountains of literature and art. Mountains may be sites of fear and awe, of narrow-mindedness, racism and ever-looming collapse; Alpine lodges may be places of hospitality, retreat and unexpected encounters; of nature under threat. In 515 notes, Zsuzsanna Gahse unfolds a finely woven interplay between her six characters while giving us a vivid panorama of mountain worlds, a multi-layered typology of all things mountainish. Recommended!
”In Mountainish, Gahse directs her reader through 515 notes, making it clear with great elegance and wit that an escape to the mountains is not an escape from the self; that the unconscious is bound to landscape and reverberations; that words haunt like ghosts; that the echo of self cannot be avoided. Each note is a story and each mountain or what is like a mountain is a language; it is a matter of orientation.” —Sharon Kivland

• Danger and dialogue.

• Squinting at mountains.

• More of an observer.

• Flooded roads, falling rocks.

• Nothing is done because it was there.

Whether you are a parent or used to be a parent or might one day be a parent or have no wish to ever be a parent or for any other reason might be curious about the often glossed-over realities of parenthood, Becky Barnicoat’s superb graphic novel is the perfect book for you (or to give to an appropriate person). The necessary antidote to parenting books, this darkly humorous, candid and insightful graphic memoir brings the early years of parenthood to life — in all their chaos, wonder and delirium. Intimate, relatable and very funny, Becky Barnicoat explores everything from the anatomy of the hospital bag to the frantic obsession with putting your baby down drowsy but awake, to the tyranny of gentle parenting. From pregnancy to the feral toddler years, Barnicoat extends a sticky hand to all new parents grappling with the impossible but joyous jigsaw puzzle of their lives.

“This book is a perfect testament to the wild ride of early parenting. It's tender, moving, beautifully drawn and also, extremely hilarious. Parents everywhere: you will feel very very seen.” —Isabel Greenberg

• Blood, sweat, tears, and body shaming.

• On turning motherhood into cartoons.

• The antidote to all that striving.

• They bite, they scratch, they kick, they flail.

• Look inside!

How do we make sense of what we see? The Vast Extent is a constellation of ‘exploded essays’ about light and image, seeing and the unseen. Each is a record of how thought builds and ideas emerge, aligning art, myth, strange voyages and scientific scrutiny with a poet's response so that they cast light upon each other. Greenlaw invites us to observe our world and beyond with a new sensitivity. Beautifully written and deeply thoughtful; both personal and universal.

• The body opens itself.

• Indescribably brilliant.

• A cabinet of curiosities.

• Shadows in your eye.

• Travelling after dark.

• Diana of the upper air.

• On Eva Hesse.

“Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird tells the story of humanity’s evolution on an epic scale that spans as far into the future as the human imagination could possibly allow. In each of its chapters, separated by eons but gracefully unified under the crystalline clarity of Asa Yoneda’s seemingly timeless translation, a variegated cast of posthuman characters each interrogate what it means to be not an individual or a nation but an entire species, that unit of being we currently and urgently struggle so much to grasp, much to the cost to the planet we live on and our own survival.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation.
In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small groups across the planet under the observation and care of AI ‘Mothers’. Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the species depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings — but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.

• The spectre of extinction.

• Post-posthuman.

• Read an extract.

• An interview with the author and the translator.

• A reading.

• Cross-wiring.

• Other books by Hiromi Kawakami.

“This unsettling, tightly-plotted debut novel explores repressed desire and historical amnesia against the backdrop of the Netherlands post-WWII. The Safekeep is at once a highly-charged, claustrophobic drama played out between two deeply flawed characters, and a bold, insightful exploration of the emotional aftermath of trauma and complicity.” —Judges’ citation on awarding The Safekeep the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
”Set in the early 1960s in the Netherlands in an isolated house, The Safekeep draws us into a world as carefully calibrated as a Dutch still-life. Every piece of crockery or silverware is accounted for here. Isa is the protagonist – a withdrawn figure who is safeguarding this inheritance. When her brother brings his new girlfriend Eva into this household the energy field changes as we sense boundaries of possession being crossed, other histories coming into the light. We loved this debut novel for its remarkable inhabitation of obsession. It navigates an emotional landscape of loss and return in an unforgettable way.” —Booker judges’ citation on short-listing the book for the 2024 Booker Prize.

• Read the first few pages.

• Standing on the shoulders.

• Heartbreaking.

• Counting teaspoons.

• Excusing herself.

• Two women and one house.

• A reckoning.

• On (not) reading Anne Frank.

• Me/not me.

• Root canals are preventable.

• Wanting to touch everything.

• Displacement, complicity and obsession.

• A reading guide.

• Forgiven.

• Into the mud.

• Dear David.

• Thank you, sorry and goodbye.

“Hope is a shovel and will give you blisters.” Overwhelmed and often unmoved by the scientific and political jargon of climate change, Nadine Hura sets out to find a language to connect more deeply to the environmental crisis. But what begins as a journalistic quest takes an abrupt and introspective turn following the death of her brother. In the midst of grief, Hura works through science, pūrākau, poetry and back again. Seeking to understand climate change in relation to whenua and people, she asks: how should we respond to what has been lost? Her many-sided essays explore environmental degradation, social disconnection and Indigenous reclamation, insisting that any meaningful response must be grounded in Te Tiriti and anti-colonialism. Slowing the Sun is a karanga to those who have passed on, as well as to the living, to hold on to ancestral knowledge for future generations.

• Hands fluent in silence.

• Make it make sense.

• How did Māui know when enough was enough?

• Narrating the seasons of grief.

• “Storytelling at its finest.”

• Standing shoulder to shoulder.

• More truth than my chest could hold.

• On the parallel worlds of climate change storytelling.

• Those riding shotgun.

• Raupatu.

“An astute, discomfiting, cringe-making and often laugh-out-loud funny portrait of everyday privilege and modern aspirations, following an expat couple in Berlin. Tom and Anna are defined by their material lives, working their way through a tick-list of clichés readers will recognise in themselves and experience as a dig in the ribs. Compassionate as well as cynical, the book — in an exquisite, precise and perfectly executed translation from Italian by Sophie Hughes — holds up a mirror up to the way so many people aspire to and are let down by today’s off-the-shelf measures of success. A startlingly refreshing read.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation

• Rewriting Georges Perec.

• The age of aimless aspiration.

• Read an extract.

• An interview with the author and the translator.

• A reading.

• The pursuit of a frictionless life.

• “Authenticity.”

• The things they posted.

• Perfection, authenticity, and things.

• A couple without qualities.

• “I have a hard time writing if I hear words.”

• The perfect millennial satire.

• Other books short-listed for the 2025 International Booker Prize.

On awarding Heart Lamp the International Booker Prize, the judges said: “In a dozen stories – written across three decades — Banu Mushtaq, a major voice within progressive Kannada literature — portrays the lives of those often on the periphery of society: girls and women in Muslim communities in southern India. These stories speak truth to power and slice through the fault lines of caste, class, and religion widespread in contemporary society, exposing the rot within: corruption, oppression, injustice, violence. Yet, at its heart, Heart Lamp returns us to the true, great pleasures of reading: solid storytelling, unforgettable characters, vivid dialogue, tensions simmering under the surface, and a surprise at each turn. Deceptively simple, these stories hold immense emotional, moral, and socio-political weight, urging us to dig deeper.
Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression.  Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters — the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost — that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well as India’s most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.”

• Read an extract.

• Picking up the matchbox.

• An interview with the author and the translator.

• Red Lungi.

• Legal work sows the seeds.

• Radical translation.

• Fighting the tyrants.

• On translating Kannada.

• Twice circumcised.

• Watch the International Booker Prize ceremony.

• Other books published by And Other Stories.

• All the other books on the International Booker Prize short list are excellent, too.

More stock is due soon!

Catherine Chidgey’s new novel is an unnerving exploration of belonging in a world where some lives are valued less than others and the public shows a disturbing tolerance for injustice and cruelty. When triplets from a cancelled medical experiment are released into the community, they find that the world is a darker and more complicated place than they had been led to believe. Chidgey’s novel addresses deep ethical and social issues in an assured and compelling way.

• The author introduces the book.

• Alarm bell.

• Monsters.

• Completely the best.

• Every beat feels right.

• Read the first chapter!

• Why 1979, specifically?

• Pretty much every prize.

• Weaponised ignorance.

• We will be discussing The Book of Guilt at our online book group, Talking Books, on Tuesday 10 June. Please joint us!

• Other books by Catherine Chidgey.

The 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards ceremony* is just around the corner. The longlists have been assembled, the shortlists announced, and on Wednesday 14th May the winners in each section will take the stage. Hine Toa: A Story of Bravery by Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku is vying for the non-fiction award, and is a strong contender.

'Remarkable. At once heartbreaking and triumphant' — Patricia Grace

'Brilliant. This timely coming-of-age memoir by an iconic activist will rouse the rebel in us all. I loved it' — Tina Makereti

Emeritus professor Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku (Te Arawa, Tūhoe, Ngāpuhi, Waikato) was the first wāhine Māori to earn a PhD in a New Zealand university. Te Awekōtuku has worked across the heritage, culture and academic sectors as a curator, lecturer, researcher and activist. Her areas of research interest include gender issues, museums, body modification, power and powerlessness, spirituality and ritual.
But growing up in Rotorua in the 1950s, whānau dismissed her dreams of higher education. To them, she was just a show-off, always getting into trouble, talking back, and running away.

In this fiery memoir about identity and belonging, Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku describes what was possible for a restless working-class girl from the pā. After moving to Auckland for university, Ngāhuia advocated resistance as a founding member of Ngā Tamatoa and the Women's and Gay Liberation movements, becoming a critical voice in protests from Waitangi to the streets of Wellington.

“Hine Toa defies easy categorisation. It is a rich, personal, stunningly evocative and creative memoir of Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku’s life, from early childhood on ‘the pā’ at Ōhinemutu to academic achievements such as being the first wahine Māori to be awarded a PhD in New Zealand. But it is also a fiery social and political history of this country through the mid late 20th century from a vital, queer, Māori, feminist perspective that deserves – and here claims – centre stage." —Ockham judges’ citation

Find out more:

• Never Give Up

• The Long Road with Sue Kedgley

• One Hell of a Lesson

• Out There

• Talia Marshall Reviews

• Te Waka Toi Awards

• What else is up for the Ockhams.

* If you are in Auckland you can head along to the event at the Aotea Centre; the rest of us can watch the Ochkam NZ Book Awards ceremony live here.

In 1879, King Leopold II of Belgium launched an ambitious plan to plunder Africa's resources. The key to cracking open the continent, or so he thought, was its elephants — if only he could train them. And so he commissioned the charismatic Irish adventurer Frederick Carter to ship four tamed Asian elephants from India to the East African coast, where they were marched inland towards Congo. The ultimate aim was to establish a training school for African elephants. Following in the footsteps of the four elephants, Roberts pieces together the story of this long-forgotten expedition, in travels that take her to Belgium, Iraq, India, Tanzania and Congo. The storytelling brings to life a compelling cast of historic characters and modern voices, from ivory dealers to Catholic nuns, set against rich descriptions of the landscapes travelled. She digs deep into historic records to reckon with our broken relationship with animals, revealing an extraordinary — and enduring — story of colonial greed, ineptitude, hypocrisy and folly.

• It started with a map.

• The book has its own website, with lots of extra material.

• Personal landscapes.

• Stories in overlooked places.

• Gone to Timbuktu.

• Sophy Roberts wrote The Lost Pianos of Siberia.

Anne Serre’s subtly inflected novel explores the difficulties of knowing another person (the very difficulties that may in fact induce us to the attempt), and contrasts these to the ways in which knowing is conveyed (or gives the illusion of being conveyed) in fiction. How does the relationship between an author and a reader resemble or differ from the relationships between actual people in the ‘real’ world?
”Anne Serre’s short novel is the deeply romantic telling of a platonic love story between the narrator and his complicated childhood friend, Fanny; a story so beautifully realised — and translated so sensitively by Mark Hutchinson — that the pair become part of the life of the reader. A perfectly balanced book, slender in size but bearing significant weight all the way through, A Leopard-Skin Hat is testament to the ways in which we continue to hold the people we love in our memories, with respect and dignity, after they die.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation

• Fully formed.

• Read an extract.

• Hope and despair.

• Is the narrator really any better than the Narrator?

• A reading.

• A book from before the book.

• An eggshell or infinite space.

• Siding with joy.

• Other books published by Lolli Editions.

Tara Selter has slipped out of time. Every morning, she wakes up to the 18th of November. She no longer expects to wake up to the 19th of November, and she no longer remembers the 17th of November as if it were yesterday. She comes to know the shape of the day like the back of her hand — the grey morning light in her Paris hotel; the moment a blackbird breaks into song; her husband’s surprise at seeing her return home unannounced. But for everyone around her, this day is lived for the first and only time. They do not remember the other 18ths of November, and they do not believe her when she tries to explain. As Tara approaches her 365th 18th of November, she can’t shake the feeling that somewhere underneath the surface of this day, there’s a way to escape. 

“The first volume's gravitational pull — a force inverse to its constriction — has the effect of a strong tranquiliser, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating.”

“On the Calculation of Volume I takes a potentially familiar narrative trope — a protagonist inexplicably stuck in the same day — and transforms it into a profound meditation on love, connectedness and what it means to exist, to want to be alive, to need to share one’s time with others. The sheer quality of the sentences was what struck us most, rendered into English with deft, invisible musicality by the translator. This book presses its mood, its singular time signature and its philosophical depth into the reader. You feel you are in it, which is sometimes unnerving, sometimes soothing, and this effect lingers long after the book is finished.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation

• Read Thomas’s review.

• Day 121.

• Obstacles and solutions.

• The germ and the translation.

• How can one day be so voluminous?

• A reading.

• Sounds in the house.

• You will want to read the second book, too.

• Other books short-listed for the 2025 International Booker Prize.

NORTHBOUND: Four Seasons of Solitude on Te Araroa. Walking from Bluff, at the southern tip of the South Island, to Cape Reinga, at the northern tip of the North Island, award-winning journalist, and author of Southern Nights, Naomi Arnold spent nearly nine months following Te Araroa, fulfilling a 20-year dream. Alone, she traversed mountains, rivers, cities and plains from summer to spring, walking on through days of thick mud, blazing sun, lightning storms, and cold, starlit nights. Along the way she encountered colourful locals and travellers who delight and inspire her. This is an upbeat, fascinating, and inspiring memoir of the joys and pains found in the wilderness, solitude, friendship, and love. Signed copies available while stock lasts.

• “The trail was haunting me.”

• What the book is about.

• The stars above.

• Written on the trail.

• Nine months of solitude.

• Phoning in, #2; #3.

• A walking guide to Te Araroa.

• Other books by Naomi Arnold.

• The day the Russians came.

What happens when our desires run contrary to our beliefs? What should we do when the failings of revered figures come to light? Who is shamed when the truth is told? A young woman arrives in Melbourne in 1986 to research the work of Virginia Woolf, and finds her life reshaped in unexpected ways both by her studies and by her experiences.

“Michelle de Kretser is a genius — one of the best writers working today. She is startlingly, uncannily good at naming and facing what is most difficult and precious about our lives. Theory & Practice is a wonder, a brilliant book that reinvents itself again and again, stretching the boundaries of the novel to show the ways in which ideas and ideals are folded into our days, as well as the times when our choices fail to meet them. There’s no writer I’d rather read.” —V.V. Ganeshananthan, winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction

"Michelle de Kretser is to my mind one of the finest writers alive and Theory & Practice a lightning strike of a book." —Ali Smith

• The fissures between one’s ideals and reality.

• Putting in and taking out.

• Writing back to the Woolfmother.

• To tread where Woolf refrained.

• Between idea and execution.

• Grappling with her ideas.

This is a significantly affecting work, comprised of mundane details noticed so clearly and described so precisely that they resonate and ‘clean out’ a reader’s perceptive and literary faculties. In 300 seven-line prose poems, von Sturmer opens his — and our — awareness to the particulars of both his surroundings and his memory, exploring insights beyond the reach of the rational mind that press at us from the quotidian world, drawing no distinctions between the beautiful, and awkward, and the absurd.

“This substantial publication with its witty and paradoxical title is a meditative poetry journal, artfully constructed to present what amounts to a series of mirabilia: anecdotes that might arouse astonishment or wonder in a spiritual sense. Richard von Sturmer’s poems seek illumination from the ordinary everyday world. Drawing partly on Buddhist teachings, life itself is here seen as miraculous. There's a dancing intelligence at work, highly alert, self aware, and fearless.” —judges’ citation, 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards

• What it means to be curious.

• Jolted into the sky.

• Although it is unnecessary to the appreciation of this book, it is interesting to know that each piece responds to one of Zen master Dōgen’s 300 Koans.

• Who ever heard of a black swan?

• A stony silence in Te Awamutu.

• Reality itself is blazing and burning.

• Some other books by Richard von Sturmer.

• RvS wrote the lyrics for the ‘national anthem’.

• Creatively wired.

• Other books short-listed for the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.