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Click through to our website to order these newly released books:

The End of Ends by Tadeusz Bradecki (translated from Polish by Tadeusz Bradecki and Kate Sinclair) $40

“In the great tradition of Sterne, Calvino, Kundera and Cervantes — the tradition of dancing playfully on the edge of the abyss of all knowledge — this book by the late great Polish theatre director Tadeusz Bradecki is about nothing less than everything. God, death, theatre, teleology, post-modernism, Marxism, ghosts on stage and off, two millennia of storytelling: it’s all here. In honour of the device of the play-within-a-play, it contains vivid verbal restagings. In honour of the tale-within-a-tale, it contains a whole small novel. Because of course it does. Anyone miserable at being marooned on this island of cynical banter and self-protective irony should read The End of Ends to be reminded of what it sounds like when art is taken seriously.” —Francis Spufford
”The author of this book is a consummate actor, director and theatre manager. He is also a dramatic writer, exceptional in his field and we can see this in his book both an original form and a ground-breaking freshness of thought. This is supported by an impressive erudition and original humour which makes it both wise and hugely enjoyable.” —Krzysztof Zanussi
”A delightful book on aesthetics generally as on Bradecki’s own area of expertise, the theatre … It combines the heights of critical theory with the ageless and incoherent impulse that sends us ordinary folk to theatres for solace, affirmation and enlightenment. The End of Ends is the playbook, the guide, the user’s manual on how the pilgrim soul should relate to the arts.” —Thomas Keneally
”Tadeusz Bradecki entertains, elucidates, and surprises at every turn. What begins as a series of witty and fiendishly astute essays exploring the roots and interconnectedness of story segues into an extraordinary example of “practice what you preach”. He brilliantly and playfully weaves into this non-fictional narrative a time-bending love story, which reflects and perfectly complements what has come before. Bravo.” —Sarah Lotz
”Bradecki’s whistle-stop tour through two thousand years of dramatic literature is breathtaking. But even more moving is the infectious relish with which he shares his love of his subject. The sheer joy he takes in these texts not only arouses our curiosity, it also quickens the pulse.” —Declan Donellan
”The End of Ends is a dazzling tour through the craft, philosophy and history of telling stories. It’s a Russian doll of wit, insight, charm, erudition and storytelling itself — and is exactly the kind of thing every creative writing student should be compelled to read.” —Danny O’Connor

Lioness by Emily Perkins $25

“You know how we say we devoured a story, and also that we were consumed by it? Eating and being eaten. It was like that with Claire, for me.” From humble beginnings, Therese has let herself grow used to a life of luxury after marrying into an empire-building family. But when rumours of corruption gather around her husband's latest development, the social opprobrium is shocking, the fallout swift, and Therese begins to look at her privileged and insular world with new eyes.In the flat below Therese, something else is brewing. Her neighbour Claire believes she's discovered the secret to living with freedom and authenticity, freeing herself from the mundanity of domesticity. Therese finds herself enchanted by the lure of the permissive zone Claire creates in her apartment - a place of ecstatic release. All too quickly, Therese is forced to confront herself and her choices - just how did she become this person? And what exactly should she do about it? New edition.
“It will make you shudder and laugh simultaneously” —Stella
”The most exciting novel I've read in ages. I gulped it down, so readable, so EXCELLENT about people. Read it.” —Marian Keyes
”A coolly ironic look at modern womanhood. This is an excellent novel.” —The Times

• Read Stella’s review.

• Other books short-listed for the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes $37

The four Flattery sisters — Olwen, Nell, Maeve and Rhona — were left to cobble together their own makeshift adolescence after the death of both their parents. Decades later, all four of them have found success in their respective fields, all of them boasting PhDs and, in Nell's case, a healthy clutch of Instagram followers. Still, none of the sisters have come to terms with their parents' deaths, choosing to focus instead on bigger problems — food insecurity, climate change, post-Brexit capitalism — to avoid confronting this trauma. When Olwen disappears, Nell, Maeve and Rhona attempt to find the sister they no longer know, a woman who wants desperately not to be found. Their search will force the siblings to bridge the isolation that has grown between them, and face the past they thought they could bury. Full of laugh-out-loud wit and clear-eyed observations, The Alternatives is a story of sisterhood and belonging, of loss and connection, written with Caoilinn Hughes' trademark intelligence and razor-sharp prose.
”A brilliant, brainy book about the bravery of following one’s own path while also remembering the value of community.” —Guardian

• A geologist, a philosopher, a politician, and a chef walk into a bar…

• Women who centre work in their lives.

After Nora by Penelope Curtis $38

In early 1920s England, Nora’s life is in a state of flux: leaving one husband for another, she embarks on a new existence on the margins of the cultural and political elite, trying to hold onto her aspirations as a painter, along with her relationships. In late 1960s Glasgow, young biologist Maria de Sousa wrestles with her feelings for an older colleague, Adam Curtis – the author’s father. The unclear connection between the two impels the narrator, fifty years later, to seek out answers in Lisbon: what really happened between Adam and Maria? After Nora bridges three generations, and moves between London, Paris, southern England, Scotland, Jamaica and Portugal, touching on key scientific discoveries, artistic and historical landmarks, the Carnation Revolution and a global pandemic. Penelope Curtis offers sensitive portraits of those whose lives she has had to imagine in order to understand, in an ambitious novel that movingly resurrects a past whose remnants still permeate the present. Poignantly revealing the forces which check personal callings, the novel also explores, among other things, the ways in which love is balanced with creative independence. Penelope Curtis is an art historian and former director of the Tate Gallery, whose novel imagines the life and motivations of Nora, the grandmother she never knew but whose paintings she inherited. Curtis envisions Nora as a woman deeply struggling to identify her sources of self-worth. This account of her grandmother’s doubts as to the importance of her own art is accompanied, too, by that of another woman: the Portuguese scientist Maria de Sousa, who had worked in Glasgow with Curtis’s father, also a scientist, and whom the author eventually met in Lisbon, after her father’s death. After Nora is a three-part novel that talks of the meaning of creative independence through the lives of three generations. It touches on the ways in which morality can check artistic, professional and emotional callings, and exert a binding and compelling power over these. The novel also underscores the limits of knowledge, of others and the self, attempting all the while to recreate the nature of past loves.

• Read an extract.

How to Win an Information War: The propagandist who outwitted Hitler by Peter Pomerantsev $40

In the summer of 1941, Hitler ruled Europe from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. Britain was struggling to combat the powerful Nazi propaganda machine, which crowed victory and smeared its enemies. However, inside Germany, there was one notable voice of dissent from the very heart of the military machine — Der Chef, a German whose radio broadcasts skilfully questioned Nazi doctrine. He had access to high-ranking military secrets and spoke of internal rebellion. His listeners included German soldiers and citizens. But what these audiences didn't know was that Der Chef was a fiction, a character created by the British propagandist Sefton Delmer, just one player in his vast counter-propaganda cabaret, a unique weapon in the war. As author Peter Pomerantsev uncovers Delmer's story, he is called into a wartime propaganda effort of his own: the global response to Putin's invasion of Ukraine. This book is the story of Delmer and his modern-day investigator, as they each embark on their own quest to seduce and inspire the passions of supporters and enemies, and to turn the tide of information wars.
”Elegant, effortlessly readable. Essential reading for the new dark age of disinformation.” —Jonathan Freedland
”Original. Pomerantsev digs deep into the past history of information warfare, in order to help us understand how to fight charlatans and fear mongers in the present.” —Anne Applebaum
”Excellent, carefully researched and beautifully written. To be read by everyone seeking perspective on all the lies of war and all the wars of lies.” —Timothy Snyder

• How to go on the offence.

Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan $25

In her acclaimed second short-story collection, the author of Small Things Like These shows Ireland and the Irish wrestling with the past in various ways. A long-haired woman moves into the priest's house and sets fire to his furniture. That Christmas, the electricity goes out. A forester mortgages his land and goes off to a seaside town looking for a wife — he finds a woman eating alone in the hotel. A farmer wakes half-naked and realises the money is almost gone. And in the title story, a priest waits on the altar for a bride and battles, all that wedding day, with his memories of a love affair.
”Perfect short stories.” —Anne Enright
”Breath-taking.” —Irish Times
”Her stories are as good as Chekhov’s.” —David Mitchell

A Book of Rongo and Te Rangahau by Briar Wood $30

Briar Wood reimagines the lives of Rongo and Te Rangahau, nineteenth-century wahine toa, tupuna of Ngapuhi, in radiant verse. The collection also stretches across time into today's world with poetry about contemporary Northland. Illustrated within, with much historical information, and cover art by Nikau Hindin.
”A time machine stretching from stories told and reimagined, an invitation to Aotearoa's past running parallel with how history impacts today.” —Anne-Marie Te Whiu

• Walking backwards into the future.

• Time-travelling poet.

Hackenfeller’s Ape by Brigid Brophy $25

In London Zoo, Professor Darrylhyde is singing to the apes again. Outside their cage, he watches the two animals, longing to observe the mating ritual of this rare species. But Percy, inhibited by confinement and melancholy, is repulsing Edwina's desirous advances. Soon, the Professor's connection increases as he talks, croons, befriends — so when a scientist arrives on a secret governmental mission to launch Percy into space, he vows to secure his freedom. But when met by society's indifference, he takes matters into his own hands. A trailblazing animal rights campaigner, Brigid Brophy's sensational 1953 novel is as provocative and philosophical seventy years on. An electric moral fable, it is as much a blazingly satirical reflection on homo sapiens as the non-human — on our capacity for violence, red in tooth and claw, not only to other species, but our own. New introduction by Sarah Hall.
”Pitch-perfect.” —Ali Smith
”So original.” —Hilary Mantel
”Stunning.” —Isabel Waidner
”Her beastly, risky best.” —Eley Williams
”Flawless.” —Sunday Times
”Ingenious.” —Observer

• On Brigid Brophy.

The Edge of the Plain: How borders make and break our world by James Crawford $37

No matter where you turn, it seems that the taut lines of borders are vibrating to — or even calling — the tune of global events. Today, there are more borders in the world than ever before in human history. Beginning with the earliest known example, Crawford travels to many borders old and new: from a melting glacial landscape to the conflict-torn West Bank and the fault-lines of the US/Mexico border. He follows the story of borders into our fragile and uncertain future — towards the virtual frontiers of the internet and the shifting geography of a world beset by climate change. As nationalism, climate change, globalisation, technology and mass migration all collide with ever-hardening borders, something has to give. And Crawford asks, is it time to let go of the lines that divide us?
”A richly essayistic account of how borders make and break our world, from Hadrian's Wall to China's Great Firewall.” —Guardian
”The borders that mark our world are either ineffective, inhumane, or both. The Edge of the Plain asks us to envision alternatives.” —New York Times
”Erudite and engaging. A fine book.” —The Irish Times

Why We Remember: The science of memory and how it shapes us by Charan Ranganath $40

We talk about memory as a record of the past, but here's a surprising twist: we aren't supposed to remember everything. In fact, we're designed to forget. Over the course of twenty-five years, Charan Ranganath has studied the flawed, incomplete and purposefully inaccurate nature of memory to find that our brains haven't evolved to keep a comprehensive record of events, but to extract the information needed to guide our futures. Using fascinating case studies and testimonies, Why We Remember unveils the principles behind what and why we forget and shines new light on the silent, pervasive influence of memory on how we learn, heal and make decisions. By examining the role that attention, intention, imagination and emotion play in the storing of memories, it provides a vital user's guide to remembering what we hold most dear.

• Making moments last.

• When is forgetting normal?

The Nineties: A book by Chuck Klosterman $37

It was long ago, but not as long as it seems — The Berlin Wall fell and the Twin Towers collapsed. In between, the world changed a lot, more than we realised. In the beginning, almost every name and address was listed in a phone book, and everyone answered their landlines because you didn't know who it was. By the end, exposing someone's address was an act of emotional violence, and nobody picked up their new cell phone if they didn't know who it was. The 90s brought about a revolution in the human condition we're still groping to understand. There were wholesale shifts in how society was perceived — the rise of the internet, pre-9/11 politics, and the paradoxical belief that nothing was more humiliating than trying too hard. Pop culture accelerated without the aid of a machine that remembered everything, generating an odd comfort in never being certain about anything. It was the last era that held to the idea of a true, hegemonic mainstream before it all began to fracture, whether you found a home in it or defined yourself against it.
"In The Nineties, Klosterman examines the social, political and cultural history of the era with his signature wit. It's a fascinating trip down memory lane." —Time
"An engaging, nuanced and literate take on the alternately dynamic and diffident decade." —Washington Post

Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin $23

Welcome to Elsewhere. It is warm, with a breeze, and the beaches are beautiful. It's quiet and peaceful. You can't get sick, and you can't get older. In Elsewhere, death is only the beginning. Elsewhere is where fifteen-year-old Liz Hall ends up, after she is killed in a hit-and-run accident. It is a place very like Earth, yet completely different. Here Liz will age backwards from the day of her death until she becomes a baby again and returns to Earth. But Liz wants to turn sixteen, not fourteen again. She wants to get her driving licence. She wants to graduate from high school and go to college. She doesn't want to get to know a grandmother she's never met before and have to make all new friends. How can Liz let go of the only life she has ever known and embrace a new one? Or is it possible that a life lived in reverse is no different from a life lived forward?
"Every so often a book comes along with a premise so fresh and arresting it seems to exist in a category all its own. Elsewhere is such a book." —New York Times Book Review

Yukie’s Island by Yukie Kimura, Kōdo Kimura and Steve Sheinkin $38

It's 1945, the final year of World War II. Yukie Kimura is eight years old. She lives on a tiny island with a lighthouse in the north of Japan with her family, and she knows that the fighting that once felt so far away is getting closer. Mornings spent helping her father tend to the lighthouse and adventuring with her brother are replaced by weeks spent inside, waiting. At some point, Yukie knows, they may be bombed. Then, it happens. One Sunday, bombs are dropped. The war ends soon after that. Everyone tells Yukie there's nothing to be scared of anymore, but she's not so sure. So she watches and she waits — until a miraculous sight finally allows her to be a child again. This is the true story of Yukie Kimura told in her own words, co-created with her son, illustrator Kodo Kimura, and co-written with bestselling Newbery Honor author Steve Sheinkin.

• Look inside!

New arrivals — just out of the carton! Click through to our website to place your orders.

100 Years of Darkness: Poems about films and film music by Bill Direen $30

The 76 poems of 100 Years of Darkness pays homage to a century of cinema and its music. The films are drawn from Japan, U.S.A., France, Germany, Russia/Ukraine, Vietnam, Sweden, Italy, Spain, New Zealand, Lebanon and other places. Since only a few of them have been released in all countries, the chosen films are itemised by means of a detailed index of sources at the close. This makes it easy for film and music lovers to find the directors and years of first appearance — to eventually see the films for themselves. The  book’s cover design represents aspect ratios used worldwide between 1888 and the present.

• Other poetry by Bill Direen.

The Sky is Falling by Lorenza Mazzetti (translated from Italian by Livia Franchini) $38

First published in 1961, Lorenza Mazzetti's The Sky is Falling (Il cielo cade) is an impressionistic, idiosyncratic, and uniquely funny look at the writer's childhood after she and her sister are sent to live with their Jewish relatives following the death of their parents. Bright and bucolic, vivid and mournful, and brimming with saints, martyrdom, ideals, wrong-doing and self-imposed torments, the novel describes the loss of innocence and family under the Fascist regime in Italy during World War II through the eyes of Mazzetti's fictional alter ego, Penny, in sharp, witty (and sometimes petulant) prose. First translated into English as The Sky Falls by Marguerite Waldman in 1962, with several pages missing due to censorship, the novel has been out of print in the anglophone world for many years. Livia Franchini's beautiful new translation carries over the playfulness and perverse naivete of the original Italian. Recommended!

Amma by Saraid de Silva $38

Singapore, 1951. When Josephina is a girl, her parents lock her in a room with the father of the boy to whom she's betrothed.  What happens next will determine the course of her life for generations to come. New Zealand, 1984. Josephina and her family leave Sri Lanka for New Zealand. But their new home is not what they expected, and for the children, Sithara and Suri, a sudden and shocking event changes everything. London, 2018. Arriving on her uncle Suri's doorstep, jetlagged and heartbroken, Annie has no idea what to expect — all she knows is that Suri was cast out by his amma for being gay, like she is. Moving between cities and generations, Amma follows three women on very different paths, against a backdrop of shifting cultures. As circumstance and misunderstanding force them apart, it will take the most profound love to knit them back together before it's too late.

• Undoubted brilliance.

Ticknor by Sheila Heti $40

On a cold, rainy night, an aging bachelor named George Ticknor prepares to visit his childhood friend Prescott, now one of the leading intellectual lights of their generation. Reviewing a life of petty humiliations, and his friend's brilliant career, Ticknor sets out for the dinner party-a party at which he'd just as soon never arrive. Distantly inspired by the real-life friendship between the historian William Hickling Prescott and his biographer, Ticknor is a witty, fantastical study in resentment. It recalls such modern masterpieces of obsession as Thomas Bernhard's The Loser and Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine and, when first published in 2006, announced the arrival of a charming and original novelist, one whose novels and other writings have earned her a passionate international following.
"A perceptive act of ventriloquism, Ticknor rewards thought and rereading, and offers a finely cadenced voice, intelligence and moody beauty." —The Globe and Mail
"Confoundedly strange and fascinating." —Quill & Quire

• Read our reviews of other books by Sheila Heti.

The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft $40

Eight translators arrive at a house in a primeval Polish forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Gray Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace. The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore this ancient wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime molds and lichens, and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets - and deceptions - of Irena Rey's that they are utterly unprepared for. Forced to face their differences as they grow increasingly paranoid in this fever dream of isolation and obsession, soon the translators are tangled up in a web of rivalries and desire, threatening not only their work but the fate of their beloved author herself. This hilarious, thought-provoking debut by award-winning translator and author Jennifer Croft is a brilliant examination of art, celebrity, the natural world, and the power of language. It is an unforgettable, unputdownable adventure with a small but global cast of characters shaken by the shocks of love, destruction, and creation in one of Europe's last great wildernesses.
”Croft writes with an extraordinary intensity.” —Olga Tokarczuk
”Mischievous and intellectually provocative, The Extinction of Irena Rey asks thrilling questions about the wilderness of language, the life of the forest, and the feral ambitions and failings of artists.“ —Megha Majumdar
”Generous and strange, funny and disconcerting, The Extinction of Irena Rey is a playground for the mind and an entrancing celebration of the sociality of reading, writing, and translation written by a master practitioner of all three.” —Alexandra Kleeman

• Read an excerpt.

• Transforming books.

• Eight translators walk into a house…

• Inspired by fungi.

Six-Legged Ghosts: The insects of Aotearoa by Lily Duval $55

Why isn’t Aotearoa famous for its insects? We have wētā that can survive being frozen, weevils with ‘snouts’ almost as long as their bodies, and the world’s only alpine cicadas. There is mounting evidence that insect numbers are plummeting all over the world. But the insect apocalypse isn’t just a faraway problem – it’s also happening here in Aotearoa. In recent years, we have lost a number of our native insects to extinction and many more are teetering on the brink. Without insects, the world is in trouble. Insects are our pollinators, waste removers and ecosystem engineers – they are vital for a healthy planet. So why don’t more people care about the fate of the tiny but mighty six- legged beings that shape our world? Richly illustrated, and including more than 100 original paintings by the author, Six-legged Ghosts: The insects of Aotearoa examines the art, language, stories and science of insects in Aotearoa and around the world. From te ao Māori to the medieval art world, from museum displays to stories of the insect apocalypse, extinction and conservation, Lily Duval explores the lives of insects not only in Aotearoa’s natural environments, but in our cultures and histories as well.

• Look inside!

Talia by Isla Huia (Te Āti Haunui a-Pāpārangi, Uenuku) $30

Short-listed for the 2024 Ockham Book Awards, The poems in Talia are a critique of hometowns, an analysis of whakapapa, and a reclamation of tongue. It is an ode to the earth the poet stands on, and to a sister she lost to the skies. It is a manifesto for a future full of aunties and islands and light.
”This is a collection so movingly steeped in aroha, in the power and reach and traffic of love. It is a poetry collection to put on repeat, to lose and find your way in. I love it.” —Paula Green

• The poet reads three of the poems.

• Looking for the light amonmgst it all.

• Five things that have shaped the poet’s practice.

• Other books shortlisted for th 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Ninth Street Women — Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five painters and the movement that changed modern art by Mary Gabriel $40

Set amid the most turbulent social and political period of modern times, Ninth Street Women is the impassioned, wild, sometimes tragic, always exhilarating chronicle of five women who dared to enter the male-dominated world of twentieth-century abstract painting — not as muses but as artists. From their cold-water lofts, where they worked, drank, fought, and loved, these pioneers burst open the door to the art world for themselves and countless others to come. Gutsy and indomitable, Lee Krasner was a hell-raising leader among artists long before she became part of the modern art world's first celebrity couple by marrying Jackson Pollock. Elaine de Kooning, whose brilliant mind and peerless charm made her the emotional center of the New York School, used her work and words to build a bridge between the avant-garde and a public that scorned abstract art as a hoax. Grace Hartigan fearlessly abandoned life as a New Jersey housewife and mother to achieve stardom as one of the boldest painters of her generation. Joan Mitchell, whose notoriously tough exterior shielded a vulnerable artist within, escaped a privileged but emotionally damaging Chicago childhood to translate her fierce vision into magnificent canvases. And Helen Frankenthaler, the beautiful daughter of a prominent New York family, chose the difficult path of the creative life. Her gamble paid off: At twenty-three she created a work so original it launched a new school of painting. These women changed American art and society, tearing up the prevailing social code and replacing it with a doctrine of liberation.

• Look inside.

A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros $25

 By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history ... The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life. In A Philosophy of Walking, a bestseller in France, leading thinker Frederic Gros charts the many different ways we get from A to B-the pilgrimage, the promenade, the protest march, the nature ramble-and reveals what they say about us. Gros draws attention to other thinkers who also saw walking as something central to their practice. On his travels he ponders Thoreau's eager seclusion in Walden Woods; the reason Rimbaud walked in a fury, while Nerval rambled to cure his melancholy. He shows us how Rousseau walked in order to think, while Nietzsche wandered the mountainside to write. In contrast, Kant marched through his hometown every day, exactly at the same hour, to escape the compulsion of thought. Brilliant and erudite, A Philosophy of Walking is an entertaining and insightful manifesto for putting one foot in front of the other. New edition.

Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four women who wrote the Renaissance by Ramie Targoff $38

In an innovative and engaging narrative of everyday life in Shakespeare's England, Ramie Targoff carries us from the sumptuous coronation of Queen Elizabeth in the mid-16th century into the private lives of four women writers working at a time when women were legally the property of men. Some readers may have heard of Mary Sidney, accomplished poet and sister of the famous Sir Philip Sidney, but few will have heard of Aemilia Lanyer, the first woman in the 17th century to publish a book of original poetry - a feminist take on the crucifixion, or Elizabeth Cary, who published the first original play by a woman — about the plight of the Jewish princess Mariam. Then there was Anne Clifford, a lifelong diarist, who fought for decades against a patriarchy that tried to rob her of her land in one of England's most infamous inheritance battles.

Champ by Payam Ebrahimi and Reza Dalvand $35

Abtin is nothing like the rest of his family. The Moleskis are fiercely competitive sports champions, and they expect Abtin to become a great athlete too. But Abtin is a reader, an artist, and has his own way of doing things. Despite his family's best efforts, Abtin remains stubbornly himself. Wanting his family to be proud of him, he comes up with a plan to make them happy: a plan that doesn't go quite as expected.

• Look inside!

Heresy: Jesus Christ and the other Sons of God by Catherine Nixey $40

“In the beginning was the Word,” says the Gospel of John. This sentence — and the words of all four gospels — is central to the teachings of the Christian church and has shaped Western art, literature and language, and the Western mind. Yet in the years after the death of Christ there was not merely one word, nor any consensus as to who Jesus was or why he had mattered. There were many different Jesuses, among them the aggressive Jesus who scorned his parents and crippled those who opposed him, the Jesus who sold his twin into slavery and the Jesus who had someone crucified in his stead. Moreover, in the early years of the first millennium there were many other saviours, many sons of gods who healed the sick and cured the lame. But as Christianity spread, they were pronounced unacceptable — even heretical — and they faded from view. Now, in Heretic, Catherine Nixey tells their extraordinary story, one of contingency, chance and plurality. It is a story about what might have been.
"How on earth could an ancient Greek word meaning 'choice' come to be used exclusively negatively to mean heresy? Catherine Nixey, expert in the darkening age of Late Antique religiosity, has all the answers, brilliantly resurrecting a teeming plurality of non-canonical, non-orthodox, and above all allegedly non-Christian ideas and practices with cool intellectual clarity and vivid literary skill.” —Paul Cartledge

• The Darkening Age.

Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s hidden histories by Amitav Ghosh $38

When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels, ‘The Ibis Trilogy’, ten years ago, he was startled to find how the lives of the 19th century sailors and soldiers he wrote of were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean, but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Most surprising at all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history was swept up in the story. Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, memoir and an essay in history, drawing on decades of archival research. In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India, and China, as well as the world at large. The trade was engineered by the British Empire, which exported Indian opium to sell to China and redress their great trade imbalance, and its revenues were essential to the Empire's financial survival. Yet tracing the profits further, Ghosh finds opium at the origins of some of the world's biggest corporations, of America's most powerful families and prestigious institutions (from the Astors and Coolidges to the Ivy League), and of contemporary globalism itself. Moving between horticultural histories, the mythologies of capitalism, and the social and cultural repercussions of colonialism, Ghosh reveals the role that one small plant had in the making of our world, now teetering on the edge of catastrophe.
”Ghosh has reinvented himself as a superlative commodity historian. In his new role, he has surpassed many seasoned historians in his ability to synthesise a wealth of research with remarkable intellectual clarity and suggestive simplicity. There's a quietly subversive element to Smoke and Ashes for which Ghosh deserves to be commended.” —The Times

• Futures and pasts.

• Some books by Amitav Ghosh.

Māori Made Easy Pocket Guide: Essential greetings, phrases and tikanga for every day by Scotty Morrison $24

This little book that really will fit into your pocket is your guide to using te reo Māori in every day situations, from introductions to conversations, online and in person. Carry the essentials with you, and develop confidence in: * Basic pronunciation * Greetings * Dates and times * Pepeha * Whakataukī * Karakia * Iwi names * and much more.

• Other books in the ‘Māori Made Easy’ series.

All Through the Night: Why our lives depend on dark skies by Dani Robertson $40

Why darkness is so important – to plants, to animals, and to ourselves – and why we must protect it all costs. Darkness is the first thing we know in our human existence. Safe and warm inside the bubble of the womb, we are comfortable in that embracing dark. But as soon as we are bought into the light, we learn to fear the dark. Why? Some 99 per cent of Western Europeans live under light polluted skies, but what is this doing to our health? Our wellbeing? Our connection to the cycles of nature? Our wildlife, too, has been cast into the harsh glare of our light addiction, with devastating impacts.
In this book Dani shares with you the excitement and adventure she has found when everyone else is tucked up in bed. She explores constellations and cultures, enjoys environmental escapades, all whilst learning why we are addicted to light and why it is ruining our lives. She’ll show you why the darkness is so important and why we must protect it all costs.

There were some exciting arrivals this week. Click through to our website to secure your copies.

Marlow’s Dream: Joseph Conrad in Antipodean Ports by Martin Edmond $45

Before Joseph Conrad’s writing career was established in 1899 with the serialised publication of Heart of Darkness, he was a merchant seafarer and eventually a shipmaster of vessels that regularly sailed between Europe and its antipodes, with several visits to Australia and New Zealand, stopping at numerous other ports along the way. In Marlow's Dream, Martin Edmond shows in vivid detail how Conrad both collected and began to arrange the tales that would later appear in his fiction during these voyages. Intertwining Conrad's biography with his own, Edmond demonstrates how Conrad's stories were lifted straight out of his experiences as an itinerant mariner who had spent many days in antipodean ports between 1878-93.
"No writer has more to tell us about our oceanic past and its human dramas than Joseph Conrad. Now Martin Edmond adds something new to Conrad's world, a hard thing to do. By placing Conrad among the Antipodean people he knew and the Antipodean ports he frequented as a sailor, the fictions become more vivid, more real, while the raffish cosmopolitanism of old Australasian port life becomes less remote. We are closer both to Conrad and the past. A marvelous achievement!" —Simon During (University of Queensland)
"Edmond wants to understand Conrad's fiction from the inside, and he wants to do this in a way that will make sense to an audience wider than the limited readership of academic literary criticism." —Andrew Dean (Deakin University)

Ash by Louise Wallace $30

Thea lives under a mountain — one that’s ready to blow. A vet at a mid-sized rural practice, she has been called back during maternity leave and is coping – just – with the juggle of meetings, mealtimes, farm visits, her boss’s search for legal loopholes and the constant care of her much-loved children, Eli and Lucy. But something is shifting in Thea – something is burning. Or is it that she is becoming aware, for the first time, of the bright, hot core at her centre? Then comes an urgent call. Ingeniously layered, Ash is a story about reckoning with one’s rage and finding marvels in the midst of chaos.
”I have not felt this seen by a book, ever. Ash worked through me like a drug: I will be going back again and again. The craft is exquisite, the comedy deeply satiating. What Louise Wallace has achieved in Ash is a monumental call to all the women who have been called good girls and bitches with the same breath. Ash simmers and smokes with honesty. It makes sparks fly.” —Claire Mabey

What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma (translated from Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey) $35

What if one half of a pair of twins no longer wants to live? What if the other can't live without them?This question lies at the heart of Jente Posthuma's deceptively simple What I'd Rather Not Think About. The narrator is a twin whose brother has recently taken his own life. She looks back on their childhood, and tells of their adult lives — how her brother tried to find happiness, but lost himself in various men and the Bhagwan movement, though never completely. In brief, precise vignettes, full of gentle melancholy and surprising humour, Posthuma tells the story of a depressive brother, viewed from the perspective of the sister who both loves and resents her twin, struggles to understand him, and misses him terribly.
”What makes What I’d Rather Not Think About rise above the average mourning novel is its utter authenticity. Posthuma associates, philosophises, links memories to everyday actions, draws on films and television series and tries to interpret in a laconic, light-footed and pointed way. ‘Less is more’ with Jente Posthuma. And again, she seems to be saying: nothing is “whole” here, in the subhuman. Everything rumbles, frays, and creaks.” —Nederlands Letterenfonds

• Short-listed for the 2024 International Booker Prize.

• Read an extract.

• The author’s procrastination routine.

White Nights by Urszula Konek (translated from Polish by Kate Webster) $40

White Nights is a series of thirteen interconnected stories concerning the various tragedies and misfortunes that befall a group of people who all grew up and live(d) in the same village in the Beskid Niski region, in southern Poland. Each story centres itself around a different character and how it is that they manage to cope, survive or merely exist, despite, and often in ignorance of, the poverty, disappointment, tragedy, despair, brutality and general sense of futility that surrounds them.
”The book’s strength lies in its ability to capture the intense, dreamlike quality of its setting, where the natural phenomenon of ‘white nights’ serves as a backdrop for the characters’ introspective journeys. White Nights is a dark, lyrical exploration of the ways in which people seek meaning and belonging in a transient world.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation

• Long-listed for the 2024 International Booker Prize.

The Russian Detective by Carol Adlam $65

An exquisitely drawn graphic novel, a crime thriller with a strong feminist vein, set in nineteenth century Russia. Journalist and magician Charlie Fox returns to her home town of Nowheregrad to investigate the murder of a glass manufacturer’s daughter, but learns some things about herself, too. Lovingly done, well researched, and full of delights and surprises.
”Could not be more rich or more beautiful if it tried. This is a book that replays multiple readings — its illustrations are so deeply atmospheric and so inordinately beautiful.” —Observer

• Look inside!

• The fun starts with the endpapers.

Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong (translated from Korean by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae) $40

Centred on three generations of a family of rail workers and a laid-off factory worker staging a high-altitude sit-in, Mater 2-10 vividly depicts the lives of ordinary working Koreans, starting from the Japanese colonial era, continuing through Liberation, and right up to the twenty-first century. 
”Mater 2-10 is a vital reminder that, while the Berlin Wall may have fallen, the Cold War lives on in a divided Korea. It traces the roots of postwar persecution of labour activists smeared as ‘commies’. Decades of torture of political opponents in Japanese-built prisons are revealed as a ‘legacy of the Japanese Empire’. Hwang’s aim, he writes, was to plug a gap in Korean fiction, which typically reduces industrial workers to ‘historical specks of dust’. Not only does he breathe life into vivid protagonists, but the novel so inhabits their perspective that we share the shock and disbelief as their hard-won freedom is snatched away.” —Maya Jaggi, The Guardian

• Short-listed for the 2024 International Booker Prize.

• Read an extract.

• How the book was written.

• Also in stock by Hwang Sok-yong: At Dusk.

Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior (translated from Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz) $25

“I heard our grandmother asking what we were doing. ‘Say something!’ she demanded, threatening to tear out our tongues. Little did she know that one of us was holding her tongue in her hand.”
Deep in Brazil's neglected Bahia hinterland, two sisters find an ancient knife beneath their grandmother's bed and, momentarily mystified by its power, decide to taste its metal. The shuddering violence that follows marks their lives and binds them together forever. Heralded as a new masterpiece, this fascinating and gripping story about the lives of subsistence farmers in Brazil's poorest region, three generations after the abolition of slavery, is at once fantastic and realist, covering themes of family, spirituality, slavery and its aftermath, and political struggle.
”Bibiana and Belonisía are two sisters whose inheritance arrives in the form of a grandmother’s mysterious knife, which they discover while playing, then unwrap from its rags and taste. The mouth of one sister is cut badly and the tongue of the other is severed, injuries that bind them together like scar tissue, though they bear the traces in different ways. Set in the Bahia region of Brazil, where approximately one third of all enslaved Africans were sent during the height of the slave trade, the novel invites us into the deep-rooted relationships of Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous peoples to their lands and waters – including the ways these communities demand love, gods, song, and dream – despite brutal colonial disruptions. An aching yet tender story of our origins of violence, of how we spend our lives trying to bloom love and care from them, and of the language and silence we need to fuel our tending.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation

• Short-listed for the 2024 International Booker Prize.

• Read an extract.

• On writing the book.

A Different Light: First photographs of Aotearoa edited by Catherine Hammond and Shaun Higgins $65

In 1848, two decades after a French inventor mixed daylight with a cocktail of chemicals to fix the view outside his window onto a metal plate, photography arrived in Aotearoa. How did these 'portraits in a machine' reveal Maori and Pakeha to themselves and to each other? Were the first photographs 'a good likeness' or were they tricksters? What stories do they capture of the changing landscape of Aotearoa? From horses laden with mammoth photographic plates in the 1870s to the arrival of the Kodak in the late 1880s, New Zealand's first photographs reveal Kingi and governors, geysers and slums, battles and parties. They freeze faces in formal studio portraits and stumble into the intimacy of backyards, gardens and homes. A Different Light brings together the extraordinary and extensive photographic collections of three major research libraries — Tamaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum, Alexander Turnbull Library and Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hakena. Beautifully presented, with many of the images never before published.

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• How Māori embraced and rejected the colonial lens.

The Home Child by Liz Berry $45

In 1908, Eliza Showell, twelve years old and newly orphaned, boards a ship that will carry her from the slums of the Black Country to rural Nova Scotia. She will never return to Britain or see her family again. She is a Home Child, one of thousands of British children sent to Canada to work as indentured farm labourers and domestic servants. In Nova Scotia, Eliza's world becomes a place where ordinary things are transfigured into treasures - a red ribbon, the feel of a foal's mane, the sound of her name on someone else's lips. With nothing to call her own, the wild beauty of Cape Breton is the only solace Eliza has — until another Home Child, a boy, comes to the farm and changes everything. Inspired by the true story of Liz Berry's great aunt, this novel in verse is an evocative portrait of a girl far from home.
”A profound act of witness to a long injustice, and a beautifully crafted conjuring of a life lived as truly as possible.” —Guardian

• Winner of The Writers’ Prize for Poetry 2024 (formerly The Folio Prize)

• Children were also sent to New Zealand under the same scheme.

Dear Colin, Dear Ron: The selected letters of Colin McCahon and Ron O’Reilly edited by Peter Simpson $65

The painter Colin McCahon and the librarian Ron O'Reilly first met in 1938, in Dunedin, when McCahon was 19 and O'Reilly 24. They remained close, writing regularly to each other until 1981, when McCahon became too unwell to write. Their 380 letters covered McCahon's art practice, the contemporary art scene, ideas, philosophy and the spiritual life. Dazzling in their range, intensity and candour, the letters track a unique friendship and partnership in art. Simpson's selection represents the first time these letters have been transcribed and collected in what is an act of great generosity to future scholars. It adds a new dimension to an understanding of McCahon and his career and is a rich and lively addition to any art lover's McCahon library. O'Reilly's son Matthew O'Reilly and McCahon's grandson Finn McCahon-Jones contribute insightful essays that round out the unique perspective the letters afford. The book is illustrated with 64 images, all discussed in the letters.

• Look inside.

• Colin McCahon’s insatiable desire.

• Some other books on Colin McCahon.

Krabat and the Sorcerer’s Mill by Ottfied Preussler (translated from German by Anthea Bell) $30

New Year's has passed. Twelfth Night is almost here. Krabat, a fourteen-year-old beggar boy dressed up as one of the Three Kings, is traveling from village to village singing carols. One night he has a strange dream in which he is summoned by a faraway voice to go to a mysterious mill — and when he wakes he is irresistibly drawn there. At the mill he finds eleven other boys, all of them, like him, the apprentices of its Master, a powerful sorcerer, as Krabat soon discovers. During the week the boys work ceaselessly grinding grain, but on Friday nights the Master initiates them into the mysteries of the ancient Art of Arts. One day, however, the sound of church bells and of a passing girl singing an Easter hymn penetrates the boys' prison: At last a plan is set in motion that will win them their freedom and put an end to the Master's dark designs.
"One of my favorite books." —Neil Gaiman

• (And there is a film based on the book.)

worm, root, wort… & bane by Ann Shelton $54

Artist Ann Shelton’s latest book, worm, root, wort… & bane delves into the rich history of plant-centric belief systems and their suppression. Part artist scrapbook, part photo book, part quotography, and part exhibition catalogue, this publication explores the medicinal, magical, and spiritual uses of plant materials, once deeply intertwined with the lives of European forest, nomadic, and ancient peoples. worm, root, wort… & bane re-assembles fragments of historical knowledge alongside the first 19 artworks from Shelton’s photographic series, i am an old phenomenon (2022-ongoing). The plant sculptures photographed are constructed by the artist, who has worked with plants since childhood and long been interested in the history of floral art and its expansive gendered resonances. Overflowing with 300+ images and quotations, this book traces the loss of plant knowledge held wise women, witches, and wortcunners in post-feudal Europe, as Christianity spread and capitalism emerged. The book follows our changing relationships with plants, through the Victorian era to the present — offering cause to reflect on the consequences of the ongoing estrangement between humans and the natural world.

• Look inside.

• i am an old phenomenon.

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A Flat Place by Noreen Masud $40

Noreen Masud has always loved flat landscapes — their stark beauty, their formidable calm, their refusal to cooperate with the human gaze. They reflect her inner world- the 'flat place' she carries inside herself, emotional numbness and memory loss as symptoms of childhood trauma. But as much as the landscape provides solace for this suffering, Britain's flatlands are also uneasy places for a Scottish-Pakistani woman, representing both an inheritance and a dispossession. Pursuing this paradox across the wide open plains that she loves, Noreen weaves her impressions of the natural world with the poetry, folklore and history of the land, and with recollections of her own early life, rendering a startlingly strange, vivid and intimate account of a post-traumatic, post-colonial landscape — a seemingly flat and motionless place which is nevertheless defiantly alive.
”It would be easy to assume that A Flat Place, dealing as it does in the currency of trauma, racism and exile, is a bleak book. But this memoir is too interested in what it means and how feels to be alive in a landscape to be anything other than arresting and memorable. In the flatlands of Britain, and in the memories they evoke of the flat places of Pakistan, Masud both finds a way to comprehend her own story and establishes a strong voice that confirms her as a significant chronicler of personal and national experience. A Flat Place is a slim volume, but that belies its expansive scope.” —Financial Times

• Read an extract.

• The roots of trauma.

• Was it urgent?

• Reflective landscapes.

• Humour in the absurdity of life.

• Other books listed for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.

Te Waka Hourua Whītiki, Mātike, Whakatika! $30

Following the treaty redaction action at Te Papa by Te Waka Hourua in December 2023, this book authored by the artists themselves is a first-hand recollection and reflection of their experience, complemented with some memorabilia of the action, and its impact in the public discourse. Te Waka Hourua is a tangata whenua-led, direct action, climate and social justice rōpū. Their kaupapa is as described by their whakaaturanga: “Our waka hourua has set its course. We feel it is beyond time to shed light on the truth of our current and existential situation; endless destruction by an elite minority at the expense of the majority, and of hospitable life on planet earth.”

• Look inside.

• Defaced or corrected?

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: Wellington street art by Jamie D. Baird $70

Art or vandalism, protest or social commentary — how you see street art depends on where you stand. Jamie Baird’s Here Today Gone Tomorrow documents his 40-year fascination with these ephemera as “a testament to human imagination, innovation and cultural diversity.” The fascinating book, with over 1200 photographs taken over four decades, really captures the variety and vitality that is Wellington's unofficial culture and true life.

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Granta 165: Deutschland edited by Thomas Meeney $35

From Lower Saxony to Marienbad, the carwash to the planetarium, this issue of Granta reflects on Germany today. Featuring non-fiction by Alexander Kluge, Peter Handke, Fredric Jameson, Lauren Oyler, Michael Hofmann, Peter Kuras, Adrian Daub, Peter Richter, Lutz Seiler, Ryan Ruby, Jan Wilm and Jürgen Habermas. As well as a conversation between George Prochnik, Emily Dische-Becker and Eyal Weizman. The issue introduces two young novelists on the German scene – Leif Randt and Shida Bazyar – forthcoming work from Yoko Tawada, a short story from Clemens Meyer, and autofiction by Judith Hermann. Plus, poetry by Elfriede Czurda and Frederick Seidel. Photography by Martin Roemers (with an introduction by the poet Durs Grünbein); Ilyes Griyeb (with an introduction by Imogen West-Knights) and Elena Helfrecht (with an introduction by Hanna Engelmeier).

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Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar $38

Cyrus Shams is lost. The orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, Cyrus never knew his mother. Killed when her plane was shot down over the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident, Cyrus has spent his life grappling with the meaningless nature of his mother’s death.  Now he is set to learn the truth of her life. When Cyrus’s obsession with the lives of the martyrs – Bobby Sands, Joan of Arc – leads him to a chance encounter with a dying artist, he finds himself drawn towards the mysteries of his past: an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of Death; and toward his mother, who may not have been who or what she seemed. As Cyrus searches for meaning in the scattered clues of his life, a final revelation transforms everything he thought he knew. 
”As a poet, Akbar is a master of economy of language, and that mastery remains untouched in this 350-page novel. The writing in Martyr! dances on the page, effortlessly going from funny and witty to deep and philosophical to dialogue that showcases the power of language as well as its inability to discuss certain things. It brilliantly explores addiction, grief, guilt, sexuality, racism, martyrdom, biculturalism, the compulsion to create something that matters, and our endless quest for purpose in a world that can often be cruel and uncaring. Akbar was already known as a great poet, but now he must also be called a great, fearless novelist.” —NPR

• Feeling alive.

• Questioning goodness.

Service by Sarah Gilmartin $37

When Hannah learns that famed chef Daniel Costello is facing accusations of sexual assault, she's thrust back to the summer she spent as a waitress at his high-end Dublin restaurant. Drawn in by the plush splendour of the dining rooms, the elegance of the food, the wild parties after service, Hannah also remembers the sizzling tension of the kitchens. And how the attention from Daniel morphed from kindness into something darker... His restaurant shuttered, his lawyers breathing down his neck, Daniel is in a state of disbelief. Decades of hard graft, of fighting to earn recognition for his talent - is it all to fall apart because of something he can barely remember? Hiding behind the bedroom curtains from the paparazzi's lenses, Julie is raking through more than two decades spent acting the supportive wife, the good mother, and asking herself what it's all been for. Their three different voices reveal a story of power and abuse, victimhood and complicity. This is a novel about the facades that we maintain, the lies that we tell and the courage it takes to face the truth.

A Brief Atlas of the Lighthouses at the End of the World by González Macías (translated from Spanish by Daniel Hahn) $50

From a blind lighthouse keeper tending a light in the Arctic Circle, to an intrepid young girl saving ships from wreck at the foot of her father's lighthouse, and the plight of the lighthouse crew cut off from society for forty days, this is a book full of illuminating stories that transport us to the world's most isolated and interesting lighthouses. Over thirty tales, each accompanied by beautiful illustrations, nautical charts, maps, architectural plans and curious facts. Includes the Stephens Island lighthouse in the Marlborough Sounds.

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We Need to Talk About Death: An important book about grief, celebrations, and love by Sarah Chavez, illustrated by Annika Le Large $25

A beautifully illustrated, frank and affirming book about death though history and around the world, and also in our own lives. Death is an important part of life, and yet it is one of the hardest things to talk about — for adults as well as children. Reading this book, children will marvel at the flowers different cultures use to represent death. They will find out about eco-friendly burials, learn how to wrap a mummy, and go beneath the streets of Paris to witness skull-lined catacombs! Readers will also ride a buffalo alongside Yama, the Hindu god of death, come face-to-face with the terracotta army a Chinese emperor built to escort him to the afterlife, and party in the streets to celebrate the Day of the Dead in Mexico. Through these examples the book showcases the amazing ways humans have always revered those who have died. Full of practical tips, this book won't stop the pain of losing a loved one or a pet, but it may give young readers ideas for different ways they can celebrate those who have passed away, and help begin the healing process.

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The One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka (translated from Japanese by Larry Korn) $30

Call it "Zen and the Art of Farming" or a "Little Green Book," Masanobu Fukuoka's manifesto about farming, eating, and the limits of human knowledge presents a radical challenge to the global systems we rely on for our food. At the same time, it is a spiritual memoir of a man whose innovative system of cultivating the earth reflects a deep faith in the wholeness and balance of the natural world. As Wendell Berry writes in his preface, the book "is valuable to us because it is at once practical and philosophical. It is an inspiring, necessary book about agriculture because it is not just about agriculture. "Trained as a scientist, Fukuoka rejected both modern agribusiness and centuries of agricultural practice, deciding instead that the best forms of cultivation mirror nature's own laws. Over the next three decades he perfected his so-called "do-nothing" technique: commonsense, sustainable practices that all but eliminate the use of pesticides, fertilizer, tillage, and perhaps most significantly, wasteful effort. Whether you're a guerrilla gardener or a kitchen gardener, dedicated to slow food or simply looking to live a healthier life, you will find something here.

Erasing Palestine: Free speech and Palestinian freedom by Rebecca Ruth Gould $37

Having been accused of antisemitism for writing an account of the injustices she witnessed in Palestine, Rebecca Ruth Gould embarks on a journey to understand how the fight against antisemitism has been weaponised not to defend civil rights, but to deny them. In this exploration, she comes to a broader understanding of how censorship threatens the intersectional movements against racism and prejudice in all its forms, including antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism. Gould warns of the consequences if academic freedom is not protected and highlights the importance of free speech for the politics of liberation.
”A detailed, in-depth study that gets to the heart of one of the contemporary world's most contentious issues. A bold and expert expose of the real reasons behind the West's current antisemitism industry: the silencing of Palestinians and their erasure from history.” —Ghada Karmi,
”Never have we been more in need of hearing the heroic voices of Palestinian activists and their supporters, still unwaveringly resisting the ongoing Israeli seizure of their land and daily control over their lives and movement. In this meticulously researched, moving and persuasive book, Rebecca Ruth Gould surveys the ever-mounting silencing of any support for justice for Palestinians with specious accusations of anti-Semitism against any and all of those joining the struggle to end Israel's brutal occupation, including against the author herself. “ —Lynne Segal

• Speaking Out for Palestine Can Be Hard, But It Has Never Been More Necessary.

• Against censorship and self-censorship.

• Occupied thoughts.

Portico: Cooking and Feasting in Rome’s Jewish kitchen by Leah Koenig $62

Over 100 recipes, and photographs of Rome's Jewish community, the oldest in Europe. The city's Jewish residents have endured many hardships, including 300 years of persecution inside the Roman Jewish Ghetto. Out of this strife grew resilience, a deeply knit community, and a uniquely beguiling cuisine. Today, the community thrives on Via del Portico d'Ottavia (the main road in Rome's Ghetto neighborhood) — and beyond. Leah Koenig's recipes showcase the cuisine's elegantly understated vegetables, saucy braised meats and stews, rustic pastas, resplendent olive oil-fried foods, and never-too-sweet desserts. Home cooks can explore classics of the Roman Jewish repertoire with Stracotto di Manzo (a wine-braised beef stew), Pizza Ebraica (fruit-and-nut-studded bar cookies), and, of course, Carciofi alla Giudia, the quintessential Jewish-style fried artichokes. A standout chapter on fritters — showcasing the unique gift Roman Jews have for delicate frying — includes sweet honey-soaked matzo fritters, fried salt cod, and savory potato pastries (burik) introduced by the thousands of Libyan Jews who immigrated to Rome in the 1960s and '70s. Every recipe is tailored to the home cook, while maintaining the flavor and integrity of tradition. Suggested menus for holiday planning round out the usability and flexibility of these dishes. A cookbook for anyone who wants to dive more deeply into Jewish foodways, or gain new insight into Rome

• Look inside.

• Browse our cookbooks.

• WHISK! (our cookbook blog).

Electric Life by Rachel Delahaye $22

Estrella is the ‘perfect’ society: an immaculate, sanitised, hyper-connected environment where everything is channelled through the digital medium. There is no dirt, no pain, no disease and no natural world. Feelings like boredom are frowned upon and discouraged. Alara is dropped down to London Under and into a new-old world that bewilders and disorientates her. How will she survive in a society where noise, dirt and sometimes pain are everyday experiences, and where food is not synthetic and tastes real? Will she accomplish her mission? Who can she trust? How will she get back to her family and her worry-free life in Estrella? This fast-paced and thrilling story set in a fictional yet believable future explores important themes and asks some big questions about where our society could be heading.

The Spectacular Science of Art: From the Renaissance to the Digital Age by Rob Colson, illustrated by Moreno Chiacchiera $25

What is colour theory? How do artists use maths in their paintings? How do scientists spot forgeries in a laboratory? And many, many more!The bright, busy artworks will encourage science-hungry children to pore over every detail and truly get to grips with the science that underpins everything around us. Clear information is delivered on multiple levels, allowing readers to dip in and out at speed, or take a deep dive into their favourite subjects.

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Island of Whispers by Frances Hardinge, illustrated by Emily Gravett $38

On the misty island of Merlank, the lingering dead can cause unspeakable harm if they're not safely carried to the Island of the Broken Tower, where they can move on. Milo's father always told him that he wasn't suited for dealing with the dead and could never become the Ferryman — but one day, he's unexpectedly thrust into the role. And his father is his first passenger . . . Milo's father was killed by the Lord of Merlank, in pursuit of his dead daughter who he's unwilling to give up. It's a race to the island as Milo must face swarms of sinister moths, strange headless birds, and dangerous storms to carry his ghostly passengers across the secret seas.  

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The following books have arrived this week and are awaiting your attention. Click through to place your orders and we will have them in your hands very soon!

The Earth Is Falling by Carmen Pellegrino (translated from Italian by Shaun Whiteside) $38

The Earth is Falling is a haunting and magical novel based around the existence of an abandoned village outside Naples. The deserted houses that still stand there are peopled with ghosts who live in a perpetual present from which time has effectively been abolished. The village appears to be semi-alive; the landslide which ominously awaits and which will eventually lead to the abandonment of the place has yet to arrive (yet its rumbles are heard). Pellegrino peoples Alento with eccentrics, luminaries, an eternally optimistic town crier. In the closing pages, the narrator Estella summons  the remaining ghosts for a final dinner. The overall effect is unsettling, haunting and uncanny, the trapped souls doomed to repeat their circumscribed daily life for ever, cut off from the world but dimly aware of its continued presence outside. The pervading mood of nostalgia and melancholy works in stark contrast with the inevitability of the impending catastrophe of the landslide that threatens to obliterate their world forever.  Beautifully written.
”What people: so vibrant and vital, if ghosts can be described as such. What a place: precarious yet utterly certain in Carmen Pellegrino’s vivid, poetic rendering. And what a book: melancholy, elegant, original and in its own particular way, totally seductive.” —Wendy Erskine

Morning and Evening by Jon Fosse (translated from Nynorsk by Damion Searls) $30

A child who will be named Johannes is born. An old man named Johannes dies. Between these two points, Jon Fosse gives us the details of an entire life, starkly compressed. Beginning with Johannes's father's thoughts as his wife goes into labor, and ending with Johannes's own thoughts as he embarks upon a day in his life when everything is exactly the same, yet totally different, Morning and Evening is a novel concerning the beautiful dream that our lives have meaning.
”He touches you so deeply when you read him, and when you have read one work you have to continue. What is special with him is the closeness in his writing. It touches on the deepest feelings that you have — anxieties, insecurities, questions of life and death — such things that every human being actually confronts from the very beginning. In that sense I think he reaches very far and there is a sort of a universal impact of everything that he writes. And it doesn't matter if it is drama, poetry or prose — it has the same kind of appeal to this basic humanness.” —Anders Olsson, Nobel committee
"He has a surgeon's ability to use the scalpel and to cut into the most prosaic, everyday happenings, to tear loose fragments from life, to place them under the microscope and examine them minutely, in order to present them afterward. The results are sometimes so endlessly desolate, dark, and fearful that Kafka himself would have been frightened." —Aftenposten

• Other books by Jon Fosse.

The End of August by Yu Miri (translated from Japanese by Morgan Giles) $55

In 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea, Lee Woo-Cheol was a running prodigy and a contender for the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. But he would have had to run under the Japanese flag. Nearly a century later, his granddaughter is living in Japan and training to run a marathon herself. With the help of powerful Korean shamans, she summons the spirit of Lee Woo-Cheol only to be immersed in the memories of her grandfather, his brother, Lee Woo-Gun, and their neighbour, a young teen who was tricked into becoming a comfort woman for Japanese soldiers. A meditative dance of generations, The End of August is a semi-autobiographical investigation into nationhood and family - what you are born into and what is imposed. Yu Miri's distinct prose, rhythmically translated by Morgan Giles, explores the minutiae of generational trauma, shedding light on the postwar migration of Koreans to Japan.
“One thing Yu can do is write. She is simultaneously a social outcast and a literary star, a dark, brooding presence on the bookshelves. A creative genius.” —The New York Times
“Morgan Giles's translation of Yu Miri's The End of August reads at a breathlessly swift pace despite, or because of, the painstakingly meticulous care put into every word and line. Yu's rich storytelling never loses its pace as Giles relays her depiction of the resilience of the Korean nation through the tragic consequences of colonialism that reverberate to this day.” —Anton Hur

• Listening to the voices of the dead.

• The translator’s voice.

• The open world.

• Other books currently short-listed for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize.

My Brilliant Sister by Amy Brown $38

Stella Miles Franklin’s autobiographical novel My Brilliant Career launched one of the most famous names in Australian letters. Funny, bold, often biting about its characters, the novel and its young author had a lot in common. Miles went on to live a large, fiercely independent and bohemian life of travel, art and freedom. Not so her beloved sister Linda. Quiet, contained, conventional, Linda was an inversion of Stella. A family peacemaker who married the man Stella would not, bore a son and died of pneumonia at 25.  In this reflective, witty and revealing novel, Amy Brown rescues Linda, setting her in counterpoint with Stella, and with the lives of two contemporary women: Ida, a writer whose writing life is on hold as she teaches and raises her young daughter; and Stella, a singer-songwriter who has sacrificed everything for a career, now forcibly put on hold. Binding the two is the novella that Linda might have written to her sister Stella – a brilliant alternative vision of My Brilliant Career. Innovative and involving, My Brilliant Sister is an utterly convincing (and hilarious) portrait of Miles Franklin and a moving, nuanced exploration of the balance women still have to strike between careers and family lives.
”A creative triumph.” —The Guardian
”A rich, playful meditation on art, domesticity, wildness and the struggle to be understood — I loved it.’ —Emily Perkins

• Mirrors, doubles, and shadows.

The Tailor Shop at the Intersection illustrated and written by Ahn Jaesun (translated from Korean by Sora Kim-Russell) $40

“Why do Westerners wear leashes around their necks?” When Deokgu opens a brand new tailor shop in town in the early 20th century, all of Seoul is skeptical of his Western styles. Who would want to wear such funny-looking suits? But Deokgu remains devoted to his craft, and it's not long before the shop begins to flourish, becoming a beloved fixture in the community. The Tailor Shop at the Intersection follows three generations of tailors weaving themselves and their business into the fabric of their community in a rapidly changing Seoul, and stress the irreplaceable value of individuality, creativity, and care. “A single suit contains the lives of the person who makes it and the person who wears it.”

• Look inside this wonderful book!

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom by Grace Blakeley $39

All over the world, democracy is in crisis. Liberal political systems are straining under the pressure imposed by authoritarian strong men undermining institutions, the rule of law and the international system that governs relations between countries. Obvious examples include Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, but these issues stretch around the world from Brazil, to Hungary, to the Philippines. People see this liberal collapse stemming from 'populist' leaders, working class voters and rogue states. But what if the threat to liberal democracy does not come from the outside, but from within? Liberal democracy and free market capitalism always go hand in hand but it is capitalism that is responsible for the crisis of liberalism. In the modern world, democracy and competition have been replaced with oligarchy and monopoly. What we are left with is corporatocracy — societies governed by a tight-knit cartel of big monopolies, financiers, states and international institutions. From technology to food, healthcare to capital, the decisions made by senior execs at the top of the world's most powerful corporations increasingly determine the conditions of life for everyone else. In Vulture Capitalism, Grace Blakeley takes on the world's most powerful corporations by showing how the causes of our modern crisis are a result of our capitalist system. And she shows how it is too full of contradictions for it to even be 'fixed' instead, it must be replaced.
”A galvanising takedown of neoliberalism's ‘free market’ logic, one rooted as much in history as it is in current events. Blakeley's argument is well researched, clear and devastating. Most important of all, she charts a path forward based in hope, democracy and liberation.“ —Naomi Klein
”Brilliantly exposes the lie at the heart of capitalism — that there is no alternative — and systematically demolishes the myths that bolster its power. Rigorous and forensic, this ultimately hopeful book hands us the keys to redesign our own destiny. Another world is possible — and Grace Blakeley expertly charts the roadmap to reach it.” —Caroline Lucas
”Grace Blakeley shows how it is the logic of ultra-monopoly capitalism, rather than greed of the elite or money politics, that is at the root of our socio-economic problems. Using sharp theoretical arguments and instructive real life examples, she tells us that only greater collectivism and a democracy that goes beyond the ballot box will allow us to create a system that can restrain that logic and make society better. Read this book if you want to make fundamental changes to the world.” —Ha-Joon Chang

• Corporations make poor people poorer.

• Other books listed for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.

The Rainbow by Yasunari Kawabata (translated from Japanese by Haydn Trowell) $40

With the Second World War only a few years in the past, and Japan still reeling from its effects, two sisters — born to the same father but different mothers — struggle to make sense of the new world in which they are coming of age. Asako, the younger, has become obsessed with locating a third sibling, while also experiencing love for the first time. While Momoko, their father's first child — haunted by the loss of her kamikaze boyfriend and their final, disturbing days together — seeks comfort in a series of unhealthy romances. And both sisters find themselves unable to outrun the legacies of their late mothers. A thoughtful, probing novel about the enduring traumas of war, the unbreakable bonds of family and the inescapability of the past, The Rainbow is a searing, melancholy work from this superb writer.
”It is impossible to understand the soul of Japan without reading Yasunari Kawabata. Snow Country is his greatest hit, a beautiful novel that both reflected and shaped Japanese culture, but The Rainbow — translated into English for the first time — is Kawabata's missing classic. The Rainbow is where modern Japan begins - a nation born again in the shadow of the nuclear mushroom cloud, and in its bitter-sweet tale of two sisters is also the story of a nation struggling to find a way to live in the rubble and ruins. As always with Japan's greatest novelist, his themes — the bonds of family, wounds that will never heal , love that endures and loser boyfriends — are painfully universal. A book for anyone who loves Japan, or great story-telling, or both. Dazzling, brilliant, unmissable.” —Tony Parsons

Where the Lost Ones Go by Akemi Dawn Bowman $20

Eliot is grieving Babung, her paternal grandmother who just died, and she feels like she's the only one. She's less than excited to move to her new house, which smells like lemons and deception, and is searching for a sign, any sign, that ghosts are real. Because if ghosts are real, it means she can find a way back to Babung. When Eliot chases the promise of paranormal activity to the presumably haunted Honeyfield Hall, she finds her proof of spirits. But these ghosts are losing their memory, stuck between this world and the next, waiting to cross over. With the help of Hazel, the granddaughter of Honeyfield's owner (and Eliot's new crush), she attempts to uncover the mystery behind Honeyfield Hall and the ghosts residing within. And as Eliot fits the pieces together, she may just be able to help the spirits remember their pasts, and hold on to her grandmother's memory.
"Full of heart and captivating from start to finish, Where the Lost Ones Go takes the sharp pieces of grief and molds them into a story full of warm, radiant love. With both the fantastical elements and profoundness of a Miyazaki film, it's a story that'll stick with me for a long time." —Lyla Lee

The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown by Adam Welz $47

The stories we usually tell ourselves about climate change tend to focus on the damage inflicted on human societies by big storms, severe droughts, and rising sea levels. But the most powerful impacts are being and will be felt by the natural world and its myriad species, which are already in the midst of the sixth great extinction. Rising temperatures are fracturing ecosystems that took millions of years to evolve, disrupting the life forms they sustain — and in many cases driving them towards extinction. The natural Eden that humanity inherited is quickly slipping away. Although we can never really know what a creature thinks or feels, The End of Eden invites the reader to meet wild species on their own terms in a range of ecosystems that span the globe. Combining classic natural history, firsthand reportage, and insights from research, Adam Welz brings us close to creatures like moose in northern Maine, parrots in Puerto Rico, cheetahs in Namibia, and rare fish in Australia as they struggle to survive. The stories are intimate yet expansive and always dramatic. An exquisitely written and deeply researched exploration of wild species reacting to climate breakdown, The End of Eden offers a radical new kind of environmental journalism that connects humans to nature in a more empathetic way.
"At once an elegy and an exhortation." —Elizabeth Kolbert

Chugga Tugga Tugboat by Sally Sutton and Sarah Wilkins $21

What a lot of jobs a tugboat has to do in a busy city port! Will it ever get some time off? Spend the day at the port with a very busy tugboat in this colourful picture book, perfect for preschoolers fascinated with boats and ships. Chugga tugga tugboat, chugging out to sea, Can't you, won't you, play with me? No, I'm too busy with this tanker. Splish splosh, wish wash, TOOT TOOT TOOT! Chugga tugga tugboat, chugging out to sea, Can't you, won't you, play with me? No, I'm too busy with this cruise ship. Splish splosh, wish wash, TOOT TOOT TOOT! Appealing illustrations by Sarah Wilkins.

• Look inside!

• See also Crane Guy.

Relic (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Ed Simon $25

Every culture, every religion, every era has enshrined otherwise regular objects with a significance which stretches beyond their literal importance. Whether the bone of a Catholic martyr, the tooth of a Buddhist lama, or the cloak of a Sufi saint, relics are material conduits to the immaterial world. Yet relics aren't just a feature of religion. The exact same sense of the transcendent animates objects of political, historical, and cultural significance. From Abraham Lincoln's death mask to Vladimir Lenin's embalmed corpse, Emily Dickinson's envelopes to Jimi Hendrix's guitar pick, relics are the objects which the faithful understand as being more than just objects. Material things of sacred importance, relics are indicative of a culture's deepest values.

• Other books in the ‘Object Lessons’ series.

Cabarets of Death: Death, Dance and Dining in Early Twentieth-Century Paris by Mel Gordon and Joanna Ebenstein $48

From 1892 until 1954, three cabaret-restaurants in the Montmartre district of Paris captivated tourists with their grotesque portrayals of death in the afterworlds of Hell, Heaven and Nothingness.  Each had specialized cuisines and morbid visual displays, performances with flashes of nudity, and grotesque optical illusions. These cabarets were considered the most curious and shocking amusements in the city.  Entrepreneurs even hawked graphic postcards of their ironic spectacles and otherworldly interiors.

• Look inside!

Classic Cookbooks: 1000-piece puzzle by Richard Baker $42

Classic Cookbooks 1000 Piece Puzzle features 42 paintings of beloved classic cookbooks, ranging from the iconic, like The Joy of Cooking, The French Chef Cookbook, and The Edna Lewis Cookbook, to quirkier classics like Fabulous Fondues and Love and Knishes. Each cookbook cover featured in this puzzle is intentionally painted to capture the telltale signs of wear from years of use in the kitchen. Whether you're a home cook, chef, bibliophile, or puzzle fanatic, you will love piecing your way through decades of cookbook classics and chatting with family or friends about your favorite recipes as you assemble. From Tatsuji Tada's Japanese Recipes, to Meera Sodha's East to Irfan Orga's Turkish Cooking and Elsie Masterton's Blueberry Hill Cookbook, you are sure to find a few of your favorite kitchen resources depicted in this charming and engaging puzzle. This 1000-piece puzzle features high-quality pieces that assemble to 64 x 50 cm, accompanied by a folded, oversize insert of the puzzle image for easy reference. Very enjoyable.

Out of the carton and into your hands!
Choose from this selection of books that have just arrived at VOLUME:

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken $35

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over asks how much of yourself can you lose before you are lost…and then what happens? The heroine of this haunting, spare novel is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, our undead narrator notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. She has forgotten even her name, but she remembers with unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was known — where she loved and was loved. She heads west and into mind-boggling adventures, carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest. A bracing writer of great nerve and verve, Anne de Marcken bends reality (and the reader’s mind) with throwaway assurance. It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over plumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love. Delivering a near-Beckettian whopping to the reader’s imagination, this is one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, a tale for our dispossessed times. Joint winner of The Novel Prize.
”Astounding, inventive, and utterly original, Anne de Marcken has written a freakish classic with wisdom to spare about life, death, and the eerily vast space between. I was absolute putty in this book’s hands.” — Alexandra Kleeman
”Anne de Marcken must write in a charmed ink that first erases the line between the living and the dead, and then — with prose as elegant as it is spooked — tells the story of what lies underneath. I have never read anything like this brilliant debut.” —Sabrina Orah Mark

• Read an extract!

• Attachment to meaning.

• Other books published by Giramondo.

The Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener (translated from Spanish by Julia Sanches) $37

A provocative autobiographical novel that reckons with the legacy of colonialism through one woman's family ties to both colonised and coloniser. Alone in an ethnographic museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener is confronted with her unusual inheritance. She is visiting an exhibition of pre-Columbian artefacts, the spoils of European colonial plunder, many of them from her home country of Peru. Peering through the glass, she sees sculptures of Indigenous faces that resemble her own - but the man responsible for pillaging them was her own great-great-grandfather, Austrian colonial explorer Charles Wiener. In the wake of her father's death, Gabriela begins delving into all she has inherited from her paternal line. From the brutal trail of racism and theft Charles was responsible for, to revelations of her father's infidelity, she traces a legacy of abandonment, jealousy and colonial violence, and questions its impact on her own struggles with desire, love and race in a polyamorous relationship. Blending personal, historical and fictional modes, Undiscovered tells of a search for identity beyond the old stories of patriarchs and plunder. Incisive and fiercely irreverent, it builds to a powerful call for decolonisation.
”Wiener has rescued an intimate story from the family archive, a story that is also the infamous history of our continent, with her trademark intelligence and irreverent humor. Her prose, sober and forward, is fresh air; her view allows us to be testimonies of Latin America's cycles of plundering and looting.” —Valeria Luiselli
”Reading Undiscovered, I wondered what so captivated me about this novel. Was it Gabriela's innate ability to plunder all sorts of convention? Her persistent exploration of our deepest despairs-the weight and falsehoods of the stories and imperatives we inherit? All this, but Undiscovered is also spurred on by a yet more profound and radical strength: the spirit of fury. Powerful and searing, this novel snaps, bucks, heals, and snaps again.” —Samanta Schweblin
”Undiscovered's beautiful blend of fiction and personal feeling on everything from sex, to death, to Peru's traumatic history to France's heritage-colonial industry could not be more contemporary, vital and important, or expressed in more dynamic and immersive prose.” —Preti Taneja

• Decolonising everything.

• The spectres of the past.

• Challenging the white man in her head.

• ‘A Weekend with My Own Death.’

• Other books long-listed for the 2024 International Booker Prize.

Tell by Jonathan Buckley $38

“I can talk for as long as you like, no problem. You'll just have to tell me when to stop. How far back do you want to take it?” Tell is a probing, exuberant and complex examination of the ways in which we make stories of our lives and of other people's. Structured as a series of interview transcripts with a woman who worked as a gardener for a wealthy businessman and art collector who has disappeared, and may or may not have committed suicide, it is a novel of strange, intoxicating immediacy, and the co-winner of the 2022 Novel Prize.
”Always well crafted, this novel is engaging in parts and digressive in others, which adds to its realism, capturing how people chatter their way down alleys, rarely hewing to the main road of a tale…. The buildup in Tell is perpetual, a sense that an explanation must be coming. But the author diverges from expectations and converges on reality, where remembering is not the same as understanding. Abruptly, someone may just disappear, and all that remains is the sight of a figure wandering across a bridge — no splash heard, just the fading ripples of ‘why’.” — Tom Rachman, New York Times
”Buckley's fiction is subtle and fastidiously low-key...every apparently loose thread, when tugged, reveals itself to be woven into the themes [and] gets better the more you allow it to settle in your mind.” —Michel Faber, The Guardian
”Exactly why Buckley is not already revered and renowned as a novelist in the great European tradition remains a mystery that will perhaps only be addressed at that final godly hour when all the overlooked authors working in odd and antique modes will receive their just rewards.” —Ian Sansom, Times Literary Supplement

• Read an excerpt.

• Other books published by Giramondo.

The Unsettled: Small stories of colonisation by Richard Shaw $40

After Richard Shaw published his acclaimed memoir The Forgotten Coast in 2021, he made contact with Pakeha with long settler histories who were coming to grips with the truth of their respective families' 'pioneer stories'. They were questioning the foundation of aggressive acts of colonisation and land confiscation on which those stories had been constructed. The Unsettled weaves those stories with Shaw's own and features New Zealanders who are trying to figure out how to live well with their own pasts, their presents and their possible futures. They may be unsettled, but they are doing something about it. It is an indispensable companion for the journey towards understanding the complex and difficult history of the New Zealand Wars and their ongoing aftermath.
'“Heartfelt, poetic; a pleasure to read." —RachelBuchanan, The Spinoff
"A fresh and exciting approach to the history of Aotearoa.” —Paul Diamond

• Unsettled by your ancestors.

• The Forgotten Coast.

Kin: Family in the 21st century by Kim Kamenev $43

The shape of family has changed in the 21st century. While the nuclear family still exists, many more types of kinship surround us.Kin is an investigation into what influences us to have children and the new ways that have made parenthood possible. It delves into the experiences of couples without children, single parents by choice and rainbow families, and investigates the impacts of adoption, sperm donation, IVF and surrogacy, and the potential for a future of designer babies. Assisted reproductive technology has developed quickly, and the ways in which we think and speak about its implications — both legally and ethically — need to catch up.

The Beautiful Afternoon by Airini Beautrais $38

In The Beautiful Afternoon, award-winning poet and short-story writer Airini Beautrais plumbs history, literature, Star Wars, sea hags, beauty products, tarot, swimwear, environmentalism and pole dancing to deliver a virtuoso inquiry into how we become, and change, who we are. Beautrais surveys the many influences on her life, from Lord Byron and Dante to Dolly magazine and 90s R&B, with intense curiosity and a fierce intelligence. Whether saving the planet in her Quaker childhood and activist youth, surviving the lonely years of early motherhood, or confronting the fears and freedoms of midlife , Beautrais’s lucid examination of experience reveals that the personal is inescapably political. Throughout these wide-ranging essays her vigilant critique of entrenched patriarchal control turns anger to resistance, as a woman finds a way out of its grip, back to herself and the world.

• The soundtrack to the book.

Te Ata o Tū: The Shadow of Tumatauenga edited by Matiu Baker, Katie Cooper, Michael Fitzgerald and Rebecca Rice $70

The wars of 1845–72 were described by James Belich as “bitter and bloody struggles, as important to New Zealand as were the Civil Wars to England and the United States”. The conflict’s themes of land and sovereignty continue to resonate today. This richly illustrated book, developed in partnership with iwi, delves into Te Papa’s Mātauranga Māori, History and Art collections to explore taonga and artefacts intimately connected with the key events and players associated with the New Zealand Wars, sparking conversation and debate and shedding new light on our troubled colonial past. Contributing essays from Basil Keane, Arini Loader, Danny Keenan, Jade Kake, Mike Ross, Paul Meredith, Monty Soutar, Puawai Cairns, and Ria Hall.

• Look inside!

• History comes alive.

Ngātokimatawhaorua: The biography of a waka by Jeff Evans $50

Ngātokimatawhaorua, the longest waka taua to be built in modern times, is a national taonga and resides at the Treaty Grounds at Waitangi. The inspiration for its construction came from Te Puea Harangi's dream to build seven waka for the 1940 centennial commemorations of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. But it was to be many decades before the true power of this mighty waka taua was realised. The story of Ngātokimatawhaorua, and those who carved and crewed it, is a fascinating window into te ao Maori and the revival of carving and voyaging traditions in Aotearoa.

• Look inside.

• Other books short-listed for the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

When I Open the Shop by romesh dissanayake $35

In his small noodle shop in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, a young chef obsessively juliennes carrots. Nothing is going according to plan: the bills are piling up, his mother is dead, and there are strangers in his kitchen. The ancestors are watching closely. Told through a series of brilliant interludes and jump cuts, When I open the shop is sometimes blackly funny, sometimes angry and sometimes lyrical, and sometimes — as a car soars off the road on a horror road trip to the Wairarapa — it takes flight into surrealism. A glimpse into immigrant life in Aotearoa, this is a highly entertaining, surprising and poignant debut novel about grief, struggle and community.
”It’s an exhilarating read, the general vibe of the novel akin to chancing on a frozen lake and deciding then and there to get your skates on. But there’s unpredictability in the firmness of the ice and fascinating things lurk underneath; those figure-eight loops demand rigorous attention to craft.” —Angelique Kasmara
”When I open the shop is a novel about loss, exile and dislocation, in which time, space, and memory become a beautiful, fluid thing. It is very funny, angry and constantly pleasurable and moving in the way it depicts people opening space for themselves, and finding comfort, in spite of everything.” —Brannavan Gnanalingam
”This is a beautiful and compelling work. The language is magnificent on a sentence-by-sentence level, but I think that the structure is an incredibly adept act of decolonisation.” —Pip Adam

A Memoir of My Former Self: A life in writing by Hilary Mantel $40

'I breathed in stories, as soon as I breathed in air. Sometimes I think I wasn't born, but I just came out of an ink blot.' As well as her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel long contributed to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. This strand of her writing was an integral part of how she thought of herself. 'Ink is a generative fluid,' she explains. 'If you don't mean your words to breed consequences, don't write at all.' A Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades. Mantel's subjects are wide-ranging. She discusses nationalism and her own sense of belonging; our dream life flopping into our conscious life; the mythic legacy of Princess Diana; the many themes that feed into her novels - revolutionary France, psychics, Tudor England - and other novelists, from Jane Austen to V. S. Naipaul. She writes about her father and the man who replaced him; she writes fiercely and heartbreakingly about the battles with her health she endured as a young woman, and the stifling years she found herself living in Saudi Arabia. Here, too, is a selection of her film reviews - from When Harry Met Sally to RoboCop - and, published for the first time, her Reith Lectures, which explore the process of art bringing history and the dead back to life. From her unique childhood to her all-consuming fascination with Thomas Cromwell that grew into the ‘Wolf Hall Trilogy’, A Memoir of My Former Self reveals the shape of Hilary Mantel's life in her own dazzling words, 'messages from people I used to be.'
”A smart, deft, meticulous, thoughtful writer, with such a grasp of the dark and spidery corners of human nature.” —Margaret Atwood

The End of Eden: Wild nature in the age of climate breakdown by Adam Welz $47

The stories we usually tell ourselves about climate change tend to focus on the damage inflicted on human societies by big storms, severe droughts, and rising sea levels. But the most powerful impacts are being and will be felt by the natural world and its myriad species, which are already in the midst of the sixth great extinction. Rising temperatures are fracturing ecosystems that took millions of years to evolve, disrupting the life forms they sustain — and in many cases driving them towards extinction. The natural Eden that humanity inherited is quickly slipping away. Although we can never really know what a creature thinks or feels, The End of Eden invites the reader to meet wild species on their own terms in a range of ecosystems that span the globe. Combining classic natural history, firsthand reportage, and insights from cutting-edge research, Adam Welz brings us close to creatures like moose in northern Maine, parrots in Puerto Rico, cheetahs in Namibia, and rare fish in Australia as they struggle to survive. The stories are intimate yet expansive and always dramatic. An exquisitely written and deeply researched exploration of wild species reacting to climate breakdown, The End of Eden offers a radical new kind of environmental journalism that connects humans to nature in a more empathetic way than ever before and galvanises us to act in defence of the natural world before it's too late.

Our Philosopher by Gert Hofmann (translated from German by Eric Mace-Tessler) $40

“O, it has happened little by little, as many things simply happen little by little, Mother said, and told us everything about Herr Veilchenfeld, as far as it was known to her.” Germany, late 1930s. Walking into town on a hot summer evening, the elderly professor Herr Veilchenfeld encounters a group of local drunks. He is humiliated and assaulted; his hair is shorn. The police ‘don’t interfere in such minor matters’. What happens to Veilchenfeld is recounted by the young son of the doctor who attends the professor. The boy observes, listens in to his parents’ conversations, and asks for ice creams. He cannot know the true import of the events he witnesses. First published in Germany 1986 and now translated into English as Veilchenfeld / Our Philosopher, this mmorable book is a salutary masterpiece about the destructive effects of persecution not only for the victims, but for the community as a whole.
”One of the best holocaust novels in postwar German literature.” —Milena Ganeva
”The past in Gert Hofmann’s books is not dead. Indeed, it is not even past.” —Lutz Hagestad

• Read Thomas’s review.

Sweet France: The 100 best recipes from the greatest French pastry chefs by François Blanc $65

France has a rich history of sweet traditions and talented pâtissiers, and with Sweet France, discover 100 recipes for irresistible cakes and pastries. The very clearly laid-out book includes the essentials, classics revisited, pastries, signature cakes, cookies, and other bite-size treats. Indulge yourself with canelés de Bordeaux, gâteau Basque, traditional fraisier cake, chocolate éclairs, and the legendary Saint-Honoré. Inside, you’ll find recipes for every level of proficiency to try at home, including the favorite creations of Cédric Grolet, Yann Couvreur, Pierre Hermé, Philippe Conticini, and a host of other big names and up-and-coming talents in contemporary French pâtisserie.

• Look inside!

Mole Is Not Alone by Maya Tatsukawa $38

Mole is invited to a party, which is very worrisome. What if the party is too rowdy for Mole? What if Mole doesn't know anyone there? What if Mole is just too shy to make friends? Mole worries through the tunnels, around Snake's burrow, under the forest, past Bear's den, and all the way to Rabbit's door. But despite all those worries, maybe Mole can find a quiet way to make friends . . .

• Look inside!

• Read Stella’s review of this and some other new children’s books.

Choose your next book straight out of the cartons that arrived this week:

La Bâtarde by Violette Leduc (translated from French by Derek Coltman) $35

An obsessive and revealing self-portrait of a remarkable woman humiliated by the circumstances of her birth and by her physical appearance, La Bâtarde relates Violette Leduc's long search for her own identity through a series of agonizing and passionate love affairs with both men and women. When first published, La Bâtarde earned Violette Leduc comparisons to Jean Genet for the frank depiction of her sexual escapades and immoral behavior. A confession that contains portraits of several famous French authors, this book is more than just a scintillating memoir--like that of Henry Miller, Leduc's brilliant writing style and attention to language transform this autobiography into a work of art.
”Notoriety aside, Leduc is first and foremost a first-rate writer. Not someone who just tells a provocative story and is unafraid to reveal the most offensive parts of her personality and of her experience, but someone who is in love with words, struggles with them, wrestles with language, dies for adjectives, is tortured by her search for le mot juste." —Women's Review of Books

• A feminist tour de force.

• Feminising your canon.

North Woods by Daniel Mason $38

When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and inhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths a mass grave - only to discover that the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a sinister conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle: as each inhabitant confronts the wonder and mystery around them, they begin to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.
”A monumental achievement . . . it sweeps the reader through hundreds of years and an array of protagonists with a deft, heartbreaking, idiosyncratic zeal. I loved it.” —Maggie O'Farrell

I Seek a Kind Person: My father, seven children, and the adverts that helped them escape the Holocaust by Julian Borger $38

'I SEEK A KIND PERSON WHO WILL EDUCATE MY INTELLIGENT BOY, AGED 11.' In 1938, Jewish families are scrambling to flee Vienna. Desperate, they take out advertisements offering their children into the safe keeping of readers of a British newspaper, the Manchester Guardian. The right words in the right order could mean the difference between life and death. Eighty-three years later, Guardian journalist Julian Borger comes across the advert that saved his father, Robert, from the Nazis. Robert had kept this a secret, like almost everything else about his traumatic Viennese childhood, until he took his own life. Drawn to the shadows of his family's past and starting with nothing but a page of newspaper adverts, Borger traces the remarkable stories of his father, the other advertised children and their families, each thrown into the maelstrom of a world at war. From a Viennese radio shop to the Shanghai ghetto, internment camps and family homes across Britain, the deep forests and concentration camps of Nazi Germany, smugglers saving Jewish lives in Holland, an improbable French Resistance cell, and a redemptive story of survival in New York, Borger unearths the astonishing journeys of the children at the hands of fate, their stories of trauma and the kindness of strangers.
”A powerful, eloquent and deeply affecting book. I loved it.” —Edmund de Waal
”Julian's book is profoundly affecting, part memoir, part detective story, part history, at once elegiac and fascinating, it is so deeply relevant for our times, I zipped through it with the deepest personal interest.” —Philippe Sands,

• An urgent appeal.

Your Utopia by Bora Chung (translated from Korean by Anton Hur) $35

From the author of Cursed Bunny, Your Utopia is full of tales of loss and discovery, idealism and dystopia, death and immortality. "Nothing concentrates the mind like Chung's terrors, which will shrivel you to a bouillon cube of your most primal instincts" (Vulture), yet these stories are suffused with Chung's inimitable wry humour and surprisingly tender moments, too — often between unexpected subjects. In 'The Center for Immortality Research', a low-level employee runs herself ragged planning a fancy gala for donors, only to be blamed for a crime she witnessed during the event, under the noses of the mysterious celebrity benefactors hoping to live forever. But she can't be fired - no one can. In 'One More Kiss, Dear', a tender, one-sided love blooms in the A.I.-elevator of an apartment complex; as in, the elevator develops a profound affection for one of the residents. In 'Seeds', we see the final frontier of capitalism's destruction of the planet and the GMO companies who rule the agricultural industry in this bleak future, but nature has ways of creeping back to life.
”Chung's writing is haunting, funny, gross, terrifying - and yet when we reach the end, we just want more.” —Alexander Chee

• “My readers are always right.”

• Cursed Bunny.

Fevered Planet: How diseases emerge when we harm nature by John Vidal $39

Covid-19, mpox, bird flu, SARS, HIV, AIDS, Ebola; we are living in the Age of Pandemics — one that we have created. As the climate crisis reaches a fever pitch and ecological destruction continues unabated, we are just beginning to reckon with the effects of environmental collapse on our global health. Fevered Planet exposes how the way we farm, what we eat, the places we travel to, and the scientific experiments we conduct create the perfect conditions for deadly new diseases to emerge and spread faster and further than ever. Drawing on the latest scientific research and decades of reporting from more than 100 countries, former Guardian environment editor John Vidal takes us into deep, disappearing forests in Gabon and the Congo, valleys scorched by wildfire near Lake Tahoe and our densest, polluted cities to show how closely human, animal and plant diseases are now intertwined with planetary destruction. He calls for an urgent transformation in our relationship with the natural world, and expertly outlines how to make that change possible.
”Urgent, fascinating and essential.” —George Monbiot
”John Vidal has travelled far and wide, and we would be wise to take seriously the reports he sends back; human lives, particularly of the rich, are not just altering the planet in devastatingly predictable ways, they are setting us up for some nasty surprises.” —Bill McKibben
”A searing, vital work. Plagues and epidemics determine human history - now it is time to learn that how we live today is driving disease on a planetary level.” —Bettany Hughes
”Drawing on a lifetime's experience as a frontline journalist, John Vidal compellingly joins the dots between accelerating climate change, population growth, dangerously disrupted ecosystems, our obsession with economic growth - and the inevitability of future pandemics. Fevered Planet is the most illuminating and disturbing book I've read in years.” —Jonathon Porritt

Sounds Good! Discover 50 instruments by Ole Könnecke and Hans Könnecke $40

What does a double bass or a sitar sound like? What's the difference between bongos and congas? Which instrument has only one note? Which one takes just 30 seconds to learn? What do these instruments really sound like? This book engagingly presents 50 common and uncommon musical instruments with practical and curious facts that will spark interest in music of all kinds. Each instrument features a piece of music composed by an award-winning musician, accessed via QR code. Very appealingly presented and full of good information.

• Look inside!

• Turn the pages!

Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil by Timothy Mitchell $32

Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption and enormous inequality. Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story, arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil. It shapes the body politic both in regions such as the Middle East, which rely upon revenues from oil production, and in the places that have the greatest demand for energy. Timothy Mitchell begins with the history of coal power to tell a radical new story about the rise of democracy. Coal was a source of energy so open to disruption that oligarchies in the West became vulnerable for the first time to mass demands for democracy. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the development of cheap and abundant energy from oil, most notably from the Middle East, offered a means to reduce this vulnerability to democratic pressures. The abundance of oil made it possible for the first time in history to reorganize political life around the management of something now called "the economy" and the promise of its infinite growth. The politics of the West became dependent on an undemocratic Middle East. In the twenty-first century, the oil-based forms of modern democratic politics have become unsustainable. Foreign intervention and military rule are faltering in the Middle East, while governments everywhere appear incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy--the disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fuelled collapse of the ecological order. In making the production of energy the central force shaping the democratic age, Carbon Democracy rethinks the history of energy, the politics of nature, the theory of democracy, and the place of the Middle East in our common world.

A Line in the World: A year on the North Sea coast by Dorthe Nors (translated from Danish by Caroline Waight) $28

Me, my notebook and my love of the wild and desolate. I wanted to do the opposite of what was expected of me. It's a recurring pattern in my life. An instinct.. There is a line that stretches from the northernmost tip of Denmark to where the Wadden Sea meets Holland in the south-west. Dorthe Nors, one of Denmark's most acclaimed contemporary writers, grew up on this line; a native Jutlander, her childhood was spent among the storm-battered trees and wind-blasted beaches of the North Sea coast. In A Line in the World, her first book of non-fiction, she recounts a lifetime spent in thrall to this coastline - both as a child, and as an adult returning to live in this mysterious, shifting landscape. This is the story of the violent collisions between the people who settled in these wild landscapes and the vagaries of the natural world. It is a story of storm surges and shipwrecks, sand dunes that engulf houses and power stations leaching chemicals into the water, of sun-creased mothers and children playing on shingle beaches. In this singularly thrilling work, Nors invites the reader on a journey through history and memory - the landscape's as well as her own.
”'A beautiful, melancholy account of finding home on a restless coast. In Dorthe Nors's deft hands, the sea is no longer a negative space, but a character in its own right. I loved it.'“ —Katherine May

Every Man for Himself and God against All: A memoir by Werner Herzog $55

From his early movies to his later documentaries, he has made a career out of exploring the boundaries of human endurance: what we are capable of in exceptional circumstances and what these situations reveal about who we really are. But these are not just great cinematic themes. During the making of his films, Herzog pushed himself and others to the limits, often putting himself in life-threatening situations. Filled with memorable stories and poignant observations, Every Man for Himself and God against All unveils the influences and ideas that drive his creativity and have shaped his unique view of the world.

• What is your favourite film by Werner Herzog?

The Taming of the Cat by Helen Cooper $33

A story within a story, featuring a mouse who is forced to tell stories to save his life, a cat who plans to eat said mouse as soon as the story is finished — and our protagonist’s protagonist, a princess in trouble. It’s a lifesaving tale – about a runaway princess, a cat that can grow to the size of a panther, an enchanted feast, a vanishing cavern and a quest to find a magical herb. But the cat is getting hungry. If the mouse wants its life to be spared, this must be the best story he has ever told.

• Look inside!

My Baby Sister is a Diplodocus by Aurore Petit $30

is a delightful and excellent introduction to being a sibling. Perfect for anyone embarking on this adventure: the excitement, the pitfalls, the frustration, and the curiosity. From the wonderful French author and illustrator Aurore Petit (her previous book was the thoughtful A Mother is A House), translated by Daniel Hahn and published by Gecko Press. 

• Look inside! 

Alebrijes: Flight to a New Haven by Donna Barba Higuera $20

For 400 years, Earth has been a barren wasteland. The few humans that survive scrape together an existence in the cruel city of Pocatel - or go it alone in the wilderness beyond, filled with wandering spirits and wyrms. They don't last long. 13-year-old pickpocket Leandro and his sister Gabi do what they can to forge a life in Pocatel. The city does not take kindly to Cascabel like them - the descendants of those who worked the San Joaquin Valley for generations. When Gabi is caught stealing precious fruit from the Pocatelan elite, Leandro takes the fall. But his exile proves more than he ever could have imagined - far from a simple banishment, his consciousness is placed inside an ancient drone and left to fend on its own. But beyond the walls of Pocatel lie other alebrijes like Leandro who seek for a better world - as well as mutant monsters, wasteland pirates, a hidden oasis, and the truth.

How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto $38

Helen, a graduate student on a quest to save the planet, is one of the best minds of her generation. But when her irreplaceable advisor’s student sex scandal is exposed, she must choose whether to give up on her work or accompany him to RIP, a research institute which grants safe harbour to the disgraced and the deplorable. As Helen settles into life at the institute alongside her partner Hew, she develops a crush on an older novelist, while he is drawn to an increasingly violent protest movement. As the rift between them deepens, they both face major – and potentially world-altering – choices. How I Won A Nobel Prize approaches contemporary moral confusion in a fresh way, examining the price we’re willing to pay for progress and what it means, in the end, to be a good person.

Out of the carton and into your hands! Choose from some of the new books that arrived this week:

Chinese Fish by Grace Yee $30

When Ping leaves Hong Kong to live in the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, she discovers that life in the Land of the Long White Cloud is not the prosperous paradise she was led to believe it would be. Every day she works in a rat-infested shop frying fish, and every evening she waits for her wayward husband, armed with a vacuum cleaner to ‘suck all the bad thing out’. Her four children are a brood of monolingual aliens. Eldest daughter Cherry struggles with her mother’s unhappiness and the responsibility of caring for her younger siblings, especially the rage-prone, meat-cleaver-wielding Baby Joseph. Chinese Fish is a family saga that spans the 1960s through to the 1980s. Narrated in multiple voices and laced with archival fragments and scholarly interjections, it offers an intimate glimpse into the lives of women and girls in a community that has historically been characterised as both a ‘yellow peril’ menace and an exotic ‘model minority’. Listed for the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
”An unflinchingly honest look at life behind closed doors, where resentment simmers, generations clash, and individual dreams are set aside for the interests of family.” —Chris Tse, New Zealand Poet Laureate
”As visually provocative as it is poetic, Chinese Fish portrays the fractured, multilayered, imperiled body of the immigrant story in a stunning work of genre-bending prose poetry. Yee has given the Chin family a literary resting place as complex and as searing as the New Zealand in which they survived.” —Juli Min
”A major poetic work of feminist, so-called ‘minority’ writing, its originality and brilliance more than earning its space alongside such works as Kathleen Fallon’s Working Hot, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands, and Alison Whittakers’s BlakWork.” – Marion May Campbell

• The intersection between poetry and history.

• Definite articles.

• Yee in conversation with Emma Sidnam.

• Other books listed for the Ockhams.

Woven: First Nations poetic conversations edited by Anne-Marie Te Whiu $33

to open up / to respond as genuinely as possible / to offer hope / we want things to change / weaving solidarity from place and history / into collective purpose (Ellen Van Neerven and Layli Long Soldier)

The Fair Trade Project inspired a series of poetic conversations between First Nations poets throughout the world, including Aotearoa, and was commissioned by Red Room Poetry. This collection weaves words across lands and seas, gathering collaborative threads and shining a light on common themes and apporaches of First Nations poetry.
“By anchoring the project in relationality, Woven's foundation is about how we connect with each other and what we are prepared, as First Nation artists, to offer and receive. The emphasis was about (re)generating poetic First Nations bonds — solidarity, consensus, family, land, oceans, the moon, remembering, dreaming, sharing, opening, mourning, respect, celebrating, finding, losing, healing and more healing.” —Anne-Marie Te Whiu
Poet collaborations in the anthology: Linda Tuhiwai Smith & Jackie Huggins; Evelyn Araluen & Anahera Gildea; Alison Whittaker & Nadine Hura; Chelsea Watego & Emma Wehipeihana; Raelee Lancaster & essa may ranapiri; Ali Cobby Eckermann & Joy Harjo; Natalie Harkin & Leanne Betasamosake Simpson; Samuel Wagan Watson & Sigbjorn Skaden; Tony Birch & Simon J. Ortiz; Ellen Van Neerven & Layli Long Soldier; Lorna Munro & January Rodgers; Rhyan Clapham (aka Dobby) & Nils Rune Utsi (aka SlinCraze); Declan Fry & Craig Santos Perez; Bebe Backhouse-Oliver & Peter Sipeli; Jazz Money & Cassandra Barnett; Charmaine Papertalk Green & Anna Naupa.

• Beyond the threshold of what is possible.

Intervals by Marianne Brooker $32

What makes a good death? A good daughter? In 2009, with her forties and a harsh wave of austerity on the horizon, Marianne Brooker's mother was diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis. She made a workshop of herself and her surroundings, combining creativity and activism in inventive ways. But over time, her ability to work, to move and to live without pain diminished drastically. Determined to die in her own home, on her own terms, she stopped eating and drinking in 2019. In  Intervals, Brooker reckons with heartbreak, weaving her first and final memories with a study of doulas, living wills and the precarious economics of social, hospice and funeral care. Blending memoir, polemic and feminist philosophy, Brooker joins writers such as Anne Boyer, Maggie Nelson, Donald Winnicott and Lola Olufemi to raise essential questions about choice and interdependence and, ultimately, to imagine care otherwise.
Listed for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.
”Intervals is an exceptional book, for which every deserved superlative seems cliched, in part because the language of illness, death and bereavement often feels too hollowed out by use to accommodate the magnitude of those experiences.… [W]ritten with such clarity and precision...  this angry, loving, sorrowing and profound book is a magnificent starting point for [a] radical imaginative act.’” — Alex Clark, Observer
”Intervals is an endlessly moving and profoundly generous telling of what it means to give and receive care. Stunning in its intimacy and expansive in its political purpose, Brooker’s writing invites us to think deeply about the relationship between giving care and honouring life. Through visceral, tactile details of creating, working, making and tending, Brooker brings us into the spaces where caring happens, where life and its endings happen. A rare, revelatory, and truly radical book.” — Elinor Cleghorn, author of Unwell Women

• Pain renewed her resolve.

• Tending and tendering.

• Other books listed for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.
  

The Britannias: An island quest by Alice Albinia $70

By looking more closely at the periphery we might learn something about the centre. The Britannias tells the story of Britain's islands and how they are woven into its collective cultural psyche. From Neolithic Orkney to modern-day Thanet, Alice Albinia explores the furthest reaches of Britain's island topography, once known (wrote Pliny) by the collective term, Britanniae. Sailing over borders, between languages and genres, trespassing through the past to understand the present, this book knocks the centre out to foreground neglected epics and subversive voices. The ancient mythology of islands ruled by women winds through the literature of the British Isles — from Roman colonial-era reports, to early Irish poetry, Renaissance drama to Restoration utopias — transcending and subverting the most male-fixated of ages. The Britannias looks far back into the past for direction and solace, while searching for new meaning about women's status in the body politic. Boldly upturning established (un)truths about Britain, it pays homage to the islands' beauty, independence and their suppressed or forgotten histories.
Long-listed for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.
”A dazzlingly brilliant book. Travelling by boat, swimming through kelp, riding on a fishing trawler, Alice Albinia takes us on an extraordinary journey around the British isles, revealing a liquid past where women ruled and mermaids sang and tracing the sea-changes of her own heart.” —Hannah Dawson
”There are books crafted from research, worthy and informative. And there are books that happen. That need to happen. That feel inevitable. As if they have always, somehow, been there waiting for us. The voyages of Alice Albinia around our ragged fringes range through time, recovering and resurrecting the most potent myths. A work of integrity and vision.” —Iain Sinclair

• Telling the story of the other.

• Island utopias, ruled by women.

• A tiny interview.

• Other books listed for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.

• Cwen.

Bird Child, And other stories by Patricia Grace $37

Mythology and contemporary Māori life are woven together in this eagerly anticipated new collection from this beloved author. The titular story ‘Bird Child’ plunges you deep into Te Kore, an ancient time before time. In another, the formidable goddess Mahuika, Keeper of Fire, becomes a doting mother and friend. Later, Grace’s own childhood vividly shapes the world of the young character Mereana; and a widower’s hilariously human struggle to parent his seven daughters is told with trademark wit and crackling dialogue.

• Spanning the worlds.

• Three strands.

• From the Centre.

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestinian story by Nathan Thrall $40

Milad is five years old and excited for his school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem, but tragedy awaits — his bus is involved in a horrific accident. His father, Abed, rushes to the chaotic site, only to find Milad has already been taken away. Abed sets off on a journey to learn Milad's fate, navigating a maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must face as a Palestinian. Interwoven with Abed's odyssey are the stories of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and pasts unexpectedly converge — a kindergarten teacher and a mechanic who rescue children from the burning bus; an Israeli army commander and a Palestinian official who confront the aftermath at the scene of the crash; a settler paramedic; ultra-Orthodox emergency service workers; and two mothers who each hope to claim one severely injured boy. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is a deeply immersive, stunningly detailed portrait of life in Israel and Palestine.
”Shows humanity on both sides. The author writes coolly, carefully, without rhetoric or invective. He does not claim neutrality — the daily humiliations of Israeli occupation thud like a drumbeat on every page — but he avoids arm-twisting reportage or cartoonish history. No one portrayed here lacks humanity or complexity.” —Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times
”A compelling work of nonfiction, a book that is by turns deeply affecting and, in its concluding chapters, as tense as a thriller. Not only a meticulously detailed account of one event but perhaps the clearest picture yet of the reality of daily life in the occupied territories.” —Jonathan Freedland, Guardian
”Nathan Thrall's book made me walk a lot. I found myself pacing around between chapters, paragraphs and sometimes even sentences just in order to be able to absorb the brutality, the pathos, the steely tenderness, and the sheer spectacle of the cunning and complex ways in which a state can hammer down a people and yet earn the applause and adulation of the civilized world for its actions.” —Arundhati Roy
”The book combines heart-wrenching prose with rare political insight. It tells a deeply moving story about one tragic road accident, which illuminates the tragedy of the millions of Palestinians who live under Israeli Occupation.” —Yuval Noah Harari

Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan $37

When we look beyond the headlines, everyone has a story to tell It's 1990 in London and Tom Hargreaves has it all: a burgeoning career as a reporter, fierce ambition and a brisk disregard for the "peasants” — ordinary people, his readers, easy tabloid fodder. His star looks set to rise when he stumbles across a scoop: a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents loved across the neighbourhood, and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and 'bad apples': the Greens. At their heart sits Carmel: beautiful, otherworldly, broken, and once destined for a future beyond her circumstances until life — and love — got in her way. Crushed by failure and surrounded by disappointment, there's nowhere for her to go and no chance of escape. Now, with the police closing in on a suspect and the tabloids hunting their monster, she must confront the secrets and silences that have trapped her family for so many generations.
”A subtle, accomplished and lyrical study of familial and intergenerational despair, a quiet book about quiet lives... An excellent novel: politically astute, furious and compassionate. A genuine achievement.” —Guardian

• Short-listed for the 2024 Gordon Burn Prize.

Chinese Dress in Detail by Sau Fong Chan $65

Chinese Dress in Detail reveals the beauty and variety of Chinese dress for women, men and children, both historically and geographically, showcasing the intricacy of decorative embroidery and rich use of materials and weaving and dyeing techniques. The reader is granted a unique opportunity to examine historical clothing that is often too fragile to display, from quivering hair ornaments, stunning silk jackets and coats, festive robes and pleated skirts, to pieces embellished with rare materials such as peacock-feather threads or created through unique craft skills, as well as handpicked contemporary designs. A general introduction provides an essential overview of the history of Chinese dress, plotting key developments in style, design and mode of dress, and the traditional importance of clothing as social signifier, followed by eight thematic chapters that examine Chinese dress in exquisite detail from head to toe. Each garment is accompanied by a short text and detail photography; front-and-back line drawings are provided for key items. An extraordinary exploration of the splendour and complexity of Chinese garments and accessories.

• Look inside this wonderful book!

French Boulangerie: Recipes and techniques from the Ferrandi School of Culinary Arts $65

A very clear and approachable complete baking course from the world-renowned professional culinary school École Ferrandi, dubbed the "Harvard of gastronomy" by Le Monde newspaper. From crunchy baguettes to fig bread, and from traditional brioches to trendy cruffins, this comprehensive volume teaches aspiring bakers how to master the art of the French boulangerie. This new cookbook focuses on bread and viennoiserie, the category of French baked goods traditionally enjoyed for breakfast (like croissants and pains au chocolat). The culinary school's team of experienced chef instructors provides more than 40 techniques, explained in 220 step-by-step instructions — from making your own poolish or levain to kneading, shaping, and scoring various types of loaves, and from laminating butter to braiding brioches. Base recipes for doughs, fillings, and classic viennoiserie provide fundamental building blocks. Organized into four categories — traditional breads, specialty breads, viennoiserie, and sandwiches — the 83 easy-to-follow recipes provide home chefs with sweet and savory options for breakfast or snacks--from country bread to grissini, pastrami bagels to croque-monsieurs, and kougelhopf to beignets. Includes gluten-free, vegetarian, and vegan recipes. A general introduction explains the fundamentals of bread and viennoiserie making, including key ingredients, the importance of gluten, the steps of fermentation, and an informative glossary.

• Look inside!

• The perfect companion to the superb Ferrandi Pâtissserie volume.

Sophie’s World: A graphic novel about the history of philosophy, Volume 1: From Socrates to Galileo by Jostein Gaardner, adapted by Vincent Zabus and drawn by Nicoby $40

One day, Sophie receives a cryptic letter posing an intriguing question: "Who are you?" A second message soon follows: "Where does the world come from?" It is the beginning of an unusual correspondence between our curious young heroine and her mysterious penpal. As the questions begin to pile up, Sophie is propelled headlong into a startling adventure through the history of Western philosophy. Her search for answers will see her explore each of the major schools of thought, as she tries to uncover the true nature of the letters, her secretive teacher — and, above all, herself!  In this witty comics adaptation, Zabus and Nicoby  have reinvented Jostein Gaarder's novel of ideas to bring Sophie's exploration of meaning and existence to a whole new medium.

• Look inside!

• Volume Two is already on its way to us — order now!

Traditional Lifeways of the Southern Māori by James Herries Beattie (edited by Atholl Anderson) $50

Journalist James Herries Beattie recorded southern Māori history for almost fifty years and produced many popular books and pamphlets. Traditional Lifeways of the Southern Māori is his most important work. This significant resource, which is based on a major field project Beattie carried out for the Otago Museum in 1920, was first published by Otago University Press in 1994 and is now available in this new edition. Beattie had a strong sense that traditional knowledge needed to be recorded fast. For twelve months, he interviewed people from Foveaux Strait to North Canterbury, and from Nelson and Westland. He also visited libraries to check information compiled by earlier researchers, spent time with Māori in Otago Museum recording southern names for fauna and artefacts, visited pā sites, and copied notebooks lent to him by informants. Finally he worked his findings up into systematic notes, which eventually became manuscript 181 in the Hocken Collections, and now this book. Editor Atholl Anderson introduces the book with a biography of Beattie, a description of his work and information about his informants. Beattie wrote a foreword and introduction to the Murihiku section, which are also included here.

My Heavenly Favourite by Lucas Rijneveld (translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison) $37

I heard you laughing from time to time and you stayed lying there on the flattened hay, and after you left, your body's imprint was left behind, and I rested my hand on the dry blades of grass that were still slightly warm and I wanted to carry on feeling you forever, really I did, but everything changed when you began to speak to me, on 7 July to be precise.
In the tempestuous summer of 2005, a 14-year-old farmer's daughter makes friends with the local veterinarian who looks after her father's cows. He has reached 'the biblical age of seven times seven' and is trying to escape trauma, while she is trying to escape into a world of fantasy. Their obsessive reliance on each other's stories builds into a terrifying trap, with a confession at the heart of it that threatens to rip their small Dutch community apart. From the author of the International Booker-winning The Discomfort of Evening.
”My Heavenly Favourite belongs to a tiny, controversial subgenre: novels about child sex abuse rendered in exquisite prose. It is all the more transgressive in that it’s narrated by the abuser, who addresses his victim in an incantatory, unflinchingly graphic second-person rant about his eternal love. Such a book has to clear a very high bar not to seem like a cynical exercise. Rijneveld’s novel leaps effortlessly over, with room to spare. What is truly extraordinary here is how, although the voice is Kurt’s, the ruling consciousness is Little Bird’s. … My Heavenly Favourite squares up deliberately to Lolita, citing it throughout, and Rijneveld compares well with Nabokov in the richness of his invention and the delicacy of his prose, while taking a much more serious approach to their shared subject. Indeed, Rijneveld conveys the squalor and despair of sexual violence with more fidelity than any other author I have read. But this novel is not only a surprisingly successful treatment of a difficult subject. It’s a unique creation and a tour de force of transgressive imagination – a dazzling addition to the oeuvre of an author of prodigious gifts.” —Sandra Newman, Guardian

These books have just arrived and are ready to be read.
Click through for your copies:

Out of Earth by Sheyla Smanioto (translated from Brazilian Portuguese by Laura Garmeson and Sophie Lewis) $45

This remarkable Brazilian novel follows four generations of female characters as they navigate the hardships of life in the parched landscape of the Brazilian sertao. Male figures are peripheral, but are also revealed as the origin of much of the suffering in the novel, generating for the women a kind of exile not only in relation to the land but to their sense of self. This is a ground-breaking feminist work, a bracing modernist fable, of sorts, formally reminiscent of A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing.

• Language itself is at war with accepted modes of expression.

• Living through ideas.

• Other books long-listed for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize.

The Grimmelings by Rachael King $25

Thirteen-year-old Ella knows that words are powerful. So she should have known better than to utter a wish and a curse on the same day, even in jest. When the boy she has cursed goes missing, in the same sudden, unexplained way as her father several years earlier, Ella discovers that her family is living in the shadow of a vengeful kelpie, a black horse-like creature. With the help of her beloved pony Magpie, can Ella break the curse of the kelpie and save not just her family, but the whole community?
”Rachael King's The Grimmelings is one of those very rare books that feels like it has always existed, as if the world has been holding space for this story. With wonderfully assured writing, this is Susan Cooper for the next generation. King writes with the utmost respect for her readers, for the story and for language itself. The Grimmelings is a beautifully written story of old magic; uncontainable, unpredictable, wild and true — I could not put it down. And although the phrase is thrown around a lot, this genuinely is a future classic.” —Zana Fraillon
”The Grimmelings is a riveting adventure set on a horse-trekking farm in the lakeside wilds of the South Island of New Zealand, where lonely thirteen-year-old Ella, the granddaughter of a rumoured witch, finds herself the target of an ancient and vengeful water horse. Ella's courage, grief and grit make her a worthy protagonist; the reader cannot help but sympathise with and root for her as she fights to save her family from the saddle of her feisty pony, Magpie. Exquisitely crafted and thrumming with old magic, The Grimmelings wraps the reader like an heirloom quilt, stitched with glittering folklore, mysterious family secrets and the love of horses.” —Rachael Craw
”The Grimmelings is a compelling, lovingly crafted novel about magic, liminal spaces (of several kinds), language and folkloric fusion. Rachael King's characters live and breathe. Her dialogue glitters quietly. She discovers new perspectives in inherited narratives to create a world that is familiar yet unexpected, tense and eerie with flashes of beauty..” —David Mitchell

• In touch with her younger self.

The Great Undoing by Sharlene Allsopp $40

How long can you run from a lie, if that lie is what your life is founded on? In a near future all identity information is encoded in digital language. Nations know where everyone is, all the time. Not everyone agrees with this constant surveillance, and when the system is hijacked and shut down, all global borders are closed. The world is no longer connected, and there is no back-up plan to establish belonging, ownership or trade. Scarlet Friday, whose job is to correct historical record, is stranded on the wrong side of the globe. Befriended by a stranger, she grabs an old, faded history book and writes her own version over the top — a record of the Great Undoing on the run. But in deciding what truth to tell Scarlet must face her own history. How do we navigate identity when it is all a lie? She must reckon with her past before she can imagine her future.
”For First Nations people, Australia is a nation founded on a lie. But this is not one single amorphous lie, but rather a web of lies that seeks to erase and make invisible First Nations peoples, her/histories and experiences. In her debut novel, The Great Undoing, Bundjalung author Sharlene Allsopp deftly juxtaposes the national and the personal mythscapes that still haunt Australia today. Through the larger-than-life character of Scarlet Friday, Sharlene explores the consequences of living a lie in a nation that refuses to acknowledge its past.” —Jeanine Leane
"Sharlene Allsopp's The Great Undoing is a remarkable book that reaches back into the early 20th century and forwards into the future to examine discontinuities in recorded histories, and the resonances of this within the lives of First Nations people. Allsopp's style is lyrical and almost poetic, even when describing ugliness. The Great Undoing joins the works of authors like Octavia Butler and Claire G Coleman, who use the light of what could be to illuminate what actually is.'“ —Books + Publishing

In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova (translated from Russian by Sasha Dugdale) $32

With the death of her aunt, Maria Stepanova is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, postcards, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family managed to survive the last century. Dipping into various forms — essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue and historical documents — Stepanova's In Memory of Memory assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory. New edition.

• Read Thomas’s review.

The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada (translated from Japanese by David Boyd} $33

Beyond the town, there is the factory. Beyond the factory, there is nothing. Within the sprawling industrial complex, three new employees are each assigned a department. There, each must focuses on a specific task: one shreds paper, one proofreads documents, and another studies the moss growing all over the expansive grounds. As they grow accustomed to the routine and co-workers, their lives become governed by their work — days take on a strange logic and momentum, and little by little, the margins of reality seem to be dissolving: Where does the factory end and the rest of the world begin? What's going on with the strange animals here? And after a while — it could be weeks or years — the three workers struggle to answer the most basic question: What am I doing here?

• Written in the factory itself.

• Manufacturing fear.

Innards by Magogodi oaMphela Makhene $37

Set in Soweto, the urban heartland of South Africa, Innards tells the intimate stories of everyday black folks processing the savagery of apartheid. Rich with the thrilling textures of township language and life, it braids the voices and perspectives of an indelible cast of characters into a breathtaking collection flush with forgiveness, rage, ugliness and beauty. Meet a fake PhD and ex-freedom fighter who remains unbothered by his own duplicity, a girl who goes mute after stumbling upon a burning body, twin siblings nursing a scorching feud, and a woman unravelling under the weight of a brutal encounter with the police. At the heart of this collection of deceit and ambition, appalling violence and transcendent love is the story of slavery, colonization and apartheid, and it shows in intimate detail how South Africans must navigate both the shadows of the recent past and the uncertain opportunities of the promised land.
”A gut punch of a collection...it astonishes as it reveals how malignant political forces can both ravage and vitalize the human spirit.” —New York Times
”An unforgettable debut that hits with all the force of the sun. Complex and breathtaking, Innards is a book haunted by apartheid's monstrous shadow and illuminated by the radiant talent of one of our generation's most original voices. Makhene writes like liberation should feel: transcendently.” —Junot Diaz

I Can Open It For You by Shinsuke Yoshitake $32

Akira has a problem: He is too small to open packages by himself. He still needs grown-ups to help him. But one day, perhaps one day soon, he'll be able to open so many things without anyone's help — and not just packages. When that time comes, he'll make amazing discoveries, help other epople to open things, and maybe even save the day with his new skills. There is so much to look forward to! With humor and wit, acclaimed author-illustrator Shinsuke Yoshitake explores a child's feelings about growing up: the push and pull of relying on parents while striving to learn and do things by yourself. Delightful.

• Look inside!

Day by Michael Cunningham $38

April 5th, 2019: In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. Dan and Isabel, troubled husband and wife, are both a little bit in love with Isabel's younger brother, Robbie. Robbie, wayward soul of the family, who still lives in the attic loft; Robbie, who, trying to get over his most recent boyfriend, has created a glamorous avatar online; Robbie, who now has to move out of the house - and whose departure threatens to break the family apart. And then there is Nathan, age ten, taking his first uncertain steps toward independence, while Violet, five, does her best not to notice the growing rift between her parents. 
April 5th, 2020: As the world goes into lockdown the brownstone is feeling more like a prison. Violet is terrified of leaving the windows open, obsessed with keeping her family safe. Isabel and Dan circle each other warily, communicating mostly in veiled jabs and frustrated sighs. And beloved Robbie is stranded in Iceland, alone in a mountain cabin with nothing but his thoughts - and his secret Instagram life - for company. 
April 5th, 2021: Emerging from the worst of the crisis, the family comes together to reckon with a new, very different reality - with what they've learned, what they've lost, and how they might go on. 
”Unsparing and tender.” —Colm Tóibín
”A brilliant novel from our most brilliant of writers".” —Colum McCann

Collected Folktales by Alan Garner $23

A superbly told collection of familiar and unfamiliar British folktales from an author who has been breathing them throughout his long life, and drawing from them the inspiration for all his novels.

The Postcard by Anne Berest $40

January 2003. The Berest family receive a mysterious, unsigned postcard. On one side was an image of the Opera Garnier; on the other, the names of their relatives who were killed in Auschwitz: Ephraim, Emma, Noemie and Jacques. Years later, Anne sought to find the truth behind this postcard. She journeys 100 years into the past, tracing the lives of her ancestors from their flight from Russia following the revolution, their journey to Latvia, Palestine, and Paris, the war and its aftermath. What emerges is a thrilling and sweeping tale that shatters her certainties about her family, her country, and herself. At once a gripping investigation into family secrets, a poignant tale of mothers and daughters, and an enthralling portrait of 20th-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life, The Postcard tells the story of a family devastated by the Holocaust and yet somehow restored by love and the power of storytelling.

The Waste Land: A biography of a poem by Mathew Hollis $30

A century after its publication in 1922, T. S. Eliot's masterpiece remains a work of comparative mystery. In this gripping account, Matthew Hollis reconstructs the making of the poem and brings its times vividly to life. He tells the story of the cultural and personal trauma that forged the poem through the interleaved lives of its protagonists — of Ezra Pound, who edited it, of Vivien Eliot, who endured it, and of T. S. Eliot himself whose private torment is woven into the fabric of the work. The result is an unforgettable story of lives passing in opposing directions: Eliot's into redemptive stardom, Vivien's into despair, Pound's into unforgiving darkness. Now in paperback.

The Flow: Rivers, water and wildness by Amy-Jane Beer $25

On New Year's Day 2012, Amy-Jane Beer's beloved friend Kate set out with a group of others to kayak the River Rawthey in Cumbria. Kate never came home, and her death left her devoted family and friends bereft and unmoored. Returning to visit the Rawthey years later, Amy realises how much she misses the connection to the natural world she always felt when on or close to rivers, and so begins a new phase of exploration. The Flow is a book about water, and, like water, it meanders, cascades and percolates through many lives, landscapes and stories. From West Country torrents to Levels and Fens, rocky Welsh canyons, the salmon highways of Scotland and the chalk rivers of the Yorkshire Wolds, Amy-Jane Beer follows springs, streams and rivers to explore tributary themes of wildness and wonder, loss and healing, mythology and history, cyclicity and transformation. Threading together places and voices from across Britain, The Flow is an immersive exploration of our personal and ecological place in nature.
”A true masterpiece; generous, elegant, acute, tender and furious.” —Charles Foster

The City Beautiful by Aden Polydoros $24

Would you sacrifice your soul to stop a killer? Chicago, 1893. For Alter Rosen, this is the land of opportunity. Despite the unbearable summer heat, his threadbare clothes, and his constantly empty stomach, Alter still dreams of the day he'll have enough money to bring his mother and sisters to America, freeing them from the oppression they face in his native Romania. But when Alter's best friend, Yakov, becomes the latest victim in a long line of murdered Jewish boys, his dream begins to slip away. While the rest of the city is busy celebrating the World's Fair, Alter is now living a nightmare: possessed by Yakov's dybbuk, he is plunged into a world of corruption and deceit, and thrown back into the arms of a dangerous boy from his past. A boy who means more to Alter than anyone knows. Now, with only days to spare until the dybbuk takes over Alter's body completely, the two boys must race to track down the killer — before the killer claims them next.
"An achingly rendered exploration of queer desire, grief, and the inexorable scars of the past." —Katy Rose Pool
”With stark, poignant prose and an endearing main character, The City Beautiful is an entrancing and chilling tale that deftly analyzes complex themes of identity and assimilation. One-part historical fantasy, one-part gothic thriller, this genre-blending story has something for everyone." —Kalyn Josephson

KIndred: Recipes, spices and rituals to nourish your kin by Eva Konecsny and Maria Konecsny $55

Sisters Maria and Eva Konecsny, founders of the Gewürzhaus spice stores, know that spices have the power to transform our everyday cooking. They also believe that cooking to feed our kin — whether it's chocolate semolina porridge, tender fennel roast pork or a tray of spiced Christmas cookies — can be a deeply nourishing and connective force in our lives. In Kindred, Maria and Eva take you into their homes to share the spices, seasonal rituals, traditions and recipes from their German heritage that bring their families around the table. Learn how to use spices in simple ways to elevate your cooking and discover key principles for spicing different types of food.

• Look inside!

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

• Curiosity is not a good reason to get married.

• Life is so hard, it never ends.

• We review some other books by Sheila Heti.

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

• Read an excerpt.

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.

• Look inside!

• The illustrator’s blog.

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 

• Dark optimism; bright pessimism.

• Your emotions are known to you though language.

• Leaving things out.

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

• Keeping a sense of place.

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

• Capitalist horror.

• ‘Ivor’.

• Read Thomas’s review of The Doll’s Alphabet.

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

• Look inside!

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

• Wary of ‘material’.

• Writing is doomed to fail.

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

• Animals and monologue.

• Queer desire and ecological grief.

• The best genderqueer mountain lion novel of the year.

• How Hoke wrote Throat.

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

The following new books deserve your reading attention. Click through for your copies:

Understanding Te Tiriti: A handbook of basic facts about Te Tiriti o Waitangi by Roimata Smail $25

A very clear introductory booklet about what was actually agreed between rangatira and the Crown in 1840, why Te Tiriti was signed, and how subsequent violations and neglect of the treaty responsibilities of the Crown have required and still require redress, restitution and restoration of rights over land, resources and self-determination (all of which were guaranteed to iwi in 1840).
Suitable for both adults and younger readers. 

• No bill can change the facts.

• A reading (and watching and listening) guide.

• Some books on Te Tiriti.

Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the philosophy of fashion by Charlie Porter $50

Why do we wear what we wear?  To answer this question, we must go back and unlock the wardrobes of the early twentieth century, when fashion as we know it was born. Porter brings us face to face with six members of the Bloomsbury Group — the collective of creatives and thinkers who were in the vanguard of a social and sartorial revolution.  Each of them offers fresh insight into the constraints and possibilities of fashion today: from the stifling repression of E. M. Forster's top buttons to the creativity of Vanessa Bell's wayward hems; from the sheer pleasure of Ottoline Morrell's lavish dresses to the clashing self-consciousness of Virginia Woolf's orange stockings; from Duncan Grant's liberated play with nudity to John Maynard Keynes's power play in the traditional suit. As Porter carefully unpicks what they wore and how they wore it, we see how clothing can be a means of creative, intellectual and sexual liberation, or, conversely, a tool for patriarchal control. As he travels through libraries, archives, attics and studios, Porter uncovers new evidence about his subjects, revealing them in a thrillingly intimate, vivid new light.  And, as he begins making his own clothing, his own perspective on fashion — and on life — starts to change. 
”A triumph. I could read Charlie Porter's books all day long. He makes us see a subject we thought we knew so well from a completely different angle; in writing that is deeply researched, but inviting, warm, and full of personality.” —Katy Hessel
”Charlie Porter is a magician, a radical historian who has pulled away all the threadbare myths about Bloomsbury, using clothes as a way of revealing the vulnerable bodies and wild new ideas of Woolf and her circle. In his hands, what people wear becomes an astoundingly rich way of thinking about love and grief, art-making and intimacy — and above all about old power structures and how to upend them. Bring No Clothes is at once an enriching account of the past and a primer for the future: a guide to how we too can clothe our bodies for freedom.” —Olivia Laing

• Look inside!

Kafka, A manga adaptation by Nishioka Kyōdai and Franz Kafka (translated by David Yang) $30

Nine of Franz Kafka's most memorable tales are here given fresh life with remarkable graphic renderings by the brother-and sister manga creators Nishioka Kyōdai. With their distinctive, surreal style of illustration, they have reimagined the fantastic, the imperceptible and the bizarre in Kafka's work, creating a hauntingly powerful visual world. These stories of enigmatic figures and uncanny transformations are stripped to their core, offering new understandings. Includes ‘The Metamorphosis’, ‘A Hunger Artist’, ‘In the Penal Colony’, ‘A Country Doctor’. 

• Look inside!

• Kafka everywhere all at once.

Tremor by Teju Cole $38

Life is hopeless but it is not serious. Tunde, the man at the centre of this novel, reflects on the places and times of his life, from his West African upbringing to his current work as a teacher of photography on a renowned New England campus. He is a reader, a listener, and a traveller drawn to many different kinds of stories: from history and the epic; of friends, family, and strangers; those found in books and films. One man's personal lens refracts entire worlds, and back again. A weekend spent shopping for antiques is shadowed by the colonial atrocities that occurred on that land. A walk at dusk is interrupted by casual racism. A loving marriage is riven by mysterious tensions. And a remarkable cascade of voices speak out from a pulsing metropolis. Tremor is a startling work of realism and invention that examines the passage of time and how we mark it. It is a reckoning with human survival amidst "history's own brutality, which refuses symmetries and seldom consoles" — but it is also a testament to the possibility of joy.
”A quietly dazzling novel.” —Deborah Levy

• Haunted by the trespasses of art.

The Rice Book: History, culture, recipes by Sri Owens $65

The Rice Book became an instant classic when it was published thirty years ago, and to this day remains the definitive book on the subject. Rice is the staple food for more than half the world, and the creativity with which people approach this humble grain knows no bounds. From food writer Sri Owen's extensive travels and years of research come recipes for biryanis, risottos, pilafs and paellas from Indonesia, Thailand, Japan, Korea, Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, Spain, Italy, Brazil and beyond. Nicely presented, with a new foreword by Bee Wilson and an updated introduction on the nutrition, history and culture surrounding rice, more than 160 delicious, foolproof recipes (20 of them new) and beautiful illustrations and food photography throughout, this is an essential book for every kitchen and every cook.

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Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism by Walter Benjamin (translated by Harry Zohn) $27

Benjamin is perhaps best known for his analyses of the work of art in the modern age and the philosophy of history. Yet it was through his study of the social and cultural history of the late nineteenth-century Paris, examined particularly in relation to the figure of the Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire, that Benjamin tested and enriched some of his core concepts and themes. Contained within these pages are, amongst other insights, his notion of the flaneur, his theory of memory and remembrance, his assessment of the utopian Fourier and his reading of the modernist movement.

The Needs of Strangers: On solidarity and the politics of being human by Michael Ignatieff $33

What does a person need, not just to survive, but to flourish? In this thoughtful, searching book, Ignatieff explores the many human needs that go beyond basic sustenance: for love, for respect, for community and consolation. In a society of strangers, how might we find a common language to express such needs? Ignatieff's enquiry takes him back to works of philosophy, literature and art, from St. Augustine to Hieronymus Bosch to Shakespeare. Is there a possibility of accommodating claims of difference within a politics based on common need?
”Michael Ignatieff writes an urgent prose. He will convince people, in highly readable fashion, that the ideas he discusses really matter.” —Salman Rushdie
”Beautifully written and profoundly thoughtful.” —New Statesman

Dragon Palace by Hiromi Kawakami (translated from Japanese by Ted Goossen) $35

Meet a shape-shifting con man, a goddess who uses sex to control her followers, an elderly man possessed by a fox spirit, a woman who falls in love with her 400-year-old ancestor, a kitchen god with three faces in a weasel-infested apartment block, moles who provide underground sanctuary for humans who have lost the will to live, a man nurtured through life by his seven extraordinary sisters, and a woman who is handed from husband to husband until she is finally able to return to the sea. Kawakami’s eight stories each pivot on a moment of transformation, moments when boundaries dissolve and new lives become possible. From the author of Strange Weather in Tokyo.
"Spirits, animals, and people cohabit the universe of these eight stories, which capture with quirky insight and deadpan humor the strangeness of human relationships." —The New Yorker

Illustrating the Antipodes: George French Angas in Australia and New Zealand, 1844—1845 by Philip Jones $40

Angas’s meticulous depictions of Māori in the 1840s provide an invaluable record of life and persons in the period. In this sumptuous illustrated volume, Philip Jones has used Angas’ sketches, watercolours, lithographs and journal accounts to retrace his Antipodean journeys in vivid detail. Set in the context of his time, Angas emerges both as a brilliant artist and as a flawed Romantic idealist, rebelling against his father’s mercantilism while entirely reliant upon the colonial project enabling him to depict Indigenous peoples and their ways of life.

• Look inside.

Yellow Butterfly by Oleksandr Shatokhin $35

A wordless picture book portrayal of war seen through the eyes of a young girl who finds hope in the symbolism of yellow butterflies against the background of a pure blue sky. Using the colors of his national flag, Oleksandr Shatokhin has created a deeply emotional response to the conflict in Ukraine and provided a narrative full of powerful visual metaphors for readers to consider as they travel from the devastating effects of war to a place of hope for peace and the future.

• Look inside!

Leila and the Blue Fox by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, illustrated by Tom de Freston $20

She was very tired. She lay down, her soft head on her soft paws. The sunset licked her face. The snow covered her like a blanket. Fox wakes, and begins to walk. She crosses ice and snow, over mountains and across frozen oceans, encountering bears and birds beneath the endless daylight of an Arctic summer, navigating a world that is vast, wild and wondrous. Meanwhile, Leila embarks on a journey of her own — finding her way to the mother who left her. On a breathtaking journey across the sea, Leila rediscovers herself and the mother she thought she'd lost, with help from a determined little fox.

• Look inside!

A Letter to My Transgender Daughter by Carolyn Hays $28

The Hays family fled for safety across the US from an intolerant community to a slightly less intolerant one. This book is an ode to Hays's brilliant, brave child, as well as a cathartic revisit of the pain of the past. It tells of the brutal truths of being trans, of the sacrificial nature of motherhood, and of the lengths a family will go to shield their youngest from the cruel realities of the world. Hays asks us all to love better, for children everywhere enduring injustice and prejudice just as they begin to understand themselves. A Letter to My Transgender Daughter is a celebration of difference, a plea for empathy, a hope for a better future, but moreover, it is a love letter to a child who has always known herself and is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

• Hays explains why she wrote the memoir.

The World of the Brontës: A 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle with over 50 characters to find by Amber Adams $45

Enter the world of the Brontës with this 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle. Travel across the blustery Yorkshire moors and into the dark, gloomy schoolrooms and weathered stone buildings of nineteenth-century England to spot Cathy and Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights, Jane and Mr Rochester getting married, and a host of other fictional and real-life characters while you build the puzzle. Includes a fold-out poster that highlights characters, locations and key moments.

• Have a closer look.

New books for a new month!

Thunderclap: A memori of art and life & sudden death by Laura Cumming $75
”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.
”No one writes art like Laura Cumming.” —Philip Hoare
”I shall never look at any painting in the same way again.” —Polly Morland

• Look inside.

• Countdown to a catclysm.

• About ‘The Goldfinch’, which features in Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch.

• On Chapel Sands.

• The Vanishing Man.

The Singularity by Balsam Karam (traslated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel) $38

In an unnamed coastal city filled with refugees, the mother of a displaced family calls out her daughter's name as she wanders the cliffside road where the child once worked. The mother searches and searches until, spent from grief, she throws herself into the sea, leaving her other children behind. Bearing witness to the suicide is another woman — on a business trip, with a swollen belly that later gives birth to a stillborn baby. In the wake of her pain, the second woman remembers other losses — of a language, a country, an identity--when once, her family fled a distant war. Balsam Karam weaves between both narratives in this formally ambitious novel and offers a fresh approach to language and aesthetic as she decenters a white European gaze.
”Lyrical, devastating and completely original, The Singularity is a work of extraordinary vision and heart. Balsam Karam's writing is formally inventive and stylistically breathtaking, and Saskia Vogel's translation does shining justice to its poetic precision and depths.” —Preti Taneja
”Balsam Karam writes at the limits of narrative, limning the boundary of loss where ‘no space remains between bodies in the singularity’. With a lucid intimacy, Karam braids a story of witness and motherhood that fractures from within only to rebuild memory and home on its own terms. The Singularity is a book of conviction where those who have been made to disappear find light and keep their secrets too.” —Shazia Hafiz Ramji

• The author introduces the book.

• No machine can deliver such surprises.

The Bridge by Eva Lindström $38

A pig drives by looking for a bridge but ends up the houseguest of two wolves in the woods. Who are they? What do they want? And where is the pig rushing off to, anyway? Written and illustrated in Lindström's laconic, razor-sharp, and darkly comical style, The Bridge is a droll, fast-paced, and ever-so-slightly-sinister story in which, as in a classic fairy tale, an ordinary chance encounter suddenly morphs into an adventure that feels both wildly improbable and true to life.
"The Bridge is so many things at once. It is very funny, it is very mysterious, it is very beautiful, and it is like no book I've ever seen. I love it very much." —Jon Klassen

• Look inside!

• Other wonderful books by Eva Lindström.

Shame by Annie Ernaux (translated from French by Tanya Leslie) $28

"My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon," begins Shame, the probing story of the 12-year-old girl who will become the author herself, and the single traumatic memory that will echo and resonate throughout her life. With the emotionally rich voice of great fiction and the diamond-sharp analytical eye of a scientist, Annie Ernaux provides a powerful reflection on experience and the power of violent memory to endure through time, to determine the course of a life.
”Shame and The Young Man deserve to be read widely. Her work is self-revealing, a series of pitiless auto-autopsies. Their disparate achievements work together to illuminate something perennially fascinating about Ernaux: her relationship to revelation and visibility. These are deeply intimate books, but in another way, Ernaux brings a disquieting impersonality to her project.” —Megan Nolan, The Times
”Exceptionally deft and precise, the very epitome of all that language can do…a surprisingly tender evocation of a bright, passionate and self-aware young girl growing up in her parents’ ‘cafe-haberdashery-grocery’ in a small town in Normandy.” —Julie Myerson, Observer

• Other books by Ernaux.

The Young Man by Annie Ernaux (translated from French by Alison L. Strayer) $20

In her latest work, Annie Ernaux recounts a relationship with a student thirty years her junior — an experience that transforms her, briefly, back into the ‘scandalous girl’ of her youth. When she is with him, she replays scenes she has already lived through, feeling both ageless and closer to death. Laid like a palimpsest on the present, the past’s immediacy pushes her to take a decisive step in her writing — producing, in turn, the need to expunge her lover. At once stark and tender, The Young Man is a taut encapsulation of Ernaux’s relationship to time, memory and writing.
”Annie Ernaux’s work is proof of how expertly autobiography can be done. The Young Man does offer a taste of what’s so unique and astonishing about her honesty, her intelligence, the deceptive simplicity of her narratives. And for those who have been reading her for decades, it adds invaluable information to what we have already learned about the sources of her energy and courage, about the complex connections between her life and her work, her lived experience and the grace with which she transforms memory into art.” —Francine Prose, Guardian
”Annie Ernaux is one of my favourite contemporary writers, original and true. Always after reading one of her books, I walk around in her world for months.” —Sheila Heti

Ludwig and the Rhinoceros: A philosophical bedtime story by Noemi Schneider, illustrated by Golden Cosmos $38

"There's a rhinoceros in my room!" Ludwig claims. His father doesn't think so. He looks for the huge pachyderm in every corner, but he just can't find it. There CANNOT be a rhinoceros in Ludwig's room. It's way too small for a rhinoceros. But Ludwig shows his father that it is impossible to be certain that something isn’t there. This enjoyable picture book replicates the 1911 argument between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell on whether knowability is a property of the actual world or of the set of epistemological propositions we make about it.

• Look inside!

• Stella reads from the book..

• Stella’s review.

• Visit Golden Cosmos.

Not a River by Selva Almada (translated by Annie McDermott) $38

Three men go out fishing, returning to a favourite spot on the river despite their memories of a terrible accident there years earlier. As a long, sultry day passes, they drink and cook and talk and dance, and try to overcome the ghosts of their past. But they are outsiders, and this intimate, peculiar moment also puts them at odds with the inhabitants of this watery universe, both human and otherwise. The forest presses close, and violence seems inevitable, but can another tragedy be avoided? Rippling across time like the river that runs through it, Selva Almada’s latest novel is the finest expression yet of her compelling style and singular vision of rural Argentina.
"A virtuoso literary work. Flashbacks and side scenes deepen the story which curls and twines like a thrusting tropical vine through the past, roping in sisters, wives, old lovers, boyhood adventures, and jealousies." —Annie Proulx
”Told with the hallucinatory atmosphere of a dream, this astonishing, stark novel doesn't turn away from the hypnotic and disturbing effects of violence. Not a River plunges us straight into the depths of its silences, bracingly so — the longer the quiet goes, the more terrible the rupture." —Manuel Munoz

• Read an excerpt.

Corner by Zo-O $38

A crow finds itself in an empty corner and begins to make the space its own. First, it furnishes the corner with a bed, a bookshelf, a rug, even a potted plant. In the newly decorated space, the crow reads and eats, listens to music and waters the plant, but something's missing. What is it? The crow decides to decorate more, drawing geometric patterns on the walls in yellow. The corner is filled with colour and shapes, but something is still missing. The crow adds a window, and finally discovers what it needed all along — a way to connect with the world outside and to make a new friend. This highly original, almost-wordless picture book cleverly uses the gutter of the book to make the crow’s corner. Soft, detailed illustrations of the cosy corner will inspire children to express themselves in their own spaces, and the crow's problem-solving skills encourage readers to think about how they can comfortably step outside of their comfort zone.

• Look inside!

Opinions: A decade of arguments, criticism, and minding other people’s business by Roxane Gay $38

Outstanding non-fiction pieces from The New York Times and elsewhere on politics, feminism, the culture wars, gender, sexuality, and equality.
”Gay has a gift for clean, well-ordered prose, and strong feelings on matters of race, gender, and sexuality. Most important, she possesses a fearlessness essential to doing the job right; though she can observe an issue from various angles, she never wrings her hands or delivers milquetoast commentaries. She comes to her opinions more out of empathy than ideology.” Fierce and informed riffs on current events and enduring challenges.” —Kirkus

Can I Sit in the Middle? by Susanne Strasser $19

It’s story time, but first everyone needs to arrive and everyone needs to find their place on the sofa. Just when everyone seems ready, a clumsy and very real rhinoceros comes looking for its slippers. How will the story ever be read? Board book.

• Look inside!

Marilyn Webb: Folded in the Hills edited by Lauren Gutsell, Lucy Hammonds and Bridget Reweti $70

Featuring over 80 colour plates from throughout Webb’s career, from 1968 to 2005, this impressive monograph includes essays by curators Lucy Hammonds, Lauren Gutsell, and Bridget Reweti, extant poems by Cilla McQueen and Hone Tuwhare and two new ekphrastic poems by Essa May Ranapiri and Ruby Solly.

• Look inside.

Poor Things by Alasdair Gray $25

A life without freedom to choose is not worth having. In Alasdair Gray’s postmodern metaphysical lampoon of Frankenstein, Godwin Baxter's scientific ambition to create the perfect companion is realised when he finds the drowned body of the beautiful Bella, who he brings back to life in a Frankenstein-esque feat, and with the brain of an infant. His dream is thwarted by Dr. Archibald McCandless's jealous love for his ‘creation’. But what does Bella think? Gray’s novel, with its dual narratives by Bella and McCandless, is an unsparing but hilarious exploration of traditional power imbalances between the sexes and the ways in which women are crushed both by men’s imposed notions of ‘propriety’ and by their projected fantasies of ‘impropriety’. How can true liberation and fulfillment be achieved?
”A magnificently brisk, funny, dirty, brainy book.” —London Review of Books

• Poor Things has recently been adapted as a film by Yorgos Lanthimos.

• Standing up for Glasgow.

• Lost in adaptation.

• A few other books by Alasdair Gray.

The following books seek a home on your shelf, or on your bedside table.

The Variations by Patrick Langley $37

Selda Heddle, a famously reclusive composer, is found dead in a snowy field near her Cornish home. She was educated at Agnes’s Hospice for Acoustically Gifted Children, which for centuries has offered its young wards a grounding in the gift – an inherited ability to tune into the voices and sounds of the past. When she dies, Selda’s gift passes down to her grandson Wolf, who must make sense of her legacy, and learn to live with the newly unleashed voices in his head. Ambitious and exhilarating, The Variations is a novel of startling originality about music and the difficulty – or impossibility – of living with the past.
‘Ecstasy is a word I’d happily associate with Patrick Langley’s lyrical and looping novel The Variations, a work with a similarly thrilling Nabokovian intrigue in the relationship between patterning, form and meaning.... The novel’s epigraph – “Variation is among the oldest and most basic devices in music. It originates in an inherent tendency to modify identical recurrence” – is a quote from the American composer Leon Stein, and almost laughably banal when held up against Langley’s humming prose. But its message is clear: it is Nabokov’s magic carpet, that age-old human impulse that – like music – wants to modify, edit, exceed, transcend itself. With The Variations, Langley appears to be weaving a carpet of his own.’ — Matthew Janney, Guardian
‘For all The Variations’ unusual elements, Langley handles traditional storytelling modes expertly. He can nail a character in a few lines… He can do action. And he has a knack for ending chapters with the expertise of a theatrical director ramping up the tension and then — curtain! — dropping into silence. The Variations, in other words, is a book whose oddness stretches the reader without estranging us. It asks more questions than it answers, but provides plenty of delight to compensate. It’s a novel where, as Selda reflects, “something about the world is revealed, though she can’t say what it is”.’ — John Self, Financial Times
‘The Variations is a wonderfully mysterious novel suffused with a Lynchian eeriness. I was totally under Langley's spell and under the thrall of the eerie rhythms governing The Variations. Simply unforgettable.’ — Brandon Taylor, author of The Late Americans
‘If Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black were written by John Banville channelling M. John Harrison, the result would look something like this. And yet Langley has made something new and unexpected about how the present is, necessarily and always, an echo corridor of the past. Beautifully written, powered by a wonderfully intelligent conceptual dynamo, and deftly sprung with surprises, The Variations is an utterly original book about haunting. It is strange, resonant, and, yes, haunting.’ — Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others
‘The Variations is a passionate meditation on how past and present meet and annihilate one another in the flare of individual human experience. Music is presented as a kind of weather, blustery and changeable, unlimited by its own time. It takes you up, puts you down, whirls you away. Langley’s prose, lyrical and accurate, enlivens and illuminates. A tremendous, seriously ambitious novel.’ — M. John Harrison, author of Wish I Was Here

• Hearing the voices of the dead.

• Arkady.

I Need Art: Reality Isn’t Enough, An illustrated memoir by Henn Kim $33
Depression and creativity, love and family, books and music: this personal and vulnerable memoir by the iconic South Korean illustrator explores her life from the ages of seventeen to thirty-three through image, text and poetry. From what nearly broke her to what saved her, everyone will find something to comfort them in Henn Kim's world.

• Look inside!

• “I stopped speaking at nineteen, and found my artistic voice.”

• “My black is poetic.”

• As it appears.

• Art that speaks to the soul.

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan $40

Beginning at a love hotel by Japan's Inland Sea and ending by a river in Tasmania, Question 7 is about the choices we make about love and the chain reaction that follows. By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West's affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this genre-defying daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die. At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, literature, place and memory is about how reality is never made by realists and how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.

Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran $28

Welcome to Cinnamon Gardens, a home for those who are lost and the stories they treasure. Cinnamon Gardens Nursing Home is nestled in the quiet suburb of Westgrove — populated with residents with colourful histories, each with their own secrets, triumphs and failings. This is their safe place, an oasis of familiar delights — a beautiful garden, a busy kitchen and a bountiful recreation schedule. But this ordinary neighbourhood is not without its prejudices. The serenity of Cinnamon Gardens is threatened by malignant forces more interested in what makes this refuge different rather than embracing the calm companionship that makes this place home to so many. As those who challenge the residents' existence make their stand against the nursing home with devastating consequences, our characters are forced to reckon with a country divided. Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens is about family and memory, community and race, but is ultimately a love letter to storytelling and how our stories shape who we are.
Winner of the 2023 Miles Franklin Award.
'This is an engaging story that feels both urgent and necessary. It is also a terrific read.' —The Daily Telegraph
'This story burns with anger and sings with optimism, sprinkled through with moments of levity and humour.' —The Canberra Times

• A ‘Trojan horse’ novel.

What You Need to Be Warm by Neil Gaiman (and various artists) $23
Troubled by the treatment of refugees around the world, Neil Gaiman asked his social media followers what makes them that they belong and are wanted. He collected the answers, and the resulting book reveals our shared desire to feel safe, welcome and warm in a world that can often feel frightening and lonely. What You Need to Be Warm is an exploration of displacement and flight from conflict through the objects and memories that represent warmth. It is about our right to feel safe, whoever we are and wherever we are from. It is about holding out a hand to welcome those who find themselves far from home. Featuring original illustrations from Chris Riddell, Benji Davies, Yuliya Gwilym, Nadine Kaadan, Daniel Egnéus, Pam Smy, Petr Horácek, Beth Suzanna, Bagram Ibatoulline, Marie-Alice Harel, Majid Adin and Richard Jones, with a thought-provoking cover from Oliver Jeffers.
Sales of every copy of this book will help support the work of UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, which helps forcibly displaced communities and stateless people across the world.

• Look inside!

The Greatest Invention: A history of the world in nine mysterious scripts by Silvia Ferrara $28
The invention of writing allowed humans to create a record of their lives and to persist past the limits of their lifetimes. In the shadows and swirls of ancient inscriptions, we can decipher the stories they sought to record, but we can also tease out the timeless truths of human nature, of our ceaseless drive to connect, create and be remembered. The Greatest Invention chronicles an uncharted journey, one filled with past flashes of brilliance, present-day scientific research and the faint, fleeting echo of writing's future. Now in paperback!
”Brisk, simple to follow and unfussy — though the author has a way with a helpful metaphor, for which we non-experts are grateful — Ferrara's book is an introduction to writing as a process of revelation, but it's also a celebration of these things still undeciphered, and many other tantalising mysteries besides.” —Daniel Hahn, Spectator

• Leaving our mark.

A trail of Crab Tracks by Patrice Nganang $40
Nganang chronicles the fight for Cameroonian independence through the story of a father’s love for his family and his land and of the long-silenced secrets of his former life. For the first time, Nithap flies across the world to visit his son, Tanou, in the United States. After countless staticky phone calls and transatlantic silences, he has agreed to leave Bangwa: the city in western Cameroon where he has always lived, where he became a doctor and, despite himself, a rebel, where he fell in love, and where his children were born. When illness extends his stay, his son finds an opportunity to unravel the history of the mysterious man who raised him, following the trail of crab tracks to discover the truth of his father and his country. At last, Nithap’s throat clears and his voice rises, and he drifts back in time to tell his son the story that is burned into his memory and into the land he left behind. He speaks about the civil war that tore Cameroon apart, about the great men who lived and died, about his soldiers, his martyrs, and his great loves. As the tale unfolds, Tanou listens to his father tell the history of his family and the prayer of the blood-soaked land. From New Jersey to Bamileke country, voices mingle, the borders of time dissolve, and generations merge.
"For Patrice Nganang . . . reimagining a nation has required reimagining the novel. Each work in [his] trilogy takes aim at the intricacies of history through an equally intricate narrative approach: the novels range back and forth across time, weaving real-world figures amid fictional characters, and shifting rapidly among different voices, registers, and languages . . . A Trail of Crab Tracks becomes a singularly complex interrogation of the relationship between thought and action, between writing and the world." —Kristen Roupenian, The New Yorker

The Goodbye Cat by Hiro Arikawa $37

Against changing seasons in Japan, seven cats weave their way through their owners' lives: A needy kitten rescued from the recycling bin teaches a new father how to parent his own human baby; a colony of wild cats on a holiday island shows a young boy not to stand in nature's way; a family is perplexed by their cat's devotion to their charismatic but uncaring father; a woman curses how her cat constantly visits her at night; and an elderly cat, Kota, hatches a plan to pass into the next world as a spirit so that he and his owner may be together for ever. Includes seven cat drawings.

Hey There, Stink Bug! by Leslies Bulion nd Evans $12
Witty poems describe how insects capture prey, trick predators, attract mates, and have managed to survive for 400 million years. Scientifically accurate information further explains bug behavior. Eye-catching linoleum-cut illustrations practically crawl across the pages. Includes notes that explain 19 poetic forms and stylistic techniques plus a glossary of entomological terms.

• Look iside!

The Future by Naomi Alderman $35

The new novel from the author of The Power shows us a future that is very similar to our own. The Future — as the richest people on the planet have discovered — is where the money is. The Future is a few billionaires leading the world to destruction while safeguarding their own survival with secret lavish bunkers. The Future is private weather, technological prophecy and highly deniable weapons. But the Future is a handful of friends — the daughter of a cult leader, a non-binary hacker, an ousted Silicon Valley visionary, the concerned wife of a dangerous CEO, and an internet-famous survivalist — hatching a daring plan. It could be the greatest heist ever. Or the cataclysmic end of civilization. The Future is what you see if you don't look behind you.

Out of the carton and onto your shelf!

Spent Light by Lara Pawson $38

A woman contemplates her hand-me-down toaster and suddenly the whole world erupts into her kitchen, in all its brutality and loveliness: global networks of resource extraction and forced labour, technologies of industrial murder, histories of genocide, alongside traditions of craft, the pleasures of convenience and dexterity, the giving and receiving of affection and care.    “Everything in this damned world calls for indignation,” the woman says at one point. All of it’s there, all interconnected, and she can’t stop looking. The likeness between a pepper mill and a hand grenade, for example, or the scarcely hidden violence of an egg timer. And what if objects knew their own histories? What if we could allow ourselves to see those weird resonances, echoes, loops, glitches, just as Pawson does so beautifully and unnervingly here? Spent Light asks us to begin the work of de-enchanting all the crap we gather around ourselves to fend off the abyss — because we’ll never manage that anyway, the book warns, the abyss is already in us. But love is too. There might be no home to be found in objects, but there’s one to be made with other people. I think, in the end, this powerful, startling book is a love letter.’ —Jennifer Hodgson
”I’m flabbergasted by the naked determination on show here, not to say the talent. Page by page, image by image, association by association, Lara Pawson develops a picture of the world that you won’t be offered anywhere else: stark, unremitting, brilliantly formed and written.” —M. John Harrison
”A shocking book. Lara Pawson’s merciless and exquisite prose adorns everyday objects with the violence of history – the savage comedy by which living creatures have become broken, petrified things. I will never look at a toaster or a timer, a toenail or a squirrel, the same way again.” —Merve Emre

• Thomas reviews This Is the Place to Be.

• Visit the author’s website.

• Other books published by CB Editions.

Unwords by Andrew Gallix $40

An enjoyable companion to the best new reading and to intriguing re-readings, this book contains essays on the highest form of intergloss (and everything having already been said), the death of the novel, the death of the author, the unwritten, the unread and unreadable, the International Necronautical Society, fictive realism, Alain Robbe-Grillet's reality hunger, the Oulipo and literary bondage, Rene Girard and mimetic desire, literary prizes, Andy Warhol's answer to Ulysses, the poetics of spam, the literati and digerati, the disappearance of 3:AM Magazine (and literature), umbilical worlds, the melancholy of Guy the Gorilla, the world without me, two interviews with philosopher Simon Critchley, and an after(un)word-cum-writing manifesto made up exclusively of quotations. It also contains reviews of works by Jenn Ashworth, Zygmunt Bauman, Claire-Louise Bennett, Gavin James Bower, Kevin Breathnach, Michel Butor, David Caron, Joshua Cohen, Douglas Coupland, Tim Etchells, Jonathan Franzen, Dan Fox, Paul Gorman, James Greer, Len Gutkin, Isabella Hammad, Jean-Yves Jouan.
”I'm starting to suspect that the last quarter century of literary history has in reality been a projection of the mind of Andrew Gallix, paused in reverie above the blank sheet of a masterpiece so perfect as to be unfeasible. We thought we were writing, reading and debating; in fact, he was daydreaming us all." —Tom McCarthy
"Andrew Gallix is the thinking punk's intellecual, a vital voice at the forefront of literary criticism. He is eminently readable, an alternative national (and international) treasure." —Benjamin Myers
"Andrew Gallix has long been one of our most astute, witty, and suprising critical thinkers. For a start, he understands how a modernist novel is put together. This is not to be taken for granted — it is one of the many reasons to enjoy the spirit of this valuable and intellectually entertaining collection." —Devorah Levy

The Good Die Young: The verdict on Henry Kissinger edited by Bhaskar Sunkara, René Rojas, and Jonah Walter $38

 If the American foreign policy establishment is a grand citadel, then Henry Kissinger is the ghoul haunting its hallways. For half a century, he was an omnipresent figure in war rooms and at press briefings, dutifully shepherding the American empire through successive rounds of growing pains. For multiple generations of anti-war activists, Kissinger personified the depravity of the American war machine. The world Kissinger wrought is the world we live in, where ideal investment conditions are generated from the barrel of a gun. Today, global capitalism and United States hegemony are underwritten by the most powerful military ever devised. Any political vision worth fighting for must promise an end to the cycle of never-ending wars afflicting the world in the twenty-first century. This book follows Kissinger's fiery trajectory around the world because he, more than any other public figure, illustrates the links between capitalism, empire, and the feedback loop of endless war-making that plagues us today.

The I Wonder Bookstore by Shinsuke Yoshitake $30

At The I Wonder Bookstore, customers come in and ask the owner countless variations on its namesake question ("I wonder if you have any books about...") and he is happy to fill their requests — he has books that play at the edges (and yet somehow are central to) our ideas of books and reading. Readers will discover books that grow on trees, books designed to be read by two (or more) people at once, books that can only be read by moonlight, bookstore weddings, an underwater library, a boot camp for charismatic bookstore attendants, and many more wonders that celebrate, books, and bookshops. Hugely inventive, thoughtful, and fun.

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A History of Queen’s Redoubt and the Invasion of the Waikato by Neville Ritchie and Ian Barton $50

On 12 July 1863, British and colonial troops under the command of Lt. Gen. Duncan Cameron crossed Mangatawhiri stream, Waikato Maori’s northern border, instigating the Waikato War. In order to do so they had amassed a vast infrastructure that included building the Great South Road (the ‘Road to War’), establishing a military supply train capable of providing for the needs of 6,000 soldiers, erecting a telegraph service between Auckland and Pokeno, forming a navy of armoured gunboats on the Waikato River, and constructing the second largest military fort built by the British Army in New Zealand: The Queen’s Redoubt. At the height of the invasion, some 14,000 British and colonial troops contested the Waikato against Maori forces which never exceeded 3000. The Waikato was occupied from July 1863 to April 1864, followed by massive land confiscations. This book tells the story of the Redoubt, and the buildup of military power along the Waikato border, which led directly to the most significant campaign of the New Zealand Wars, the invasion of the Waikato.
”Queen’s Redoubt was the launching pad for the invasion of Waikato in 1863. Ian Barton and Neville Ritchie have produced a valuable account of its place in this defining conflict in New Zealand’s history.” — Vincent O’Malley

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Mountains of Fire: The secret lives of volcanoes by Clive Oppenheimer $40

olcanoes mean more than threat and calamity. Like our parents, they've led whole lives before we get to know them. They have inspired our imaginations, provoked pioneering explorations and shaped the path of humanity. Volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer has worked at the crater's edge in the wildest places on Earth, from remote peaks in the Sahara to mystical mountains in North Korea. He's faced down AK47s, learned from tribal elders, and watched red hot rocks shoot into the sky. More people have been into space than have set eyes on the fiery depths of Mount Erebus in Antarctica, where he has measured the Earth's powerful forces. In Mountains of Fire, he paints volcanoes as otherworldly, magical places where our history is laid bare, and shows us just how entangled volcanic activity is with our climate, economy, politics, culture and beliefs.
”What the French adventurer Jacques Cousteau was to the hidden world under our seas, Oppenheimer is to the hidden, molten world bubbling under our feet.” —Sunday Times
”Gripping ... reads] like a thriller. Perhaps one final attribute of a volcanologist is that he should be a good storyteller. Oppenheimer is better than good. This is terrific.” —Spectator
”A fantastic account of the power and importance of volcanoes to history. Clive Oppenheimer takes us on a wonderful tour of some of the world's best and least known volcanoes in a book that will make all readers want to become volcanologists.” —Peter Frankopan

• Menace, meaning and magic.

High: A journey across the Himalayas through Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Nepal, and China by Erika Fatland $30

The Himalayas meander for more than two thousand kilometres through many different countries, from Pakistan to Myanmar via Nepal, India, Tibet and Bhutan, where the world religions of Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism are interspersed with ancient shamanic beliefs. Countless languages and vastly different cultures exist in these isolated mountain valleys. Modernity and tradition collide, while the great powers fight for influence.We have read about climbers and adventurers on their way up Mount Everest, and about travellers on a spiritual quest to remote Buddhist monasteries. Here, however, the focus is on the communities of these Himalayan valleys, those who live and work in this extraordinary region. As Erika Fatland introduces us to the people she meets along her journey, and in particular the women, she takes us on a vivid and dizzying expedition at altitude through incredible landscapes and dramatic, unknown histories.

• Sovietistan.

Feeling and Knowing by Antonio Damasio $35

In recent decades, many philosophers and cognitive scientists have declared the question of consciousness unsolvable, but Antonio Damasio is convinced that recent findings in neuroscience, psychology and artificial intelligence have given us the necessary tools to solve its mystery. In Feeling & Knowing, Damasio elucidates the myriad aspects of consciousness and presents his analysis and new insights in a way that is faithful to our own intuitive sense of the experience. In forty-eight brief chapters, Damasio helps us understand the relation between consciousness and the mind; why being conscious is not the same as either being awake or sensing; the central role of feeling; and why the brain is essential for the development of consciousness. He synthesises the recent findings of various sciences with the philosophy of consciousness, and, most significantly, presents his original research which has transformed our understanding of the brain and human behaviour. Now in paperback.
“Damasio has succeeded brilliantly in narrowing the gap between body and mind.” —The New York Times Book Review

Sylvie and the Wolf by Andrea Debbink, illustrated by Merce Lopez $38

Sylvie has a secret. She's seen a wolf in the woods and is afraid to tell anyone about it. She thinks people won't believe her or will make fun of her. As her fear begins to control her life, she stops going to the woods, spending time with friends, and doing the things she loves. Eventually, with the encouragement of a loving aunt, Sylvie is able to confront her fear. She learns that instead of running or hiding, she can live alongside her anxiety. She also learns that everyone is dealing with something that scares them — even the wolf.

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In the Museum — 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle by Tomi Um $35

Familiar faces and delightful discoveries abound in this menagerie of art gallery visitors, from inquisitive art students, to selfie-snapping divas, and aspiring artists who happen to be mice. Each gallery offers new details to discover and allusions to art movement across time and history.

Out of the carton and onto your shelf!

The Beach Activity Book: 99 ideas for activities by the water around Aotearoa New Zeland by Rachel Haydon, illustrated Pippa Keel $35

The 99 activities in this immersive book for children aged 7 to 14 range from experiments and observation to conservation and mindfulness. Developed to inspire curious young minds to explore and appreciate our beaches, lakes, rivers and streams, it is also designed to be taken out into natural environments and to be drawn and written in. Written by a children’s learning expert, all sorts of learning styles are recognised, with each activity being open to children who like to draw and those who like to write. The book’s journal-like format and activities that range across the seasons make it a long-term and much treasured companion. Mātauranga Māori concepts and the theme of nature connectedness are an integral part of the activities. 

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Titus Angus White and the Māori Captives on Waitematā Harbour, 1863/4 by Barbarar Francis $45

In November 1863 at the battle of Rangiriri, over 180 Māori defenders were taken prisoner. They were marched up the Great South Road to Ōtāhuhu, from where they were transferred onto the Waitematā Harbour. There they were held captive on the prison ship Marion for nearly eight months, supervised by their bilingual Pākehā Superintendent Titus Angus White, who was also sent to retrieve them after their subsequent escape from Kawau Island. This book is the story of Titus Angus White and the men he ended up supervising as they were imprisoned only 600 metres off the Port of Auckland. It is also the wider story of the invasion of the Waikato and the circumstances that led to the establishment of New Zealand’s largest ever floating prison.
“This work navigates the colonial propaganda and attempts to provide an objective perspective on a tumultuous time in New Zealand history – Barbara Francis has been meticulous in collecting, collating and connecting information to produce a detailed narrative around the work and thinking of Titus Angus White.” – Dr Mike Ross, Ngāti Hauā.

Granta 164: Last Notes edited by Sigrid Rausing $33

Generators, rockets, sirens and the clatter of chess – from war in Ukraine to construction booms in Phnom Penh and Cairo; from music to the experience of living in partial silence, this issue is an attempt to get at what we hear rather than what we see. Featuring non-fiction by Lydia Davis, Brian Dillon, Wiam El-Tamami, Peter Englund (tr. Sigrid Rausing), Diana Evans, Tabitha Lasley, Adam Mars-Jones, Maartje Scheltens, Anjan Sundaram, Y-Dang Troeung, Ed Vulliamy and Ada Wordsworth; Fiction by Nicola Barker, Mazen Maarouf (tr. Mazen Maarouf with Laura Susijn), Adèle Rosenfeld (tr. Jeffrey Zuckerman) and Brywan Washington poetry by Oluwaseun Olayiwola and Martha Sprackland; Photography by Suzie Howell (introduced by A.K. Blakemore), James Berrington and Sama Beydoun.

• Some samples.

On the Tip of a Wave: How Ai Weiwei’s art is changing the tide by Joanna Ho and Cátia Chien $32

Told in Joanna Ho's lyrical writing, this is the story that shines a light on Ai Weiwei and his journey, specifically how the ‘Life Jackets’ exhibit at Konzerthaus Berlin came to be. As conditions for refugees worsened, Ai Weiwei was inspired by the discarded life jackets on the shores of Lesbos to create a bold installation that would grab the attention of the world. Cátia Chien portrays the intricate life of Ai Weiwei with inspirations from woodblock printing and a special emphasis on the color orange, the same color of the life jackets that became a beacon of hope. Through Chien’s dynamic illustrations, we see how Ai Weiwei became the activist and artist he is today while proving the power of art within humanity.

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• 14000 life jackets.

The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li $27

Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnes, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised — the place that Fabienne helped Agnes escape ten years ago. Now, Agnes is free to tell her story. As children in a backwater town, they'd built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves — until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnes on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss. A dark, ravishing tale winding from the rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school, to the quiet Pennsylvania home where Agnes can live without her past. Now in paperback.
”Wonderfully strange and alive.” —Jon McGregor
”Li has become one of our finest living authors: Her elegant metaphysics never elide the blood and maggots . The most propulsively entertaining of Li's novels, an existential fable that illuminates the tangle of motives behind our writing of stories.” —New York Times

Barcode (‘Object Lessons series) by Jordan Bogost $25

Barcodes are about as ordinary as an object can be. Billions of them are scanned each day and they impact everything from how we shop to how we travel to how the global economy is managed. But few people likely give them more than a second thought. In a way, the barcode's ordinariness is the ultimate symbol of its success. However, behind the mundanity of the barcode lies an important history. Barcodes bridged the gap between physical objects and digital databases and paved the way for the contemporary Internet of Things, the idea to connect all devices to the web. They were highly controversial at points, protested by consumer groups and labour unions, and used as a symbol of dystopian capitalism and surveillance in science fiction and art installations. This book tells the story of the barcode's complicated history and examines how an object so crucial to so many parts of our lives became more ignored and more ordinary as it spread throughout the world.

Magazine (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Jeff Jarvis $25

For a century, magazines were the authors of culture and taste, of intelligence and policy - until they were overthrown by the voices of the public themselves online. Here is a tribute to all that magazines were, from their origins in London and on Ben Franklin's press; through their boom - enabled by new technologies - as creators of a new media aesthetic and a new mass culture; into their opulent days in advertising-supported conglomerates; and finally to their fall at the hands of the internet. This tale is told through the experience of a magazine founder, the creator of Entertainment Weekly at Time Inc., who was also TV critic at TV Guide and People and finally an executive at Condé Nast trying to shepherd its magazines into the digital age.

Dreamhome: Stories of art and shelter by Justin Paton $70

This book reveals how some of today's most exciting artists are reimagining the idea of home for our unsettled times. In his evocative style, Justin Paton investigates a place we all have a stake in — from houses of memory to upturned houses, from haunted houses to light houses, from intimate spaces of shelter to optimistic future communities. Richly illustrated, Dreamhome brings together artworks by twenty-six artists from around the world, as well as diverse contextual imagery that includes family photographs, film stills, architectural drawings, and historical records. Artists include: Michael Parekowhai (Aotearoa); Afshar (Iran/Australia); Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan; Philippines/Australia); Igshaan Adams (South Africa); Phyllida Barlow (UK); Zarina Hashmi (India/USA); Simone Leigh (USA); Tracey Moffatt (Australia); John Prince Siddon (Australia/Walmajarri)

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The Wall Between Us by Dan Smith $22

BERLIN 1961. Anja and Monika live opposite each other. They play together every day, with Otto the cat. One night they wake up to bangs and shouts. Soldiers are building a huge barbed wire fence between them. A terrible forever wall that gets longer and higher until it divides the whole city. On the East side, Monika is scared — neighbours are becoming spies and there are secret police everywhere. It's Anja who spots that Otto has found a way across. If he can visit Monika, then perhaps she can too. But Anja gets trapped and there's no safe way back . . . From the author of She Wolf.

Edible Economics: Around the world in seventeen dishes by Ha-Joon Chang $30

For decades, a single, free-market philosophy has dominated global economics. But this intellectual monoculture is bland and unhealthy. Ha-Joon Chang makes challenging economic ideas delicious by plating them alongside stories about food from around the world, using the diverse histories behind familiar food items to explore economic theory. For Chang, chocolate is a lifelong addiction, but more exciting are the insights it offers into postindustrial knowledge economies; and while okra makes Southern gumbo heart-meltingly smooth, it also speaks of capitalism's entangled relationship with freedom. Myth-busting, witty, and thought-provoking, Edible Economics serves up a feast of bold ideas about globalisation, climate change, immigration, austerity, automation, and why carrots need not be orange. It shows that getting to grips with the economy is like learning a recipe: when we understand it, we can adapt and improve it — and better understand our world.
”Excellent. Chang has been working hard at providing an alternative to neoliberalism for two decades; Now he's reached the summit of the profession.” —Dan Davies , Guardian
”Edible Economics is a moveable feast of alternative economic ideas wrapped up in witty stories about food from around the world. Ha-Joon Chang proves yet again that he is one of the most exciting economists at work today.” —Owen Jones

Appliance by J.O. Morgan $26

A highly inventive and and humane novel about our relationship with technology and our addiction to innovation. This is the tale of a new technology, an alternative history that unfolds over many decades. It is a fable told through a constantly shifting cast of characters, all drawn into the world of a machine that slowly alters every life it touches. But in this unending quest for progress, what will happen to the things that make us human- the memories, the fears, the love, the mortality? As we push towards a brave new world, what do we stand to lose? Now in paperback.

• “I think I do books that may sound strange.”

Solito by Javier Zamora $30

Young Javier dreams of eating orange sherbet ice cream with his parents in the United States. For this to happen, he must embark on a three-thousand-mile journey alone. It should last only two weeks. But it takes seven. In limbo, Javier learns what people will do to survive - and what they will forfeit to save someone else. This is a memoir of perilous boat trips, relentless desert treks, and pointed guns. But it is also a story of tasting tacos for the first time, of who passes you their water jug in the crippling heat, and of longing to be in your mother's arms.
”I don't think I've ever read a memoir which captivated me in so many ways. It was a beautiful book about family, those that we have and those that we make, and the little family that they made on their journey, which was almost sort of Iliad-esque. An epic journey to their loved ones, because they had no choice.” —Jenna Bush Hager
”Crafted with stunning intimacy, you'll feel so close to the boy Zamora was then that you'll think about him long after the book is done. It's impossible not to feel both immersed in and changed by this extraordinary book.” —Los Angeles Times 
”An important, beautiful work.: —New York Times Book Review
”Solito is at once blistering and tender, devastating and affirming — it is, quite simply, a revelation, a new landmark in the literature of migration, and in nonfiction writ large.” —Francisco Cantu

The Magic Place by Chris Wormell $20

Clementine works as a slave for her wicked aunt and uncle. But she dreams of a magic place, and she's determined to escape and find it. With the help of a very clever cat, she sets off on an adventure that might just make her dreams come true.

Once a Monster by Robert Dinsdale $38

London, 1861: Ten-year-old Nell belongs to a crew of mudlarks who work a stretch of the Thames along the Ratcliffe Highway. An orphan since her mother died four years past, leaving Nell with only broken dreams and a pair of satin slippers in her possession, she spends her days dredging up coals, copper and pieces of iron spilled by the river barges - searching for treasure in the mud in order to appease her master, Benjamin Murdstone. But one day, Nell discovers a body on the shore. It's not the first corpse she's encountered, but by far the strangest. Nearly seven feet tall, the creature has matted hair covering his legs, and on his head are the suggestion of horns. Nell's fellow mudlarks urge her to steal his boots and rifle his pockets, but as she ventures closer the figure draws breath and Nell is forced to make a decision which will change her life forever . A reimagining of the Minotaur legend, set in Victorian London.

• No relation.

New books for a new year! Click through for your copies:

Taranga by Reina Kahukiwa, illustrated by Robyn Kahukiwa $38
Taranga is the mother of Māui, the cultural hero in the Māori creation narrative. Here Reina Kahukiwa recounts the birth of Māui seen through the eyes of Taranga. Exquisitely llustrated throughoutby Reina's mother, the artist Robyn Kahukiwa. This is a beautiful book that will be especially treasured by mothers and mothers-to-be.
”Inā te ātaahua o tēnei pukapuka. Recommending this reo rua book by Reina Kahukiwa and illustrated by Robyn Kahukiwa. Taranga's story of birthing Māui tikitiki a Taranga, from her perspective is powerful and empowering.” —Stacey Morrison

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Articulations by Henriette Bollinger $28

A well-known writer, activist, and disability rights advocate, Henrietta Bollinger’s debut essay collection speaks to their experiences as a queer, disabled person, and as a twin. Articulations is a timely, personal, and poignant appraisal of life in Aotearoa New Zealand. Soundtracked by the Topp Twins, Anika Moa, Woody Guthrie and more, Bollinger’s essays take us on a journey from first crushes and first periods to parliamentary reform and Disability Pride. They challenge the norms of our ableist society, asking us to consider better ways of being with each other and ourselves.

White Holes by Carlo Rovelli $40

Let us journey, with beloved physicist Carlo Rovelli, into the heart of a black hole. Let us slip beyond its boundary, the horizon, and tumble - on and on - down this crack in the universe. As we plunge, we'll see geometry fold, we'll feel the equations draw tight around us. Eventually, we'll pass it - the remains of a star, deep and dense and falling further far. And then - the bottom. Where time and space end, and the white hole is born .
”Reading it is akin to the final psychedelic sequence in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey: you're not sure where you're heading but it feels bloody exciting. If you want to remember why you once fell in love with the idea of the cosmos, or want to fall in love with that idea for the first time, then this book is for you.” —Kevin Fong, Observer
”It is always worth reading Rovelli. He writes like he believes you are as learned and clever as he is. Yet he also writes with such care for your ignorance that it feels every page is urging and coaxing you — a non-physicist — to see what he can see.” —Tom Whipple, The Times
”Possibly the most charming book by a mainstream scientist this year. Carlo Rovelli is a maestro of imaginative science writing. The book's structure and language have a charm that I found irresistible. No one else matches the way Rovelli describes the creative and imaginative thinking behind theoretical physics .” —Clive Cookson, Financial Times

The Dead Are Always Laughing at Us words by Dominic Hoey, design by Trudi Hewitt $35

The Dead Are Always Laughing At Us is a collaboration between Dominic Hoey and designer Trudi Hewitt.
“Accessibility has shaped the way I write and perform. I’ve always resisted the idea that poetry should be a puzzle you need a 50k education to unlock. Early on I knew I wanted this to be the kind of poetry collection anyone could pick up and be drawn into immediately. With that in mind it was really important to add a visual element to the text.” — Dominic
“I saw this project as an opportunity to experiment. To rethink the rules we set for consistency and to challenge typesetting conventions of literature and poetry. Ultimately I wanted to give each of Dominic’s poems their own sense of identity by playing with pace, space, size and tension. An awesome collaboration with a very talented friend.” — Trudi

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Edmonds Taku Puka Tohutau Tuatahi $28
Edmonds My First Bookbook in te reo Māori! I te ahua o nga pikitia, me te takoto o te hatepe tohutohu, ka mama noa to ako ki te tunu i enei kai e hangai pu ana ki Aotearoa. Kia tu koe hei toa ki te tao panikeke, hei toki ki te tunu potaka tiakarete, hei rehe ranei ki te mahi pihapiha. Mai i te kai ata, ki te purini, tae ana ki nga kai me nga timotimo katoa i waenganui, ka noho ko tenei kohinga, kei koni atu i te 90 ona tohutao, hei kaiwhakato i te ngakaunui mauroa o te tangata ki te tunu me te tao kai. Tirohia nga tohutao hou me te rarangi kupu e reorua ana. With an illustrated, step-by-step layout, you'll find it super easy to learn to cook these classic New Zealand recipes — and to learn te reo! Become a champion-pikelet-maker, an expert-afghan-baker or an award-winning-pizza-creator — and a fluent speaker. From breakfast through to dessert and all the meals and snacks in between, this collection of over 90 recipes will be the beginning of a life-long love of baking and cooking. Check out the new recipes and bilingual glossary. Every home needs a copy.

• Look inside.

Little Green Fingers: Easy peasy gardening activities by Claire Philip $45

These inspiring, creative and simple activities are possible whether you have a backyard, a balcony or even just a windowsill - everyone is welcome to get their hands dirty. Growing fruits and vegetables, creating fun art projects with nature, learning about the natural world and how plants grow, learning to observe the green spaces around us — all this and more can be found in Little Green Fingers.

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Atua Wāhine: A collection of writings by wāhine Māori edited by Ataria Sharman, Cassie Hart, Stacey Teague, Sinead Overbye and Faith Wilson $34

A collective of wāhine Māori writers and their pieces, versions and stories of Atua Wāhine from Papatūānuku to Hineahuone, all the way down to our grandmothers. Contributors include Jessica Maclean, Ariana Sutton, Ataria Sharman, Cassie Hart, Ruby Solly, Nicole Titihuia Hawkins, Isla Martin, Ariana Sutton, Miriama Gemmell and Saskia Sassen.

Viewing Velocities: Time in contemporary art by Martin Verhagen $40

Viewing Velocities explores a contemporary art scene caught in the gears of 24/7 capitalism. It looks at artists who embrace the high-octane experience economy and others who steer closer to the slow movement. Some of the most compelling artworks addressing the cadences of contemporary labour and leisure employ distinct, even contradictory conceptions of time.
From Danh Vo's relics to Moyra Davey's photographs of dust-covered belongings, from Roman Ondak's queuing performers and Susan Miller's outdoor sleepers to Maria Eichhorn's art strike and Ruth Ewan's giant reconstruction of the French revolutionary calendar, artists have drawn out aspects of the present temporal order that are familiar to the point of near invisibility, while outlining other, more liberating ways of conceiving, organising and experiencing time. Marcus Verhagen builds on the work of theorists Jonathan Crary, Hartmut Rosa and Jacques Rancière to trace lines of insurgent art that recast struggles over time and history in novel and revealing terms.
”Compelling and groundbreaking. These analyses point toward imaginative possibilities beyond the dispiriting neoliberal imperatives now increasingly imposed on us.” —Jonathan Crary

History’s Angel by Anjum Hasan $37

Alif is a middle-aged, mild-mannered history teacher, living in contemporary Delhi, at a time when Muslims in India are seen either as hapless victims or live threats. Though his life's passion is the history he teaches, it's the present that presses down on him: his wife is set on a bigger house and a better car while trying to ace her MBA exams; his teenage son wants to quit school to get rich; his supercilious colleagues are suspicious of a Muslim teaching India's history; and his old friend Ganesh has just reconnected with a childhood sweetheart with whom Alif was always rather enamored himself. And then the unthinkable happens. While Alif is leading a school field trip, a student goads him and, in a fit of anger, Alif twists his ear. His job suddenly on the line, Alif finds his life rapidly descending into chaos. Meanwhile, his home city, too, darkens under the spreading shadow of violence. In this darkly funny, sharply observed and deeply moving novel, Anjum Hasan deftly and delicately explores the force and the consequences of remembering your people's history in an increasingly indifferent milieu.
”A seething seismic tale about the disturbing times the Muslims of India are living through, in ever growing dread of worse to come. Told in a subdued, sad, ironical tenor, it is compassionate without being sentimental. The novel asserts humanity and hope in the face of widening fissures through its main protagonist who, drawing sustenance from a deep historical perspective, refuses to play the victim and negotiates the situation empathetically.” —Geentanjali Shree

The Book of Wilding: A practical guide to rewilding, big and small by Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell $75

The Book of Wilding is a compendious and beautifully produced handbook for how we can all help restore nature. It is ambitious, visionary and pragmatic. The book has grown out of Tree’s and Burrell’s mission to help rewild Britain, Europe and the rest of the world by sharing knowledge from their pioneering project at Knepp in Sussex. It is inspired by the requests they receive from people wanting to learn how to rewild everything from unprofitable farms, landed estates and rivers, to ponds, allotments, churchyards, urban parks, gardens, window boxes and public spaces.. The Book of Wilding has the answers.
”A deep, dazzling and indispensable guide to the most important task of all: the restoration of the living planet.” —George Monbiot

• Look inside.

• Visit Knepp.

Dream Girl by Joy Holley $30
Alice wants a heart-shaped bed. Mary, Genevieve and Angelica want to know the future. June says she wants Lena to rescue her from a rat, but really she wants Lena to make out with her. Eve wants to get Wallace alone at the strawberry farm. Olivia just wants to leave the haunted boarding school and go home. Bittersweet and intimate, comic and gothic, Dream Girl is a collection of stories about young women navigating desire in all its manifestations. In stories of romance and bad driving, ghosts and ghosting, playlists and competitive pet ownership, love never fails to leave its mark.
”Dream Girl is a winning concoction – sweet, heady, funny, tight, sharp – wittily charting the lightweight antics of “unattainably hot” girls, wearing its love-bites saucily and watching its crushes play out with wry sidelong glances. Its stories start as they mean to go on – with charm, chic, laughter, skill and sting.” —Tracey Slaughter
”These funny, original stories are the new cool girls of fiction. You’ll want to sit next to them.” —Emily Perkins
”I imagine travelling back in time and giving myself this book, Dream Girl. At sixteen. At twenty.  What a world-changing read it would be to me then.” —Naomi Mary Smith, Takahē
”'Dream Girl by Joy Holley might just be Aotearoa's sexiest, dreamiest, most swoonsome book.'“ —Donna Robertson
”A tender and liberating book.” —Emma Hislop, RNZ

Saga by Hannah Mettner $25
In Saga, the permafrost is melting and the secrets frozen within are emerging. Nothing is spared, from the old family recipe for pineapple cheesecake to the portrait of an ancestor, from the wife who sleeps with an axe under her bed to the tough heart of a man that beats beneath the skin. With an uneasy grace, these poems explore questions of love, sexuality, family, friendship and politics. They visit a childhood playground in a storm, women painted on the walls of churches, and the fjords and riot grrrls of Hannah Mettner’s history. They are woven through with wild blackberry and everyday magic.
‘Hannah Mettner’s poems are funny and clever and lusty. They make me want to go out and look at the world again, to conjure up eternal life, and to dip my toe into the lake of flame.’ —Morgan Bach
'The poetry here is full, the lines long, not pared back to a minimal bleakness but more maximal and exuberant, like a river in flood, gushing and tumbling along freely, going in multiple directions effortlessly.' —Piet Nieuwland, Landfall
'Give me true art, real desire, genuine darkness, or nothing. Even if the replicated cavern with its faux-dankness ultimately didn’t trigger the hairs at the narrator’s nape, this book reeks of realness. I’d give it five stars on Fragrantica.' —Rebecca Hawkes, Newsroom

How Life Works: A user’s guide to the New Biology by Philip Ball $40

Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works—the idea of the genome as a blueprint, of genes as instructions for building an organism, of proteins as precisely tailored molecular machines, of cells as entities with fixed identities, and more—have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong. In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. Ball explains that there is no unique place to look for an answer to this question: life is a system of many levels—genes, proteins, cells, tissues, and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system—each with its own rules and principles. How Life Works explains how these levels operate, interface, and work together (most of the time). With this knowledge come new possibilities. Today we can redesign and reconfigure living systems, tissues, and organisms. We can reprogram cells, for instance, to carry out new tasks and grow into structures not seen in the natural world. As we discover the conditions that dictate the forms into which cells organize themselves, our ability to guide and select the outcomes becomes ever more extraordinary. Some researchers believe that ultimately we will be able to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even create new life forms that evolution has never imagined.

Flavour by Sabrina Ghayour $50

'Sabrina Ghayour's Middle-Eastern plus food is all flavour, no fuss — and makes me very, very happy' —Nigella Lawson
Over 100 new, authentic and appraocahble recipes from the author of Persiana. Recipes include: Zaatar onion, tomato and aubergine tartines with labneh; Chicken shawarma salad: Herb koftas with warm yoghurt, mint amd pul biber; Ras el Hanout and orange lamb cutlet platter; Mama ghanoush; Pan-fried salmon with barbary butter; Nut butter noodles; Lime, coconut and cardamom loaf cake; Tea, cranberry, orange and macadamia shortbreads.

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Stay True by Hua Hsu $40

When Hua Hsu first meets Ken in a Berkeley dorm room, he hates him. A frat boy with terrible taste in music, Ken seems exactly like everyone else. For Hua, who makes zines and haunts indie record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to – the mainstream. The only thing Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, and Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the US for generations, have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn’t seem to have a place for either of them. But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet. Capturing a coming-of-age cut short, and a portrait of a beautiful friendship, Stay True is a deeply moving and intimate memoir about growing up and moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.
”One of the best nonfiction books about friendship ever, right up there with Patti Smith’s Just Kids.” —The Atlantic

Wellness by Nathan Hill $40

When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the 90s, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in Chicago's thriving underground art scene with an appreciative kindred spirit. Fast-forward twenty years to married life, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to painful childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process, Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other. Moving from the gritty 90s Chicago art scene to a suburbia of detox diets and home renovation hysteria, Wellness mines the absurdities of modern technology and modern love to reveal profound, startling truths about intimacy and connection.
”Wellness is one of the funniest, saddest, smartest novels I've ever read. It's a flat-out masterpiece.” —Anthony Marra

The Price of Time: The real story of interest by Edward Chancellor $32

In the beginning was the loan, and the loan carried interest. For at least five millennia people have been borrowing and lending at interest. The practice wasn't always popular — in the ancient world, usury was generally viewed as exploitative, a potential path to debt bondage and slavery. Yet as capitalism became established from the late Middle Ages onwards, denunciations of interest were tempered because interest was a necessary reward for lenders to part with their capital. And interest performs many other vital functions: it encourages people to save; enables them to place a value on precious assets, such as houses and all manner of financial securities; and allows us to price risk. All economic and financial activities take place across time. Interest is often described as the ‘price of money’, but it is better called the ‘price of time’: time is scarce, time has value, interest is the time value of money. Over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, interest rates have sunk lower than ever before. Easy money after the global financial crisis in 2007/2008 has produced several ill effects, including the appearance of multiple asset price bubbles, a reduction in productivity growth, discouraging savings and exacerbating inequality, and forcing yield-starved investors to take on excessive risk.

Godfather Death by Sally Nicholls, illustrated by Júlia Sardà $33
When a poor fisherman chooses Death to be godfather to his son, he’s sure he’s made a good choice – for surely there’s no-one more honest than Death? At the christening, Death gives the fisherman a gift that seems at first to be the key to the family’s fortune, but when greed overcomes the fisherman, he learns that nobody can truly cheat Death.

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A new book is a promise of good times ahead. Click through for your copies:

Compound Press Poetry Calendar 2024 $20
Poets believe in 2024. The text-positive high-manilla Compound Press Poetry Calendar has a poem for each month, and marks Aotearoa poet birthdays, like alternative saints feast days. In the spirit of poetry, it contains virtually no useful information such as public holidays. The poets are: Chris Tse, Renae Williams, Richard von Sturmer, Craig Foltz, David Merritt, Ana Iti, Hera Lindsay Bird, Cadence Chung, Amber Esau, Dominic Hoey, Rebecca Hawkes, and Ya-Wen Ho.

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• Publications from Compound Press.

1 2 3 What Will We See? by Sarah Pepperle $30
Count with me! What will we see? Lift the flaps to discover a joyful selection of artworks curated especially for young children in this lively new book. Children will learn to count from 1 to 10 in English, te reo Māori and sign language while looking at delightful works of art. A short read-aloud rhyme accompanies each artwork. The artworks include sculpture, painting, tukutuku, linocuts and woodcuts, tapestry and photography by artists from Aotearoa and abroad. Warm, fun and stylish, this book will delight young minds. Artists include Edith Amituanai, Alice Coats, Ruth Dean, Lonnie Hutchinson, Jack Knight, Gottfried Lindauer, Michael Parekowhai, Juliet Peter, Cyril Power, Philip Trusttum, Ōtautahi Weavers, Robin White and Carolyn Yonge.

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• See also: A Is for Art.

The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi $40
Anisa Ellahi spends her days writing subtitles for Bollywood films in her London flat, all the while longing to be a translator of 'great works of literature'. Her boyfriend Adam's extraordinary aptitude for languages only makes her feel worse, but when Adam learns to speak Urdu practically overnight, Anisa forces him to reveal his secret. Adam tells Anisa about the Centre, an elite, invite-only programme that guarantees total fluency in any language in just ten days. Sceptical but intrigued, Anisa enrols. Stripped of her belongings and contact with the outside world, she undergoes the Centre's strange and rigorous processes. But as she enmeshes herself further within the organisation, seduced by all that it's made possible, she soon realises the disturbing, hidden cost of its services.
”I am obsessed with this book and you will be too! A brilliant meditation on language and translation and the most gripping novel I've read in forever. I'm in awe.” —Jennifer Croft

Ayesha Green — Folk Nationalism and Other Stories edited by Ayesha Green and Moya Lawson $30
Working across painting, drawing and sculpture, Ayesha Green (Ngāti Kahungunu ki Heretaunga, Kāi Tahu) examines histories of Māori and Pākehā representation. Green’s work focuses on imagery where intercultural relationships intersect, overlap or diverge—from Māori pūrākau, such as the separation of Rangi and Papa, to the signing of the treaties of Waitangi, to Prince William meeting Buzzy Bee. Her exhibition Folk Nationalism traces and contests the ways these images pervade our daily lives and shape our sense of nationhood. Folk Nationalism and other stories is the first publication dedicated to Ayesha Green's practice. It features texts by nine writers who take different routes to and through her work. Through subtle acts of mirroring and repositioning, Green refracts the often-simplified way that images from the history of Aotearoa have been read. Like Green, the writers in Folk Nationalism and other stories demonstrate how numerous, diverse and contradictory meanings converge within these images. With contributions by Francis McWhannell, Elle Loui August, Hanahiva Rose, Madison Kelly, Jess Nicholson, Moewai Marsh, Matariki Williams, Lachlan Taylor and Sarah Hudson.

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A History of the Barricade by Eric Hazan $25
In Eric Hazan's native Paris, barricades were instrumental in the revolts of the nineteenth century, helping to shape the political life of a continent. The barricade was always a makeshift construction (the word derives from barrique or barrel), and in working-class districts these ersatz fortifications could spread like wildfire. They doubled as a stage from which insurgents could harangue soldiers and subvert their allegiance. Their symbolic power persisted into May 1968 and, more recently, the Occupy movements.
”I feel like quoting endlessly from this revealing compact book, which, on top of everything else, is beautifully written and no-less beautifully translated. The idea of tracing centuries of tempestuous European history by looking just at one significant engineering object strikes me as brilliant. “ —Vitali Vitaliev

A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare (translated from Albanian by John Hodgson) $40
In June 1934, Joseph Stalin allegedly telephoned the famous novelist and poet Boris Pasternak to discuss the arrest of fellow Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam. In a fascinating combination of dreams and dossier facts, Ismail Kadare reconstructs the three minutes they spoke and the aftershocks of this tense, mysterious moment in modern history. Weaving together the accounts of witnesses, reporters and writers such as Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova, Kadare tells a gripping story of power and political structures, of the relationship between writers and tyranny. The telling brings to light uncanny parallels with Kadare's experience writing under dictatorship, when he received an unexpected phone call of his own.

The Truth About Max by Alice and Martin Provensen $35
Have you met Max?
Max is a cat who lives on a farm.
Max is always hungry.
Max is very clever.
Max is full of mischief.
But what is the truth about Max?
Read this book and you’ll find out!
Inspired by the Provensens’ real life cat, who lived with them in their home on Maple Hill Farm, this charming picture book offers a window into life on the farm, living in harmony—and good humour!—with animals and nature. It also celebrates the fundamental mystery of the inner life of others. Never before published.

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India After Gandhi: A History by Ramachandra Guha $60
An extended new edition of this remarkable work, with new material that explains the major events, policy shifts and controversies of the past decade, placing them in their proper sociological and historical context and setting out the author's justifiable concerns for the decline of democracy in India. Born against a background of privation and civil war, divided along lines of caste, class, language and religion, independent India emerged, somehow, as a united and democratic country. Ramachandra Guha's acclaimed book tells the full story — the pain and the struggle, the humiliations and the glories — of the world's largest and least likely democracy. While India is sometimes the most exasperating country in the world, it is also the most interesting. Ramachandra Guha writes of the myriad protests and conflicts that have peppered the history of free India. Moving between history and biography, the story of modern India is peopled with extraordinary characters. Guha gives fresh insights into the lives and public careers of those long-serving Prime Ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. But the book also writes with feeling and sensitivity about lesser-known (though not necessarily less important) Indians — peasants, tribals, women, workers and musicians. Massively researched and elegantly written.
”Finally, here is a history of democratic India that is every bit as sweeping as the country itself. A magisterial work.” —Financial Times

Warhol After Warhol: Power and money in the Modern Art world by Richard Dorment $40
Late one afternoon in the winter of 2003 art critic Richard Dorment answered a telephone call from a stranger. The caller was Joe Simon, an American film producer and art collector. He was ringing at the suggestion of David Hockney, his neighbour in Malibu. A committee of experts called the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board had declared the two Warhols in his collection to be fake. He wanted to know why and thought Dorment could help. This call would mark the beginning of an extraordinary story that would play out over the next ten years and would involve a cast of characters straight out of fiction. From rock icons and film stars; art dealers and art forgers; to a murdered Russian oligarch and a lawyer for the mob; from courtrooms to auction houses: all took part in a bitter struggle to prove the authenticity of a series of paintings by the most famous American artist of the 20th century. Part detective story, part art history, part memoir, part courtroom drama, Warhol After Warhol is a spellbinding account of the dark connection between money, power and art.

Mexico (‘The Passenger’) $40
Once synonymous with escape and freedom, Mexico is now more frequently described as a place plagued by widespread violence, drug trafficking, endemic corruption, and uncontrolled migration. Under the patina of a tourist paradise — with its beaches, its ancient ruins, its tequila — lies a complex, dynamic country trying to carve out a place for itself in the shadow of its powerful neighbour. The most populous Spanish-speaking country in the world, Mexico is also home to 89 indigenous peoples and languages: one of the many contradictory legacies of the country's colonial past, which still permeates its politics, society, religion, food, and culture. With a fifth of the population identifying as indigenous, the issue of rediscovering and revaluing the country's pre-Columbian roots is at the center of the public debate. The controversial Mayan train project, which would connect Mexico's Caribbean resorts with the South's archaeological sites, crossing (and endangering) communities and forests, is a perfect example of the opposition between the two souls of the country. The attempts to resolve this contradiction, or better still to learn to live with it, will define the Mexico of the future. Only by recognising equal status to ethnic and linguistic minorities will the country be able to reconcile its fractured identity. IN THIS VOLUME: Underground Tenochtitlan by Guadalupe Nettel * Crime and (No) Punishment by Juan Villoro * The Birth of Fridolatry by Valeria Luiselli * plus: the cocaine that washes in from the sea and the pearl of the west, the jungle train and the last stop on the line, femicide and TikTok politics, mole, rice, the Virgin of Guadalupe and more ...

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• Other volumes in ‘The Passenger’ series.

Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto $33
In Hawaii, a cast of women reckon with physical and emotional alienation, and the toll it takes on their psyches. A childhood encounter with a wild pua'a (boar) on the haunted Pali highway portends one woman's increasingly fraught relationship with her body during pregnancy. A woman recalls an uncanny experience, in which Elvis impersonators take centre stage, to an acquaintance who doesn't yet know just how intimately they're connected. An elderly widow begins seeing her deceased lover in the giant corpse flower a mourner has gifted her. Centering native Hawaiian identity, and how it unfolds in the lives, mind and bodies of kanaka women, the stories in Kakimoto's debut collection are speculative and uncanny, exploring themes of queerness, colonisation and desire. Both a fierce love letter to mixed native Hawaiian and Japanese women and a searing dispatch from an occupied territory simmering with tension, Every Drop is a Man's Nightmare takes seriously the superstitions born of the islands.

Slow Drinks: A field guide to foraging and fermenting seasonal sodas, botanical cocktails, homemade wines, and more by Danny Childs $50
Organised by season, Slow Drinks demonstrates how to make drinks that tell a story of botany, history, culture, and terroir, while honoring beverage traditions both old and new. Each season will highlight eight new ingredients with recipes that build on a basics chapter and teach readers how to interchangeably use master recipes to make their own meads, country wines, beers, sodas, tinctures, shrubs, and more. This book is for bartenders, do-it-yourselfers, foodies, homesteaders, homebrewers, food activists, and anyone looking to dive into the world of botanical drink making. Slow Drinks teaches home cooks, industry pros, homebrewers, and foragers how to transform botanical ingredients—whether foraged or purchased from the store—into unique beverages and cocktails.

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ZigZag by Julie Paschkis $40
There's nothing ZigZag enjoys more than tasting his words as he uses them, plays with them, and enjoys them, for ZigZag is a lover of words! But one day, excited and energized, he gulps down all his vowels while exploring and enjoying the word "tambourine." Without A, E, I, O, and U, ZigZag's life is turned upside-down: no more lovely tambourines, only tasteless and dull tmbrns; no more tart green apples, only disappointing ppls. Poor ZigZag can't even get any sleep in his comfy, cozy bed, which is now a too short bd. But vowels are all around ZigZag, from his grandmother's satisfied "Aaahs" to his best friend Beanie's amazed "Ooohs." Can you help ZigZag find his vowels again?

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A new book is a promise of good times ahead. Click through for your copies:

So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan $23

An exquisitely written new story from the author of the indelible Small Things Like These and Foster. After an uneventful Friday at the Dublin office, Cathal faces into the long weekend and takes the bus home. There, his mind agitates over a woman named Sabine with whom he could have spent his life, had he acted differently. All evening, with only the television and a bottle of champagne for company, thoughts of this woman and others intrude — and the true significance of this particular date is revealed. From one of the finest writers working today, Keegan's new story asks if a lack of generosity might ruin what could be between men and women. Is it possible to love without sharing?

Little Dead Rabbit by Astrid Alben and Zigmunds Lapsa $48
A collaboration between poet Astrid Alben and visual artist and designer Zigmunds Lapsa, a book-length poem with die-cut images throughout. During the lockdown of 2020/21, Alben and Lapsa worked closely together on this book-length poem that is part adult fairy-tale, part concrete poem about a little dead rabbit the poet found on the verge of a road. Ostensibly a poem about death, the small corpse is equally a meditation on healing and joy.

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Sublunar by Harald Voetmann (translated from Danish by Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen) $38
In the 16th century, on the island of Hven, the pioneering Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe, is undertaking an elaborate study of the night sky. A great mind and a formidable personality, Brahe is also the world's most illustrious noseless man of his time. Told by Brahe and his assistants — a filthy cast of characters — Sublunar is both novel and almanac. Alongside sexual deviancy, spankings, ruminations on a new nose — flesh, wood, or gold? — Brahe (a choleric and capricious character) and his peculiar helpers take painstainking measurements that will revolutionize astronomy, long before the invention of the telescope. Meanwhile the plague rages in Europe... The second in Voetmann's triptych of historical novels, Sublunar is as visceral, absurd, and tragic as its predecessor Awake (which focussed on Pliny the Elder) but with a special nocturnal glow and a lunatic-edged gaze trained on the moon and the stars.
”Reading Voetmann’s books makes me feel so alive. His voice is like no other, his hold on his material masterful.” —Olga Ravn
”Voetmann seems to work from the ground up. Although Awake and Sublunar might be called novels of ideas, Voetmann's intellectual concerns are not forcefully imposed upon fictional dramas arbitrarily designed to illustrate them, but rather arise from particulars that are irreducible. Each page of the books contains a richness of detail and a depth of attention that has all but vanished from the contemporary novel—or, for that matter, any other mass-produced object. The novels themselves—each scarcely more than a hundred pages— are miniatures that appear to have been less written than chiseled. Images glow in stark relief against the somber backdrops and recur with slight variations, as though guided by a Fibonacci sequence. Amid the guts and gore, there are moments of quiet splendour. —New York Review of Books

• The genius who ruined eternity.

Held by Anne Michaels $33
1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night, his childhood on a faraway coast as the snow falls. 1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near another river alive, but not still whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and endeavours to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures — ghosts whose messages he cannot understand. So begins a narrative that spans four generations, moments of connection and consequence igniting and re-igniting as the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later.
”Through luminous moments of chance, change, and even grace, Michaels shows us our humanity - its depths and shadows.” —Margaret Atwood
”Dazzling lyrical snapshots recall the dreamlike style of Fugitive Pieces in the poet's third novel, a fluid examination of history, memory and generational trauma. The writing is always personal, hypersensitive and profoundly interior. Michaels's writing continues to stand head and shoulders above most other fiction. At the heart of this book lies the question of how goodness and love can be held across the generations.” —Observer

Start Here: Instructions for becoming a better cook by Sohla El-Waylly $70
A really clear and useful practical, information-packed, and transformative guide to becoming a better cook and conquering the kitchen, this is a must-have masterclass in leveling up your cooking. Across a dozen technique-themed chapters — from "Temperature Management 101" and "Break it Down & Get Saucy" to "Mix it Right," "Go to Brown Town," and "Getting to Know Dough" — Sohla El-Waylly explains the hows and whys of cooking, introducing the fundamental skills that you need to become a more intuitive, inventive cook. A one-stop resource, regardless of what you're hungry for, Start Here gives equal weight to savory and sweet dishes, with more than 200 mouthwatering recipes. Packed with practical advice and scientific background, helpful tips, and an almost endless assortment of recipe variations, along with tips, guidance, and how-tos, Start Here is culinary school — without the student loans.

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‘Other Stations Are Shit’: Student radio in Aotearoa New Zealand by Matt Mollgaard and Karen Neill $40
From its beginnings in 1969 as a student capping stunt, student radio has gone on to become an influential source of music and culture across Aotearoa New Zealand. Fresh sounds, new talent and creative expression have secured the sector’s reputation as the ‘research and development’ branch of the country’s music milieu, where each station is a champion of its local scene, serving as a springboard for bands, presenters and contributors. ‘Other Stations Are Shit’: Student Radio in Aotearoa New Zealand celebrates the contributions of student radio to the arts ecosystem. With full colour images and ephemera, staff profiles and chapters on each of the contemporary stations in addition to student radio whānau, music and its future, this book explores and documents the cultural phenomenon that is student radio.

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Ultrawild: An audacious plan to rewild every city on Earth by Steve Mushin $38
Join maverick inventor Steve Mushin as he tackles climate change with an avalanche of mind-bending, scientifically plausible inventions to rewild cities and save the planet. Jump into his brain as he designs habitat-printing robot birds and water-filtering sewer submarines, calculates how far compost cannons can blast seed bombs (over a kilometer), brainstorms biomaterials with scientists and engineers, studies ecosystems and develops a deadly serious plan to transform cities into jungles, rewilding them into carbon-sucking mega-habitats for all species, and as fast as possible. Through marvellously designed and hilarious engineering ideas, Mushin shares his vision for super-high-tech urban rewilding, covering the science of climate change, futuristic materials and foods, bio reactors, soil, forest ecosystems, mechanical flight, solar thermal power and working out just how fast we could actually turn roads into jungles, absorb carbon and reverse climate change.

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Before George by Deborah Robertson $30
When Marnya immigrates to New Zealand from South Africa in 1953 with her mother and sister, her mother cuts off Marnya's hair and changes her name to George to hide her identity as a girl. Hours later, their Christmas Eve train plummets into the Whangaehu River and George loses not only her family and name, but also the answers as to why her mother deceived her father and fled their homeland. Now a ward of the state, George finds herself enrolled in a rural school where survival depends on fitting in with a group of boys who think she's strange. Disconnected from everything that once defined who she was, George must reconstruct her identity and come to understand her mother's decisions.

The Trio by Johanna Hedman (translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson) $26
When Hugo takes a room in the house of one of Stockholm's wealthiest families, he unwittingly invites himself into the lives of people he will be unable to forget: Thora, a beautiful descendant of old money, and her childhood best friend August, who dreams of art. None of them have anything in common, but find themselves irresistibly drawn to each other. Decades later, a young woman shows up on Hugo's door in New York one morning, hoping to stay with him. She introduces herself as the child of Thora and August, and comes carrying questions about her parents that send Hugo reeling back to his youth — to two euphoric summers in Stockholm, and people to whom he is now a stranger.
”The Trio is like the love child of Normal People and Brideshead Revisited. A sublime and elegiac meditation on love, intimacy, freedom and jealousy, it elegantly explores the gulf between our interior lives and the personas we perform — and between ourselves and other people. Hedman's writing (and Josefsson's stunning translation) is staggeringly beautiful. Vivid, effortless, and perceptive to a molecular degree.” —Francesca Reece

The Story of the Brain in 10½ Cells by Richard Wingate $37
There are more than 100 billion brain cells in our heads, and every single one represents a fragment of thought and feeling. And yet each cell is a mystery of beauty, with branching, intricate patterns like shattered glass. Richard Wingate has been scrutinising them for decades, yet he is still moved when he looks at one through a microscope and traces their shape by hand. With absorbing lyricism and clarity, Wingate shows how each type of cell possesses its own personality and history, illustrating a milestone of scientific discovery and exploring the stories of pioneering scientists like Ramon y Cajal and Francis Crick, and capturing their own fascinating shapes and patterns. Discover the ethereal world of the brain with this elegant little book — and find out how we all think and feel.

Wayfinding Leadership: Ground-breaking wisdom for developing leaders by Chellie Spiller, Hoturoa Barclay-Kerr, and John Panoho $45
This book presents a new way of leading by looking to traditional waka navigators or wayfinders for the skills and behaviours needed in modern leaders. It takes readers on a journey into wayfinding and leading, discussing principles of wayfinding philosophy, giving examples of how these have been applied in businesses and communities, and providing action points so that readers can practise and reflect on the skills they are learning.

The Faint of Heart by Kerilynn Wilson $30
What would you do if you were the only person left with a heart? The only person left who felt anything at all? Would you give in to the pressure to conform? Or would you protect your heart at all costs? Not that long ago, the Scientist discovered that all sadness, anxiety, and anger disappeared when you removed your heart. And that's all it took. Soon enough, the hospital had lines out the door-even though the procedure numbed the good feelings, too. Everyone did it. Everyone except high school student June. But now the pressure, loneliness, and heartache are mounting, and it's becoming harder and harder to be the only one with a heart. One day, June comes across an abandoned heart in a jar. The heart in the jar intrigues her, it baffles her, and it brings her hope. But the heart also brings her Max, a classmate with a secret of his own. And it may rip June's own heart in two. A memorable graphic novel for teens.

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Family of Forest and Fungi | He Tukutuku Toiora by Valetta Sowka; Isobel Joy Te Aho-White, and Hana Natalija Park $24
How did our Māori ancestors use mushrooms? What are some of the astounding ways that fungi can help us? Why do mushrooms glow? Discover the answers to these questions and more in this book for tamariki about the magical world of fungi. Help a child build a natural connection to the taiao by journeying to the forests of Aotearoa and discovering the amazing kingdom of fungi that dwells there!

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Dictionary People: The unsung heroes who created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie $40
What do three murderers, Karl Marx's daughter and a vegetarian vicar have in common? They all helped create the Oxford English Dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary has long been associated with elite institutions and Victorian men; its longest-serving editor, James Murray, devoted 36 years to the project, as far as the letter T. But the Dictionary didn't just belong to the experts; it relied on contributions from members of the public. By the time it was finished in 1928 its 414,825 entries had been crowdsourced from a surprising and diverse group of people, from archaeologists and astronomers to murderers, naturists, novelists, pornographers, queer couples, suffragists, vicars and vegetarians. Lexicographer Sarah Ogilvie dives deep into previously untapped archives to tell a people's history of the OED. She traces the lives of thousands of contributors who defined the English language, from the eccentric autodidacts to the family groups who made word-collection their passion.

A new book is a promise of good times ahead. Click through for your copies:

Selected Poems by Geoff Cochrane $40
”Geoff Cochrane's is a whole world, rendered in lines at once compressed and open, mysterious and approachable.” —Damien Wilkins
”Over the years, Cochrane's work has been a joy to me, a solace, a proof that art can be made in New Zealand which shows ourselves in new ways.” —Pip Adam
”Would he break your heart, make you chuckle or tear you a new one – one never quite knew. He had this way of creating a moment of meeting that elided everything else, a calm where all our antennae raised as one and you never knew what would come out of his mouth, or his work. —Carl Shuker
(Hardback)

Why Memory Matters: ‘Remembered histories’ and the politics of the past by Rowan Light $18
”Behind the foreground narratives of justification, real or symbolic wounds are stored in the archives of cultural memory.” From curriculum to commemoration to constitutional reform, our society is in the grip of memory, a politics and culture marked by waves of loss, grief, absence and victimhood. Why are certain aspects of the past remembered over others, and why does this matter? In response to this fraught question, historian Rowan Light offers a series of case studies about local debates about history in New Zealand. These provisional judgements of the past illuminate aspects of what it means to remember — and why it matters. (Paperback)

The Forest Brims Over by Maru Ayase (translated from Japanese by Haydn Trowell) $37
Nowatari Rui has long been the subject of her husband's novels, her privacy and identity continually stripped away, and she has come to be seen by society first and foremost as the inspiration for her husband's art. When a decade's worth of frustrations reaches its boiling point, Rui consumes a bowl of seeds, and buds and roots begin to sprout all over her body. Instead of taking her to a hospital, her husband keeps her in an aquaterrarium, set to compose a new novel based on this unsettling experience. But Rui breaks away from her husband by growing into a forest — and in time, she takes over the entire city. (Paperback)
”The effectiveness of The Forest Brims Over lies precisely in Ayase's thorough awareness of the power of fiction: While we may never grow forests out of our bodies, Ayase has enabled us to experience in her words how doing so might just change society for the brighter." —Eric Margolis, The Japan Times

• Against gendered exploitation.

Birdspeak by Arihia Latham $25
”Let me speak as if a bird
Let me speak of you in our reo as if
your memories have wings”
“A call to and from the wild. It is a call for peace and a call to fight. Latham writes from the mud and moonlight; the caves, craters, and lakes of te taiao. Like the digging bird she uses her pen to claw memories out of the earth—the mundane, the joyful, the worried, the violent, the aching memories—before rinsing them in the awa and holding them up, to make us wonder whose they are; hers or ours.” —Becky Manawatu
”There's so much whakapapa to this book with the ancestors, Arihia’s wha nau, the deep pūrākau in it, and all the kaitiaki manu that fly through the pages. Every poem feels like a karanga, or an oriori, or a patere, or even a spell. Reading my tīpuna in her words feels like coming home.” —Ruby Solly
(Paperback)

From Paper to Platform: How tech giants are redefining news and democracy by Merja Myllylahti $18
While global regulators grapple with tech behemoths such as Google and Facebook through evolving laws and regulations, the New Zealand government has held a laissez-faire stance. In From Paper to Platform, prominent New Zealand media scholar, Merja Myllylahti, scrutinises how major digital platforms exert ever-growing influence over news, journalism, our everyday lives, personal rights and access to information. This analysis provides not only insights into the relentless and pervasive impacts these platforms have on our daily experiences, but also delves into their effects on societal structures and the potential perils for our democratic future. (Paperback)

Landfall 246 edited by Lynley Edmeades $30
Presents the winners of the 2023 Landfall Essay Competition; the 2023 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award ; and the 2023 Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize. Art: Steven Junil Park, Ann Shelton and Wayne Youle; Non-fiction: Aimee-Jane Anderson-O'Connor, Madeleine Fenn, Eliana Gray and Bronwyn Polaschek; Poetry: Jessica Arcus, Tony Beyer, Victor Billot, Cindy Botha, Danny Bultitude, Marisa Cappetta, Medb Charleton, Janet Charman, Cadence Chung, Brett Cross, Mark Edgecombe, David Eggleton, Rachel Faleatua, Holly Fletcher, Jordan Hamel, Bronte Heron, Gail Ingram, Lynn Jenner, Erik Kennedy, Megan Kitching, Jessica Le Bas, Therese Lloyd, Mary Macpherson, Carolyn McCurdie, Kirstie McKinnon, Frankie McMillan, Pam Morrison, Jilly O'Brien, Jenny Powell, Reihana Robinson, Tim Saunders, Tessa Sinclair Scott, Mackenzie Smith, Elizabeth Smither, Robert Sullivan, Catherine Trundle, Sophia Wilson, Marjory Woodfield, Phoebe Wright; Fiction: Pip Adam, Rebecca Ball, Lucinda Birch, Bret Dukes, Zoë Meager, Petra Nyman, Vincent O'Sullivan, Rebecca Reader, Pip Robertson, Anna Scaife, Kathryn van Beek and Christopher Yee; reviews. (Paperback)

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Arita / Table of Contents: Studies in Japanese porcelain by Annina Koivu $110
A beautiful and fascinating large-format book. The art of Japanese porcelain manufacturing began in Arita in 1616. Now, on its 400th anniversary, Arita / Table of Contents charts the unique collaboration between 16 contemporary designers and 10 traditional Japanese potteries as they work to produce 16 highly original, innovative and contemporary ceramic collections rooted in the daily lives of the 21st century. More than 500 illustrations provide a fascinating introduction to the craft and region, while the contemporary collections reveal the unique creative potential of linking ancient and modern masters. (Hardback)

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The Things We Live With: Essays on uncertainty by Gemma Nisbet $37
After her father dies of cancer, Gemma Nisbet is inundated with keepsakes connected to his life by family and friends. As she becomes attuned to the ways certain items can evoke specific memories or moments, she begins to ask questions about the relationships between objects and people. Why is it so difficult to discard some artefacts and not others? Does the power exerted by precious things influence the ways we remember the past and perceive the future? As Nisbet considers her father's life and begins to connect his experiences of mental illness with her own, she wonders whether hanging on to 'stuff' is ultimately a source of comfort or concern. The Things We Live With is a collection of essays about how we learn to live with the 'things' handed down in families which we carry throughout our lives — not only material objects, but also grief, memory, anxiety and depression. It's about notions of home and restlessness, inheritance and belonging — and, above all, the ways we tell our stories to ourselves and other people. (Paperback)

• The things we keep and the memories they inspire.

A Guided Discovery of Gardening: Knowledge, creativity and joy unearthed by Julia Atkinson-Dunn $50
For some, gardening is a mysterious activity involving muck, unfathomable know-how and physical labour. To others, it is a gateway to creativity, well-being and magic. Julia Atkinson-Dunn knows what it is to stand on both sides of this fence and has channeled her discovery of gardening into a book to aid and inspire others in their own.  A Guided Discovery of Gardening is a comprehensive partner in creating a garden, arranged to sweep beginner and progressing gardeners through informative basics to fascinating insights laid bare through Julia's casual, friendly and often personal writing. From introductions to plant types and taking cuttings to valuable tips for home buyers and the curation of seasonally responsive planting. Particularly relevant to temperate regions around the world, rich doses of handy knowledge are intermingled with reflective essays and visual visits to some of her favourite New Zealand gardens, as well as her own. (Flexibound)

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Begin Again: The story of how we got here and where we might go — Our human story, so far by Oliver Jeffers $33
Oliver Jeffers shares a history of humanity and his dreams for its future. Where are we going? With his bold, exquisite artwork, Oliver Jeffers starts at the dawn of humankind following people on their journey from then until now, and then offers the reader a challenge: where do we go from here? How can we think about the future of the human race more than our individual lives? How can we save ourselves? How can we change our story? (Hardback)

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• If you know you are going in the wrong way, what do you do?

Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri $40
A man recalls a summer party that awakens an alternative version of himself. A couple haunted by a tragic loss return to seek consolation. An outsider family is pushed out of the block in which they hoped to settle. A set of steps in a Roman neighbourhood connects the daily lives of the city's myriad inhabitants. This is an evocative fresco of Rome, the most alluring character of all: contradictory, in constant transformation and a home to those who know they can't fully belong but choose it anyway. (Paperback)

Open Up by Thomas Morris $33
Five achingly tender, innovative and dazzling stories of (dis)connection. From a child attending his first football match, buoyed by secret magic, and a wincingly humane portrait of adolescence, to the perplexity of grief and loss through the eyes of a seahorse, Thomas Morris seeks to find grace, hope and benevolence in the churning tumult of self-discovery. (Paperback)
”Heart-hurtingly acute, laugh-out-loud funny, and one of the most satisfying collections I've read for years.'“ —Ali Smith
”This brilliant, funny, unsettling book is a work of deep psychological realism and a philosophical inquiry at the same time. Thomas Morris is a master of the contemporary short story, and the stories in this collection are his best.” —Sally Rooney
”That tonic gift, the sense of truth — the sense of transparency that permits us to see imaginary lives more clearly than we see our own. The tonic comes in large doses in Thomas Morris's short-story collection.” —Irish Times

• There’s a play list.

Night Tribe by Peter Butler $25
Twelve-year-old Toby and his sister Millie, fourteen, are tramping the Heaphy Track with their mother when they go off-track to find an old surveyor’s hut their grandfather used. When their mother breaks her leg in a hidden hole the kids set off back to fetch help. They spend some nights alone, hungry and lost. So far, so ordinary, but there is something strange about the cave they’ve camped next to. A little woman emerges and draws them in with the promise of food and shelter. They enter an underground cavern that is deeper than they first thought and where a whole tribe lives. These people believe in natural law, not human law, and have deliberately hidden away from humans believing that here they can survive a total war or pandemic. The kids are intrigued by the techniques this strange people have used to survive but this is tempered by the growing realisation that the Tribe don’t want them to leave. (Paperback)

Here is Hare by Laura Shallcrass $23
An appealing peek-a-book board book with animal characters. (Board book)

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Juno Loves Legs by Karl Geary $37
Juno loves Legs. She's loved him since their first encounter at school in Dublin, where she fought the playground bullies for him. He feels brave with her, she feels safe with him, and together they feel invincible, even if the world has other ideas. Driven by defiance and an instinctive feeling for the truth of things, the two find their way from the backstreets and city pubs to its underground parties and squats. Here, on the verge of adulthood, they reach a haven of sorts, a breathing space to begin their real lives. Only Legs's might be taking him somewhere Juno can't follow. Set during the political and social unrest of the 1980s, as families struggled to survive and their children struggled to be free, this beautiful, vivid novel of childhood friendship is about being young, being hurt, being seen and, most of all, being loved. (Paperback)
”Juno Loves Legs will haunt you long after you have read it. In gorgeous, effortless prose, Karl Geary bears witness to those who, like his protagonists, are invisible and voiceless. By boldly confronting the darkness, this novel finds the light.” —Gabriel Byrne

Listen: On music, sound, and us by Michel Faber $40
What is going on inside us when we listen? Michel Faber explores two big questions: how we listen to music and why we listen to music. To answer these he considers biology, age, illness, the notion of 'cool', commerce, the dichotomy between 'good' and 'bad' taste and, through extensive interviews with musicians, unlocks some surprising answers. (Paperback)

Lawrence of Arabia: An in-depth glance at the life of a twentieth-century legend by Ranulph Fiennes $42
Co-opted by the British military, archaeologist and adventurer Thomas Edward Lawrence became involved in the 1916 Arab Revolt, fighting alongside guerilla forces, and made a legendary 300-mile journey through blistering heat. He wore Arab dress, and strongly identified with the people in his adopted lands. By 1918, he had a £20,000 price on his head.  (Paperback)

• A difficult man to photograph.

A new book is a promise of good times ahead. Click through for your copies:

Our Strangers by Lydia Davis $45
Lydia Davis is a virtuoso at detecting the seemingly casual, inconsequential surprises of daily life and pinning them for inspection. In Our Strangers, conversations are overheard and misheard, a special delivery letter is mistaken for a rare white butterfly, toddlers learning to speak identify a ping-pong ball as an egg and mumbled remarks betray a marriage. In the glow of Davis's keen noticing, strangers can become like family and family like strangers. (Hardback)
”This is a writer as mighty as Kafka, as subtle as Flaubert and as epoch-making, in her own way, as Proust.” —Ali Smith
”Davis captures words as a hunter might and uses punctuation like a trap. Davis is a high priestess of the startling, telling detail, a most original and daring mind.” —Colm Toibin

• A feat of omission.

• Writing and revision.

• Not worried about fame and glory.

A Shining by Jon Fosse (translated from Nynorsk by Damion Searles) $26
A man starts driving without knowing where he is going. He alternates between turning right and left, and finally he gets stuck at the end of a forest road. Soon it gets dark and starts to snow, but instead of going back to find help, he ventures, foolishly, into the dark forest. Inevitably, the man gets lost, and as he grows cold and tired, he encounters a glowing being amid the obscurity. (Paperback)
”A Shining can be read in many ways: as a realistic monologue; as a fable; as a Christian-inflected allegory; as a nightmare painstakingly recounted the next morning, the horror of the experience still pulsing under the words, though somewhat mitigated by the small daily miracle of daylight. I think the great splendour of Fosse’s fiction is that it so deeply rejects any singular interpretation; as one reads, the story does not sound a clear singular note, but rather becomes a chord with all the many possible interpretations ringing out at once. This refusal to succumb to the solitary, the stark, the simple, the binary – to insist that complicated things like death and God retain their immense mysteries and contradictions – seems, in this increasingly partisan world of ours, a quietly powerful moral stance.’” —Lauren Groff
”Fosse’s prose doesn’t speak so much as witnesses, unfolds, accumulates. It flows like consciousness itself. This is perhaps why A Shining feels so momentous, even at fewer than 50 pages. You never quite know where you’re going. But it doesn’t matter: you want to follow, to move in step with the rhythm of these words.” —Matthew Janney

• Find out more about Fosse.

Hangman by Maya Binyam $40
A man returns home to sub-Saharan Africa after twenty-six years living in exile in America. When he arrives, he finds that he doesn't recognise the country or anyone in it. Thankfully, someone at the airport knows him — a man who calls him brother. As they travel to this man's house, the purpose of his visit comes into focus: he is here to find his real brother, who is dying. In Hangman, Maya Binyam tells the story of this twisted odyssey, and of the phantoms and tricksters, aid workers and taxi drivers, the relatives, riddles and strangers that lead this man along a circuitous path towards the truth. Hangman is a strangely honest story of one man's stubborn search for refuge — in this world and the one that lies beyond it. (Hardback)
”Hangman beckons you into a zone that at first seems as clear, as blank, and as eerily sunny as the pane of a window. Then it traps you there, until you notice the blots, bubbles, and fissures in the glass — and then the frame itself, then the shatter. A clean, sharp, piercing — and deeply political — novel.” —Namwali Serpell

• Diaspora and forgetting.

• For your eyes only.

This Plague of Souls by Mike McCormack $40

The long-awaited next novel from the Goldsmiths Prize-winning author of Solar Bones. How do you rebuild the world? How do you put it back together? Nealon returns to his family home in Ireland for the first time in years, only to be greeted by 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. Part roman noir, part metaphysical thriller, This Plague of Souls is a story for these fractured times, dealing with how we might mend the world and the story of a man who would let the world go to hell if he could keep his family together..(Hardback)
”This is the reason Mike McCormack is one of Ireland's best-loved novelists; he is the most modestly brilliant writer we have. His delicate abstractions are woven from the ordinary and domestic — both metaphysical and moving, McCormack's work asks the big questions about our small lives.” —Anne Enright

• A man without a hat.

• “If I have one gift as a writer, it’s patience.”

• A sharp clip around the year.

• Read Thomas’s review of Solar Bones.

Forgotten Manuscript by Sergio Chejfec (translated from Spanish by Jeffrey Lawrence) $38
"Could anyone possibly believe that writing doesn't exist? It would be like denying the existence of rain." The perfect green notebook forms the basis for Sergio Chejfec's work, collecting writing, and allowing it to exist in a state of permanent possibility, or, as he says, "The written word is also capable of waiting for the next opportunity to appear and to continue to reveal itself by and for itself." This same notebook is also the jumping off point for this essay, which considers the dimensions of the act of writing (legibility, annotation, facsimile, inscription, typewriter versus word processor versus pen) as a way of thinking, as a record of relative degrees of permanence, and as a performance. From Kafka through Borges, Nabokov, Levrero, Walser, the implications of how we write take on meaning as well worth considering as what we write. This is a love letter to the act of writing as practice, bearing down on all the ways it happens (cleaning typewriter keys, the inevitable drying out of the bottle of wite-out, the difference between Word Perfect and Word) to open up all the ways in which "when we express our thought, it changes." (Paperback)
"It is hard to think of another contemporary writer who, marrying true intellect with simple description of a space, simultaneously covers so little and so much ground.” —Times Literary Supplement

• Other contemporary Latin American literature published by Charco Press.

Any Body: A comic compendium of important facts and feelings about our bodies by Katharina von der Gathen and Anke Kuhl $30
An honest, humorous and factual book for children and early teens who want to understand and feel at home with their own bodies. Sometimes we feel uncomfortable in our own skin, sometimes invincible. Katharina von der Gathen’s many years of experience working with children as a sex educator are the basis for this witty encyclopedia covering interesting facts about skin, hair and body functions alongside the questions that may affect us through puberty and beyond—gender identity, beauty, consent, self-confidence, how other people react and relate to us, and how they make us feel. With accessible and warm text, Any Body gently acknowledges common feelings of ambivalence about our bodies. Through showing body diversity and positivity, it encourages acceptance of self and others. The illustrations are relatably funny and include charts, cartoons and more—even a handy page of visual compliments. This compendium is an encouraging starting point for conversations with children navigating puberty and laying the foundations for body acceptance in a straightforward and highly entertaining way.

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• Turn the pages.

The Untamed Thread: Slow stitch to sooth the soul and ignite creativity by Fleur Woods $50
The Untamed Thread is the story of Fleur Woods’s journey from corporate world to creative life — woven with generous doses of the practical ways you can bring more creativity into your own life. Taking cues from the natural world we wander through Fleur’s contemporary fibre art practice to encourage and support you to find your own creative path. This inspiring creative guide invites you into Fleur’s art studio, near Upper Moutere. Her practice is as untamed as the New Zealand landscape that inspires her, free of rules, guided by intuition and joy in the process. Together we explore colour, texture, flora, textiles and stitch alongside the magic moments, happy accidents, perfect coincidences and ridiculous randomness of the creative process. Embracing the slow, contemplative nature of stitch we can reconnect our creative spirits to reimagine embroidery as a contemporary tool for mark making. This book wraps you in a warm blanket of nostalgia, grounds you in nature and inspires your senses to allow you to travel down your own creative path gathering all the precious little details meant for you along the way. (Flexibound)

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Marigold and Rose: A fiction by Louise Glück $44
The twins, Marigold and Rose, in their first year, begin to piece together the world as they move between Mother’s stories of ‘Long, long ago’ and Father’s ‘Once upon a time’. Impressions, repeated, begin to make sense. The rituals of bathing and burping are experienced differently by each. The story is about beginnings, each of which is an ending of what has come before. There is comedy in the progression, the stages of recognition, and in the ironic anachronisms which keep the babies alert, surprised, prescient and resigned. Charming, resonant, written with Gluck’s characteristic poise and curiosity, Marigold and Rose unfolds as a new kind of creation myth. "Marigold was absorbed in her book; she had gotten as far as the V." So begins Marigold and Rose, Louise Gluck's astonishing chronicle of the first year in the life of twin girls. Imagine a fairy tale that is also a multigenerational saga; a piece for two hands that is also a symphony; a poem that is also, in the spirit of Kafka's ‘The Metamorphosis’, an incandescent act of autobiography.

To the Ice by Thomas Tidholm and Anna-Clara Tidholm $28
Ida, Max and Jack go to the creek one winter’s day. They play on an ice floe then find themselves floating away—all the way to the polar ice, with just a box, a branch and some sandwiches. “You probably don’t think it’s true, and we didn’t either, not even while it was happening.” They find an old hut, meet penguins, see extraordinary things and, after testing their resources in this dramatic land of ice and snow, come home safe at the end of the day. “What shall we say about where we’ve been?” asked Max. “Tell the truth,” I said. “We don’t know.” (Hardback)

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• Turn the pages.

Dialogue with a Somnambulist: Stories, essays, and a portrait gallery by Chloe Ardjis $36
Renowned internationally for her lyrically unsettling novels Book of Clouds, Asunder and Sea Monsters, the Mexican writer Chloe Aridjis crosses borders in her writing as much as in life. Now, collected here for the first time, her stories, essays and pen portraits reveal an author as imaginatively at home in the short form as in her longer fiction. Conversations with the presences who dwell on the threshold of waking and reverie, these pieces will stay with you long after the lamps have flickered out. At once fabular and formally innovative, acquainted with reverie and rigorous report, sensitive to the needs of a wider ecology yet familiar with the landscapes of the unconscious, her texts are both dream dispatches and wayward word plays infused with the pleasure and possibilities of language. In this collection of works, we meet a woman guided only by a plastic bag drifting through the streets of Berlin who discovers a nonsense-named bar that is home to papier-mâché monsters and one glass-encased somnambulist. Floating through space, cosmonauts are confronted not only with wonder and astonishment, but tedium and solitude. And in Mexico City, stray dogs animate public spaces, “infusing them with a noble life force.” In her pen portraits, Aridjis turns her eye to expats and outsiders, including artists and writers such as Leonora Carrington, Mavis Gallant, and Beatrice Hastings. (Paperback)

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• Dreamlike paths.

The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A story of crime and consequences in Revolutionary America by John Wood Sweet $40
An account of the first published rape trial in American history and its long, shattering aftermath, revealing how much has changed over two centuries — and how much has not. On a moonless night in the summer of 1793 a crime was committed in the back room of a New York brothel — the kind of crime that even victims usually kept secret. Instead, seventeen-year-old seamstress Lanah Sawyer did what virtually no one in US history had done before: she charged a gentleman with rape. Her accusation sparked a raw courtroom drama and a relentless struggle for vindication that threatened both Lanah's and her assailant's lives. The trial exposed a predatory sexual underworld, sparked riots in the streets, and ignited a vigorous debate about class privilege and sexual double standards. The ongoing conflict attracted the nation's top lawyers, including Alexander Hamilton, and shaped the development of American law. Eventually, Lanah Sawyer did succeed in holding her assailant accountable — but at a terrible cost to herself. (Paperback)

Artichoke to Zucchini: An alphabet of delicious things from around the world by Alice Oehr $30
A is for artichokes and long spears of asparagus. It's for bright, creamy avocados and salty little anchovies… From apple pie to zeppole, and everything in between, Artichoke to Zucchini introduces young readers to fruit, vegetables, and dishes from around the globe. Full of tasty favourites and delicious new discoveries, it's sure to lead to inspiration in the kitchen!

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