All questions about Artificial Intelligence are really questions about what it is to be human. The Employees, A workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn (translated from Danish by Martin Aitken), takes the form of a set of witness statements made by workers aboard a spaceship that has travelled to a new planet and found there certain strange objects which have served as catalysts for behavioural changes among the crew — some of whom are human and some of whom are humanoid — which have led to the corporation terminating the expedition. Beautifully and effectively written, the novel is packed with enough thoughts, dreams, longings and sense experiences to reward many re-readings. 

• Read Stella's review. 

• Read Thomas's review. 

• Reading with the mouth. 

• Consumed future spewed up as present. 

• A worker's words. 

• In an intergalactic cocoon. 

• Read an extract. 

• Ravn vs Moskovich.

• What do our tools tell us about ourselves?

• Short in length but infinite in scope. 

• Am I human? 

• An interview with Ravn and Aitken. 

• Join the discussion at our online book group in April!

“In the programme, beneath my interface, there’s another interface, which is also me.”

All Her Lives follows women across generations as they resist, nurture and transform. These are lives shaped by love and politics, motherhood and memory, constraint and defiance. From girls raised in the garden of Plunket founder Truby King, to a queer university student at a mid-2000s Berlin rave, to a mother facing the cost of her son's climate rebellion, the women of All Her Lives are complex, resilient and deeply human. Shadowing their stories is the early feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, whose journey of grief and revolution will become a vessel for what endures — and for finding hope. Vast and intimate, All Her Lives explores the layered selfhood of women — all that they inherit, sacrifice, imagine and carry forward — and the power found in unravelling and reweaving those selves on their own terms.

“Connections abound in this intelligent, skilfully observed story collection. Characters reappear, their past acts echoing through generations. From the life of Mary Wollstonecraft and the troubled legacy of Truby King to the complexities of queer life, the struggles of a single mother and the consequences of political and climate activism, in All Her Lives Ingrid Horrocks subtly depicts the challenges and transformations of women from 1795 to the present day.” —Ockham New Zealand Book Awards judges’ citation

• Becoming porous.

• Not right, but true.

• Critical waves.

• Turning to fiction.

• Short-listed for the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

“Set during the witch trials of 17th-century Denmark, this unforgettable novel by Olga Ravn is compulsively readable yet anything but biddable — shadowy lives are revealed in shadowy prose, largely from the perspective of an object, a wax doll belonging to a group of women who exploit magic as a means of survival. Martin Aitken has leant his pitch-perfect ear to the period language and poetry of the Danish original. Every word in The Wax Child feels spontaneous, every scene alive, as if Ravn and Aitken had lived and breathed its mysterious atmospheres in order to deliver them to us. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that this haunting, gripping and singular historical novel cast a spell on us.” —judges’ citation on listing the book for the 2026 International Booker Prize

• Find out more.

• Fragmenting the novel.

• Holding the skin girdle.

• Witch trials and wax narrators.

• Everyone asks.

• The maternal gothic.

• Where is the first person?

• Where is the witchcraft?

• Made for strength.

• Read our reviews of The Employees. (>>Discuss this book with us!)

• My Work.

• Other books long-listed for the 2026 International Booker Prize.

“When Tom Layward’s wife cheated on him, he stayed for the children but promised to leave when his youngest turned eighteen. Twelve years later, Tom drops his daughter off at university, but instead of driving back to New York he heads west. What follows is a remarkably satisfying road trip full of strangers, friends, and self-discovery. This novel is matter of fact, effortlessly warm, and it uses the smallest parts of human behaviour to uphold bigger themes, like mortality, sickness, and love. The Rest of Our Lives is a novel of sincerity and precision. We found it difficult to put it down.” — Judges’ citation on short-listing the book for the 2025 Booker Prize

• Read an extract.

• Hear an extract.

• Normal and odd.

• Quietly brilliant.

• On writing about middle age.

• Clearly right and clearly wrong at the same time.

• First in.

• Modest realism.

Thought takes place wherever it finds purchase, which, if you think about it, is pretty much everywhere. When we stand in the centre of our personal worlds we stand also in the centre of our thoughts, which stretch to the edges of our awareness and contain others who seem to us also to think. What are the thoughts like of these others? How do the thoughts of animals, for instance, differ from or suggest themselves to be similar to our own thoughts, and what could this difference or similarity tell us not only about what thought could be but also about what makes a person, and who or what else, apart from us, might be persons? Anna Jackson’s very enjoyable and thought-provoking book blends domestic circumstance, scientific factoids, hens, and philosophical conundra into a kind of thought generator, spilling thought, both Jackson’s and the reader’s own, in a way that makes it pleasurably impossible to tell which is which. Terrier, Worrier demonstrates the benefits of including the associative method of poetry alongside the Socratic method and the scientific method as useful modes of seeking knowledge of our world. {T}

• Read Stella’s review.

• Always somewhere else.

• Listen to Stella’s radio review (RNZ).

• Written with a cat on her lap.

• To hold in the hand and the mind.

• Untamable state.

• Join our online discussion of this book on 10 March!

• The book has just been listed for the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

• Actions & Travels.

• Pasture and Flock.

Following a stroke that was initially mistaken for a panic attack, the poet Richard Siken found himself having to completely rebuild his relationship with his body, with his world, and with language itself — the medium that previously had come most naturally to him. This wonderful, darkly hilarious book, both vitriolic and tender, began as a series of exploratory and explanatory survival notes to himself and built into a series of playful interrogations of memories, traumas and losses, a pinning of personal phantoms, a renegotiation of the contract between inner and outer worlds, and an unfurling of new and vulnerable possibilities in language and in life. Recommended.

"An astonishing feat of poetic prowess. Siken has created 'an encyclopedia of myself,' a kaleidoscope of memory, language and identity that reveals — at times revels — in the faultiness of our own narratives. Siken's voice — and language — is both rooted and aloft, even as he avers that these are not 'poems of song.' Beyond such marvels, this is a virtuosity of candor and technique, bound by a seemingly effortless linguistic choreography that leans into multiplicity and mutability, with continuous sparks and joys, from one of our finest contemporary poets." —Mandana Chaffa, Chicago Review of Books

• Wiped clean.

• The most fundamental poetic device.

• Any utterance.

• An encyclopedia of the self.

• Paragraphs as rooms.

• Landmarks for meaning.

• Multiplication tables.

• Deeper than love or hate.

• Crush.

• War of the Foxes.

“Flashlight is a sprawling novel that weaves stories of national upheavals with those of Louisa, her Korean Japanese father, Serk, and Anne, her American mother. Evolving from the uncertainties surrounding Serk’s disappearance, it is a riveting exploration of identity, hidden truths, race, and national belonging. In this ambitious book that deftly criss-crosses continents and decades, Susan Choi balances historical tensions and intimate dramas with remarkable elegance. We admired the shifts and layers of Flashlight’s narrative, which ultimately reveal a story that is intricate, surprising, and profound.” —Booker Prize judges’ citation

• Read Stella’s review.

• Awake staring into the dark.

• Just a short walk.

• Absence, alienation, and affection.

• Dropped onto an alien planet.

• Reflexive hostility.

• Escalating.

• A cross-cultural story of mystery and tragedy.

• Sprawling stories.

• So many things.

• Reading is irreplaceable.

Perhaps the objects that carry the most meaning in our lives, the ones that are most imbued with the connections we have with the significant people in our pasts, the ones that both store and release the memories that are fundamental to our idea of ourselves, are not so much the precious heirlooms or heritage pieces but rather the ordinary objects that we use every day, just as, perhaps, their previous owners used them every day before us. The kitchen probably holds the greatest concentration of such useful-and-meaningful objects, come to us in many different ways, each with its own story. Bee Wilson’s thoughtful and beautifully written book tells the stories attached to 35 kitchen objects of many origins, and gives insight into the texture of the lives of the people who used them, and their importance to the people who use them now.

• A life of their own.

• Transferring meaning.

• Emotional punch.

• A few of our favourite things.

• What went stale.

• An unexpected ending.

Lynley Edmeades’s Hiding Places is a book about the writing of a book (this book) in a life impacted by the arrival of a new life (a child) while caught also in a culture where both the writing of books and the raising of children are freighted with sets of judgements and expectations that make it hard to know, when you are doing either of these things best, if you are doing either of these things right (if there even is a right way of doing either of them). The fragmentary form of the book and the cumulative immediacy of the fragments, often slippery, often either pained or playful and frequently both, produce a work that is more confessionary than evasive while treasuring the possibilities of evasion, investigating shared experience while highlighting the irremediable particularity of the actual experiences it treats. 

• Fragment by fragment.

• “I couldn’t have written this book if I’d tried.”

• Deep dive.

• Living, thinking, being, doing.

• How to make sense of Truby King when sleep-deprived.

• Looking for the unseen.

• Motto and method.

• Bordering on the Miraculous. >>Read Thomas’s review.

• Listening In.

• As the Verb Tenses.

“A revolutionary book. When Spark published her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957, it was recognised as unique — something that quite simply had never been done before. Wilson's achievement in Electric Spark is equally remarkable: an entirely original method of life writing which leaves conventional biographical techniques gasping in the dust. Electric Spark heaves with ghosts and furies, burglaries and blackmail. It is disquieting and absolutely mesmerising. I was possessed by this book in the same way that I suspect its author was possessed by Spark. It still hasn't put me down.” —Lisa Hilton, Spectator
”Wilson is not any old biographer. Her books are intense, eclectic and wildly diversionary, her intelligence rising from their pages like steam — and in Spark, the cleverest and the weirdest of them all, she may have found her ultimate subject.” —Rachel Cooke, Observer

• World-beating buster-upper.

• Odd things happened when she was around.

• Life echoes fiction (or vice versa).

• Right into the deep end.

• Spark meets her match.

• The matter of fact.

• Twin menace.

• More than nerve.

• Strike a few Sparks.

• Other remarkable biographies by Frances Wilson.

Perhaps the objects that carry the most meaning in our lives, the ones that are most imbued with the connections we have with the significant people in our pasts, the ones that both store and release the memories that are fundamental to our idea of ourselves, are not so much the precious heirlooms or heritage pieces but rather the ordinary objects that we use every day, just as, perhaps, their previous owners used them every day before us. The kitchen probably holds the greatest concentration of such useful-and-meaningful objects, come to us in many different ways, each with its own story. Bee Wilson’s thoughtful and beautifully written book tells the stories attached to 35 kitchen objects of many origins, and gives insight into the texture of the lives of the people who used them, and their importance to the people who use them now.

• A life of their own.

• Transferring meaning.

• Emotional punch.

• A few of our favourite things.

• What went stale.

• An unexpected ending.

Arundhati Roy's first work of memoir is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to Mary Roy, the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as "my shelter and my storm”. "Heart-smashed" by her mother's death in 2022 yet puzzled and "more than a little ashamed" by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write, to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age eighteen, "not because I didn't love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her”. And so begins this astonishing, sometimes disturbing, and surprisingly funny memoir of the author's journey from her childhood in Kerala, India, where her single mother founded a school, to the writing of her prizewinning novels and political essays, through today.

• What to make of the mother who made you.

• A fugitive childhood.

• All of us, everywhere.

• “I didn’t want my mother to destroy me, but I didn’t want to destroy her either.”

• Roy reads.

• The mother of big things.

• Perpetually at war with her children.

• From rebel roots to global voice.

• You mustn’t pretend you didn’t know.

• Books by Arundhati Roy.

After the death of her invalid mother, a retired art teacher leaves her birthplace in the south for a beach cottage on a sub-tropical island in the north. Freed from endless lessons on still life and the dominating presence of her family, she hopes at last to be alone with nature and the ‘room two inches behind the eyes’. But the solitude she has sought mocks her with echoes of her past, when, one stormy night, an intruder pounds ceaselessly and inexplicably on her door. Propulsive yet poignant, A State of Siege is a mesmerising exploration of the artistic process, of selfhood and loneliness, and of death and its counterpart: the need to survive, to live. SoS was first published in 1966, and is now back in print.
”Intensely personal, Frame’s writing is always spiralling in on itself, towards the condition of myth, and yet it nails the moment, pins down experiences so fleeting that others would never grasp them. What eludes ordinary language, she can capture in the extraordinary argot of her imagination.'' —Hilary Mantel

• Woman alone!

• Wouldn’t you like to be normal?

• The book was made into a film by Vincent Ward (1978).

• Some other books by Janet Frame.

When visitors to a famous conceptual artist's installation start mysteriously disappearing, the aftershocks radiate outwards through twelve people who were involved in the project, changing all of their lives, and launching them on a crazy-quilt trajectory that will end with them all together at one final, apocalyptic bacchanal. Mixing illusion and reality, simulacra and replicants, sound artists and death artists, performers and filmmakers and theorists and journalists, We Live Here Now ranges across the world of weapons dealers and international shipping to the galleries and studios on the cutting edge of hyper-contemporary art.
"C.C. Rose's genius novel is a book that shows it is possible for a novel to be at once highly original and to fit within an established tradition. We Live Here Now is both accessible and challenging, entertaining the reader with its ridiculous and sinister figures, even as it prompts more intellectual questions about the reality of appearances." —John Self

• What art does and doesn’t do.

• Massive clouds overhead, or underfoot.

• Art that will change your life, or end it.

• Going with the flow, or not.

• Clearing the bar, or circumventing it.

• A stevedore or a steeplejack.

A collection of interlinked miniature prose pieces that grapple with the phenomenon of disappearance on scales both large and small. The things that disappear in these pages range from everyday objects such as socks and cheese to close friends and the social norms of common courtesy, to sites and objects resonant with East German history, such as the Palace of the Republic or the lines of sight now blocked by new construction in Berlin. Erpenbeck asks: "Is there some kind of perpetrator who makes things that I know cherish and disappear?" These things disappear, and yet do they really? Do they remain in our memories more fully than if they continued to exist?

• Junk.

• The last dinosaurs.

• They disappeared when the wall came down.

• Keeping time.

• Virtually here.

• Other books by Jenny Erpenbeck.

Szalay uses his signature spare prose to unsparing effect in this novel that aligns surface and depth, style and plot to portray a protagonist unable to achieve agency in a world that expects him to dominate. “You have no way of knowing whether these experiences that you’re having are universal or entirely specific.”
“David Szalay’s novel follows István from his teenage years on a Hungarian housing estate to borstal, and from soldiering in Iraq to his career as personal security for London’s super-rich. In many ways István is stereotypically masculine — physical, impulsive, barely on speaking terms with his own feelings (and for much of the novel barely speaking: he must rank among the more reticent characters in literature). But somehow, using only the sparest of prose, this hypnotically tense and compelling book becomes an astonishingly moving portrait of a man’s life.” —Booker Prize judges’ citation
”I don’t think I’ve read a novel that uses the white space on the page so well. It’s as if the author, David Szalay, is inviting the reader to fill the space, to observe — almost to create — the character with him. The writing is spare and that is its great strength. Every word matters; the spaces between the words matter. The book is about living, and the strangeness of living and, as we read, as we turn the pages, we’re glad we’re alive and reading — experiencing — this extraordinary, singular novel.” — Roddy Doyle, Booker judges spokesperson
Find out more:

• Insider/outsider.

• Read an extract.

• An incident on the stairs.

• A general crisis in the idea of progress.

• Does he really want anything or is he told what he should want?

• Life as a physical experience.

• Put through the wringer.

• A living body in the world.

• Read the third chapter.

• Acknowledging failure.

• Books inspire flesh.

• You have your answer.

During a time of restricted movement, the narrator of Mr Outside visits his reclusive father Thomas who is packing up to move into a care home. As father and son grapple with the task, long-buried conflicts resurface. Thomas, a poet and former radical priest, slips between affection and fear, while the narrator struggles to find the words he’s been holding back. Yet amidst confusion and grief, moments of humour and connection emerge, as both men discover new ways to listen. Told through a striking combination of text and image, Klaces’ distilled novel explores the stories we tell about our lives, intimacy in crisis, and the fragile line between reality and delusion. Based on the life of his own father, Mr Outside is poignant, profound, and unexpectedly funny; a tender meditation on endings, the limits of understanding, and the act of letting go.

• The author reads us the book.

• What the picture knows.

• Clues as to the real person.

• Notes on craft.

• The hatred of Lerner.

• Fatherhood.

• Other books from Prototype Publishing.

“A Kosovan torture survivor requests translation assistance at his therapy sessions. The novel’s narrator, a nameless translator, reluctantly agrees. But Alfred’s account of his experiences conjures hidden memories that seep into her psyche, forcing her to question her marriage and her place in the world. This is a story of a woman saddled between her Albanian past and her New York present. It explores the way that language is kept in our bodies, how it can reveal truths we aren’t ready to hear. Misinterpretation subtly blurs the distinction between help and harm. We found it propulsive, unsettling, and strangely human.” —Booker Prize judges’ citation

• Read an extract.

• Trauma and perils.

• The joy and pain of letting go.

• The muscle of language.

• Unavoidable intimacy.

• Playing on mute.

• What if…

• Titration.

• Not to be absorbed.

Unfortunately we need this book now more than we ever thought that we would — and we need it more by the day. Geoffrey Palmer draws on his experience as former Prime Minister, Minister of Justice, and Attorney-General to get people thinking about the state of New Zealand’s democracy. Palmer offers rare insights into the machinery of power and its vulnerabilities, and rather than surrendering to pessimism, he presents a roadmap for renewal. At a time when authoritarianism rises globally and the rule of law faces unprecedented threats, Palmer’s message is clear: ordinary citizens hold the key to democratic revitalisation through civic engagement and vigilance. This collection of thoughtful essays challenges readers to reclaim their role in governance. Palmer argues that regardless of which parties hold power, without public awareness and participation, democratic institutions will continue to weaken.

• Why this book is necessary now.

• What does the future of democracy look like?

• The crisis we face.

• “Democracy doesn’t get lost in a moment, it gets lost gradually.”

• Pressures on democracy.

• An executive paradise.

• The real threats.

• A new low in political life.

• Lurching towards constitutional impropriety.

• 12 much-needed reforms.

• Books by Geoffrey Palmer.

Aotearoa’s longest-running arts and literary journal honours its milestone 250th issue with a new name, a new design, cover art by Fiona Pardington and an exciting bumper issue. Landfall Tauraka 250 is filled with contributions from emerging and established writers and artists. Alongside the new writing, art and reviews from across the motu, the commemorative 250th issue debuts the Landfall Tauraka Craft Interview — a kōrero between Bill Manhire and editor Lynley Edmeades — and features reflections from cherished writers on the journal’s enduring impact. It also announces the winners of three major literary awards: the 2025 Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize; the 2025 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award; and the 2025 Landfall Tauraka Essay Prize. Landfall Tauraka was founded in 1947 as a periodical dedicated to New Zealand poetry, fiction, essays, art, criticism and reviews. The journal has been in continuous publication for nearly 80 years. In that time, it has become a living taonga, a record of creative and critical expression in Aotearoa, and a platform for an extraordinary range of voices.

• The ghost of Charles Brasch.

• Writing because Landfall was there.

• Casting back, casting off.

• 9000 pieces of work.

• Good old Landfall gets older.

• A vibrant gathering place.

• Tasmin Pritchard wins the 2025 Landfall Tauraka Essay Prize.

• Lynn Jenner wins the 2025 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award.

• Photographs by Fiona Pardington featured in this issue.

• Contemporary issues.

• Celebratory snips! Charles Brasch’s Journals ($40 per volume or $90 for all three!)