This well written, cutting portrayal of social mechanics will make you look differently at those around you. “After marrying the older, wealthier Trevor, Teresa Holder has transformed herself into upper-class Therese Thorn, complete with her own homeware business. But when rumours of corruption gather around one of Trevor’s property developments, the fallout is swift, and Therese begins to reevaluate her privileged world. Emily Perkins weaves multiple plotlines and characters with impressive dexterity. Punchy, sophisticated and frequently funny, Lioness is an incisive exploration of wealth, power, class, female rage, and the search for authenticity.” —Ockham judges’ citation on short-listing the book for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction in the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards
The abattoir has an unspoken centrality to Brazilian rural culture, just as it has in New Zealand. In Ana Paula Maia’s superbly, sparely written novel, set in a slaughterhouse in an impoverished and isolated corner of Brazil, the established tension between repetitive killing and the unthinking acceptance functionally necessary for its continuance — for both humans and cattle — is unbalanced by something seemingly beyond the contained and ritualised world of rural meat production. What is it that is driving the men, and the animals, to madness and murder?
Before he was catapaulted into the literary sphere at the age of 42 with the publication of Heart of Darkness in 1899, Joseph Conrad worked as a merchant seaman and frequented ports in Australia and New Zealand between 1878 and 1893 (he captained the Otago until he declined to repeat a sugar-trade run between Australia and Mauritius). Martin Edmond does a superb job of tracing Conrad’s ghost in the Antipodes, and reveals how many elements, incidents and characters in his fiction draw directly from his experiences in this part of the world. As always, Edmond’s style, precision and personal, thoughtful approach to writing non-fiction make the book a pleasure to read.
The public service is hot news this week with cuts announced and more cuts to come. It fact, all year the Wellington folk who make the wheels of government turn have been in the churn of the news cycle. Not far behind are increasingly loud noises from the coalition government about co-governance and the place of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. It seems like a very good time to read Tīhema Baker’s satirical, but highly perceptive, novel Turncoat.
Daniel is a young, idealistic Human, determined to make a difference for his people. He lives in a distant future in which Earth has been colonised by aliens. His mission: infiltrate the Alien government called the Hierarch and push for it to honour the infamous Covenant of Wellington, the founding agreement between the Hierarch and Humans.
With compassion and insight, Turncoat explores the trauma of Māori public servants and the deeply conflicted role they are expected to fill within the machinery of government. From casual racism to co-governance, Treaty settlements to tino rangatiratanga, Turncoat is a timely critique of the Aotearoa zeitgeist, holding a mirror up to Pākehā New Zealanders and asking: “What if it happened to you?”
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Listen to Tīhema Baker
Longlisted for the JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION (and in the running for the Best First Book Award!)
Another standout from excellent indie publisher Lawrence & Gibson
We will be discussing Turncoat at our TALKING BOOKS session in May!
“An expertly braided novel about the entanglement of personal and national transformations, set amid the tumult of 1980s Berlin. Kairos unfolds around a chaotic affair between Katharina, a 19-year-old woman, and Hans, a 53-year-old writer in East Berlin. Erpenbeck’s narrative prowess lies in her ability to show how momentous personal and historical turning points intersect, presented through exquisite prose that marries depth with clarity. She masterfully refracts generation-defining political developments through the lens of a devastating relationship, thus questioning the nature of destiny and agency. Kairos is a bracing philosophical inquiry into time, choice, and the forces of history.” — International Booker Prize judges' citation
Artist Sophie Calle makes intriguing art and beautiful books. I’ve been lucky enough to be a recipient of several Sophie Calle publications and I love them all. This French photographer and writer’s art practice consists of rules-based (Oulipo-style) projects — many controversial, some intimate and quiet — where she follows strangers, stalks ex-lovers, becomes invisible, performs and imposes her camera on abandoned places and unseen people. Sophie Calle investigates identity and intimacy, records the ordinary, and documents public as well as private lives. Her photographs are infused with story, and she disrupts the concepts of autobiography and memories, her own as well as others. If you are keen to start on your Calle journey, the primer, Sophie Calle, is a good place to start. If you are curious, Hotel is wonderful, Blind is deeply moving and stunningly beautiful in text and image, and the True Stories (regularly updated) books captivating. Internationally acclaimed, Sophie Calle has been making work since the 1970s, her most recent show was at the Picasso Museum (walk through in the link below).
The story of a photograph: Stella’s stack of Sophie Calle publications photographed in the late evening in low light with handmade objects. Jug made by Thomas’s grandfather Alexander Bannerman Ingram. Jug is dated November 1961. Runner gifted to us by our friend and excellent weaver Meg Nakagawa.
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*Unfortunately, we can’t hold all her books in stock. Fortunately, we can order any of these and get them to you within 2-4 weeks.
In Thunderclap: A Memoir of Life and Art and Sudden Death, art critic Laura Cumming connects the lives of herself, her painter father, and the artists of the Dutch golden age. An outstanding book, this week it won the highly regarded Writers’ Prize (formerly the Folio Prize) non-fiction category, is long-listed for the Women’s Prize, and has garnered dazzling reviews:
“This is an extraordinary book, full of beauty and feeling and immediacy and depth (and impressive detective work)...Thunderclap is a work of genius.” —India Knight
“Cumming is a word-painter ... When something fascinates Laura Cumming, she makes sure, with her beguiling prose, that we too are caught up in her fascination.” —The Times
“Cumming writes with the sureness of carefully laid paint. This is not art historical scholarship of the academic kind – there are no footnotes or references to sources beyond her own feelings and intuition. It is an emotionally informed approach to art. “ —Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian
“We see with everything that we are.” On the morning of 12 October 1654, a gunpowder explosion devastated the Dutch city of Delft. The thunderclap was heard over seventy miles away. Among the fatalities was the painter Carel Fabritius, dead at thirty-two, leaving only his haunting masterpiece ‘The Goldfinch’ and barely a dozen known paintings. For the explosion that killed him also buried his reputation, along with answers to the mysteries of his life and career. What happened to Fabritius before and after this disaster is just one of the discoveries in a book that explores the relationship between art and life, interweaving the lives of Laura Cumming, her Scottish painter father, who also died too young, and the great artists of the Dutch Golden Age. Thunderclap takes the reader from Rembrandt's studio to wartime America and contemporary London; from Fabritius's goldfinch on its perch to de Hooch's blue and white tile and the smallest seed in a loaf by Vermeer. This is a book about what a picture may come to mean: how it can enter your life and change your thinking in a thunderclap. For the explosion of the title speaks not only to the precariousness of our existence, but also to the power of painting: the sudden revelations of sight.
“Take Two moves beyond the conventions of family memoir, fusing narrative with something like the spirit of a compendium or almanac, gathering up song titles, drawings of household objects, letter extracts, playscripts, poems, and illuminated micro-stories. The book accumulates into a vivid portrait of a family of German and British heritage, set up in post-WW2 London and torn between impulses to close ranks or break apart. It’s a fascinating and provocative act of witnessing, one that offers up new insights and patterns with each re-reading.” —Michael Loveday
Award-winning Albanian writer Ismail Kadare unpicks a three-minute conversation in thirteen views in his latest novel, A Dictator Calls. Here history, memoir, fiction, and myth merge to analyse a short and tense telephone conversation between Joseph Stalin and Boris Pasternak. Within these factual and imagined viewpoints Kadare probes the relationship between art and autocracy — how to write under a dictatorship — with verve and wit.
“An inquiry concerning power, artistic integrity, fame, memory and more. A Dictator Calls is slim, but its themes are not — the riddles of this novel are still ringing in my mind. “ —Sunday Telegraph
When Lori takes her partner Joe coffee in the morning, she finds him dead. She immediately sets off on a long loop walk over the Westmorland fells. This remarkable piece of writing shows us how the mind maintains its claustrophobia even in the most wide-open spaces. Amy Arnold compellingly captures the way her protagonist’s thoughts swarm and cluster, accumulate in ruts and run thin over past traumas, stuttering in proximity to the unfaceable that yet shapes everything it underlies.
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.
This Plague of Souls by Mike McCormack $40
Our Book of the Week is the long-awaited new novel from the Goldsmiths Prize-winning author of Solar Bones. When Nealon returns to his family home in Ireland for the first time in years, he finds a completely empty house. No heat or light, no furniture, no sign of his wife or child anywhere. It seems the world has forgotten that he even existed. The one exception is a persistent caller on the telephone, someone who seems to know everything about Nealon's life, his recent bother with the law and, more importantly, what has happened to his family. All Nealon needs to do is talk with him. But the more he talks the closer Nealon gets to the same trouble he was in years ago, tangled in the very crimes of which he claims to be innocent.
How was the English text of the Treaty of Waitangi understood by the British in 1840? That is the question addressed by historian and lawyer Ned Fletcher, in this extensive work. With one exception, the Treaty sheets signed by rangatira and British officials were in te reo Maori. The Maori text, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, was a translation by the missionary Henry Williams of a draft in English provided by William Hobson, the Consul sent by the British government to negotiate with Maori. Despite considerable scholarly attention to the Treaty, the English text has been little studied. In part, this is because the original English draft exists only in fragments in the archive; it has long been regarded as lost or 'unknowable', and in any event superseded by the authoritative Maori text. Now, through careful archival research, Fletcher has been able to set out the continuing relevance of the English text. The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi enriches our understanding of the original purpose and vision of Te Tiriti o Waitangi/The Treaty of Waitangi and its foundational role in Aotearoa New Zealand.
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A novel of desire and destruction, The Glutton is worth every mouthful. Here is the story of The Great Tarare, a man who could never satisfy his appetite, made famous in revolutionary France by his horrific ability to eat anything! Golden forks, raw offal, live animals and worse. A marvel, a freak, unwanted and jeered, but a source of endless fascination to the peasants who ‘feed’ him with the abject and to the medical profession who poke and prod to unpick his mystery.
This week we are aiming your attention toward a small press based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa. Compound Press publishes excellent and unexpected titles, predominantly poetry, from familiar and not-so-familiar authors working in the Pacific region. Their books are beautifully designed (covers and interiors); often short-run, well-produced (sometimes handbound), and made from recycled materials.
Here's what they say about themselves: "Compound Press was founded in 2012 after hours in the print room of an unnamed law firm with appropriated materials, the name first appearing on an eclectic array of hyperlimited 3-5 run chapbooks. We maintain a particular though non-exclusive commitment to poetry of the Pacific Region while sea-levels still permit."
Help those sea-levels remain steady by adding to your poetry shelf or delving into new waters.
Browse Compound.
We have a copy of The 2024 Compound Press Poetry Calendar to give away. It’s got a poem for each month, and the calendar marks NZ poet birthdays, like alternative saints feast days. In the spirit of poetry, it contains virtually no useful information such as public holidays. To go in the draw, email us a 3—5 line poem (a haiku or a limerick are certainly options) on the New Year.
Interested in expanding your poetry horizons further? Let us know if you would like a Special Poetry Subscription.
In our evocatively written Book of the Week, HELD by Anne Michaels (the author of Fugitive Pieces), the past irrupts into the present in ways that are generally but not always unwelcome, shunting the lives of its characters down paths that they had scarcely anticipated. How does this affect not only themselves but those around them, and those descended or who will descend from them? To what extent does memory keep us alive, and to what extent does it prevent us from healing? Can love hold us safe across generations?
More stock of Prophet Song has arrived. Order it now to read it in time for our discussion at the first Book Group session. VOLUME Book Group will meet online on Tuesday 13th February at 7 pm.
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch is the winner of the 2023 Booker Prize. Here’s why, according to Esi Edugyan, Chair of the judges: “From that first knock at the door, Prophet Song, forces us out of our complacency as we follow the terrifying plight of a woman seeking to protect her family in an Ireland descending into totalitarianism. We felt unsettled from the start, submerged in – and haunted by – the sustained claustrophobia of Lynch’s powerfully constructed world. He flinches from nothing, depicting the reality of state violence and displacement and offering no easy consolations. Here the sentence is stretched to its limits – Lynch pulls off feats of language that are stunning to witness. He has the heart of a poet, using repetition and recurring motifs to create a visceral reading experience. This is a triumph of emotional storytelling, bracing and brave. With great vividness, Prophet Song captures the social and political anxieties of our current moment. Readers will find it soul-shattering and true, and will not soon forget its warnings.’”
Edited by Carlos Lehnebach, Claire Regnault, Rebecca Rice, Isaac Te Awa, and Rachel Yates
This sumptuous book from Te Papa Press is beautifully designed and produced. It’s this year’s gem: a fine example of cultural history as told through objects. The essays, which are wide-ranging and contextually interesting, add that layer that makes this publication a standout. For both lovers of art and of plants, Flora is a visual treat underpinned by intelligent essays that explore our wider relationship with nature in Aotearoa.
From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers comes a lyrical historical novel, This Other Eden. As beguiling as the cover of this book, Harding’s writing has been described as ‘painted imagery’ and as ‘angelic sentences’. Like his earlier works, this is set in New England, this time on the imagined Apple Island, based on the historical Malaga Island off the coast of Maine, home to a racially mixed fishing community from the Civil War up until the early 20th century. It’s a story of a community on borrowed time.
Short-listed for this year’s Booker Prize, the judges said: “Based on a relatively unknown true story, Paul Harding’s heartbreakingly beautiful novel transports us to a unique island community scrabbling a living. The panel were moved by the delicate symphony of language, land and narrative that Harding brings to bear on the story of the islanders.”
This Other Eden is rich in language and imagery with unforgettable characters. A handsome gift in this hardback edition, or a perfect addition to your summer reading pile.
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch is the winner of the 2023 Booker Prize. Here’s why, according to Esi Edugyan, Chair of the judges: “From that first knock at the door, Prophet Song, forces us out of our complacency as we follow the terrifying plight of a woman seeking to protect her family in an Ireland descending into totalitarianism. We felt unsettled from the start, submerged in – and haunted by – the sustained claustrophobia of Lynch’s powerfully constructed world. He flinches from nothing, depicting the reality of state violence and displacement and offering no easy consolations. Here the sentence is stretched to its limits – Lynch pulls off feats of language that are stunning to witness. He has the heart of a poet, using repetition and recurring motifs to create a visceral reading experience. This is a triumph of emotional storytelling, bracing and brave. With great vividness, Prophet Song captures the social and political anxieties of our current moment. Readers will find it soul-shattering and true, and will not soon forget its warnings.’”