NEW RELEASES
A few books just out of the carton that we think you'll like.
Click through to find out more, and to reserve or purchase copies from our website,
"I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden."
Seven stories of men choosing loneliness as a way of avoiding pain, even if it brings them close to self-erasure. Contains all your favourite Murakami signatures (cats, pasta, baseball, music, mysterious women).
>> The playlist for this book.
Another remarkable novel from the author of HHhH. What if the death of Roland Barthes in 1980 was not an accident but an assassination? What if the cultural theorist's death of the was part of an international intrigue, involving the use of language as an irresistible convincer (its ultimate 'seventh function'). Police Captain Jacques Bayard and his reluctant accomplice Simon Herzog set off on a global chase that takes them from the corridors of power and academia to seedy back streets. Both brainy and fun.
"This is a novel that establishes Laurent Binet as the clear heir to the late Umberto Eco, writing novels that are both brilliant and playful, dense with ideas while never losing sight of their need to entertain. The 7th Function of Language is one of the funniest, most riotously inventive and enjoyable novels you’ll read this year." - Guardian
The short fable-like tales from this Syrian writer often have sly morals or sharp comments about politics or society. Personified objects find they have a lot to tell us.
"Elegant masterpieces of compression, fables worth of Kafka: swamps and streams, lightning and dogs all play a part in these beguiling, suggestive fables. These stories are of perfect length, but one wishes the book went on for much longer." - Kirkus
Two enthusiasts form a society for the minute appreciation of recorded music. The society becomes unexpectedly popular, and a schism develops in the ranks. "A spectacularly disingenuous exploration of power, fanaticism and really, really good records." An Animal Farm with turntables, perhaps.
Our built environments are expressions of the way we think, and, in turn, they shape the way we think. This interesting book help us to consider the psychological effects of city living, and the forces at play in our constructed habitats.
In June 1819 Henri Beyle (aka Stendhal) is rejected by the woman he loves. Beyle finds himself stranded in an afterlife populated by tourists, shoplifters and characters in novels he hasn't yet written. Footnoting a host of other writers, An Overcoat is an obsessional play upon the life and work of one of the founders of the modern novel.
"An Overcoat takes intellection as seriously as, say, being able to make a three-point turn in traffic; perhaps less so. This is the book’s charm, and possibly its point. It’s a mind at play, and Boyle’s silly pseudonym is a deliberate act of self-sabotage – as well as a nod to Stendhal’s fondness for different identities. I can’t think of a wittier, more engaging, stylistically audacious, attentive and generous writer working in the English language right now." - Nicholas Lezard , Guardian
The author of Remainder and the Booker-shortlisted Satin Island presents a selection of his essays, many of which appeared in The Believer, London Review of Books and elsewhere, on, among other things, Laurence Sterne, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Kathy Acker, London weather, Gerhard Richter, David Lynch, and Sonic Youth.
"Reading Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish is like receiving a map of all the space that art, literature and culture have carved out for each other. This is the kind of book that deepens your appreciation of the subjects you've previously encountered, and send you to seek out the ones you haven't." - Publishers Weekly
Short stories from the world of Argentine Gothic: sharp-toothed children; women racked by desire; demons lurking beneath the river; stolen skulls and secrets half-buried under Argentina's terrible dictatorship.
"Hits with the force of a freight train." - Dave Eggers
As astounding graphic novel recounting the fate of Doctors Without Borders administrator Christophe Andre, who was kidnapped by armed men in Chechnya and taken away to an unknown destination in the Caucasus in 1997.
"Another reason why Delisle must be counted as one of the greatest cartoonists of our age." - Guardian
When it was issued in 1856, it cost a penny. In 2014, this tiny square of faded red paper known as the one-cent magenta sold at Sotheby’s for nearly $US9.5 million, the highest amount ever paid for a postage stamp at auction. One-cent magentas were provisional stamps, printed in British Guiana when a shipment of official stamps from London failed to arrive. They were intended for periodicals, and most were thrown out. But one stamp survived. It has had only nine owners since a 12-year-old Scottish boy discovered it in 1873 (and sold it for what would be $17 today).
Some of the most haunting and anomalous fiction of the 20th century belongs to these two modes. The Weird and the Eerie are closely related but distinct modes, each possessing its own distinct properties. Both have often been associated with Horror, yet this emphasis overlooks the aching fascination that such texts can exercise. The Weird and the Eerie both fundamentally concern the outside and the unknown, which are not intrinsically horrifying, even if they are always unsettling. Perhaps a proper understanding of the human condition requires examination of liminal concepts such as the weird and the eerie. Includes consideration of the work of H. P. Lovecraft, H. G. Wells, M.R. James, Christopher Priest, Joan Lindsay, Nigel Kneale, Daphne Du Maurier, Alan Garner, Margaret Atwood, Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer and Christoper Nolan.
Numbers are infinitely extensive but also infinitely divisible. Can one sort of infinity be said to be larger than another?
When Rene Hargreaves is billeted to Starlight Farm as a Land Girl, far from the city where she grew up, she finds farmer Elsie Boston and her country ways strange at first. Yet over the months Rene and Elsie come to understand and depend on each other and soon can no longer imagine a life apart. But a visitor from Rene's past threatens the life they have built together, a life that has always kept others at a careful distance.
Hold, a Welsh fisherman, Grzegorz, a Polish migrant worker, and Stringer, an Irish gangster, all want the chance to make their lives better. One kilo of cocaine and the sea tie them together in a fatal series of decisions and reactions.
During World War 2, Brecht took photographs from newspapers and magazines and captioned them with an epigraph in verse in a singular attempt to deconstruct propaganda and show the miseries of war for the ordinary person.
>> Mother Courage.
The story of Europe and its people through its genetic legacy, from the first wave of immigration to the present day, weaving in the latest archaeological findings, genetic sequencing and new evidence of prehistoric migrations.
Examines the confluence of religious and secular antiauthoritarian thought that did much to set the groundwork such remarkable twentieth century thinkers as Martin Buber, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukacs.
Viet Thanh Nguyen offers a haunting piece of fiction about those fleeing Vietnam after the war. Rabih Alameddine leaves his mother's Beirut apartment to connect with Syrian refugees who are rebuilding a semblance of normalcy, even beauty. Nir Baram takes us on a journey to the West Bank. Gerald Murnane celebrates winning a literary prize named after his home town. Danez Smith explores everyday alienation in a poem about an encounter at a bus stop. Kerri Arsenault returns to the ailing mill town where she grew up. Xiaolu Guo reflects on her childhood in a remote Chinese fishing village.
Essays on Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg and Chagall, and on the Jews under Stalin and of the 'remnants of a race' after Hitler, as well as on the causes and results of Zionism.
"Exceedingly vivid." - TLS
12-year-old Jack's family is caring for off-the-rails 14-year-old Joseph. The two boys set off in the middle winter to find the baby Joseph has fathered.
"Beautiful, tragic and heartbreaking." - Guardian, 'The Best New Children's Books'
"Schmidt uses beautifully sparse language to tell a big story. This is a punchy and emotional book which will draw you in then spit you out crying at the end." - Scotsman
From the first diagnosis 75 years ago to the latest scientific discoveries and difference activism, the history of autism is inseparable from the history of the non-autistic. This book does much to include the experiences of the autistic, parents and doctors, and will help towards a new understanding and acceptance.
Very Fordian in its perceptions and texture, Ford's memoir of his parents, whose lives were considerably altered by his arrival, is a considered portrait of mid-twentieth century American life.
"Ford is possessed of a writer's greatest gifts: pure vocal grace, quiet humour, precise and calm observation. Ford's language is of the cracked, open spaces and their corresponding places within." - Lorrie Moore
>> A good memory is not always a good thing.
A novel exploring the last months of Mulgan's life, leading up to his suicide in Cairo in 1945. Although Man Alone had been published in 1939, almost the entire print run was destroyed in the London blitz and Mulgan never knew the place the book would hold in the New Zealand literary landscape.
A mountain-climbing accident, a petrol-head neighbour, a troubled little brother - what boy wouldn't prefer the company of Greek gods, astronomers and his best friend, Attila the Pun?
The latest in the excellent Hogarth Shakespeare series, rejigging the plays into modern-day novels.
"Chevalier's modern interpretation of Othello deftly explores race relations in the schoolyard in 1970s suburban Washington, and captures how it feels to be an outsider." - Anita Sethi, '2017 Books of the Year'
A novel on an actual literary hoax concocted in 1904: a romantic correspondence between rising young Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jiménez (eventual recipient of the 1956 Nobel Prize) and two Peruvian men pretending to be a young female fan.
"Here's a tale with the subtlest of stings in it, dark wit and telescopic perspective aplenty. And then there's the intoxicating folly of the games that the protagonists play with fantasy and fact, malice, tenderness, ambition, envy and other forces that strike at our most vulnerable selves. I'll be thinking of these characters, what they longed to create and what they managed to despoil, for a long time." - Helen Oyeyemi
How has the Middle East been transformed since the 2003 invasion of Iraq?
>> Sampler.
At the start of the twentieth century, a young girl and her family emigrate from Lithuania in search of a better life in America, only to end up in Ireland by mistake. In 1958, a mute boy locked away in a mental institution outside of Dublin forms an unlikely friendship with a man consumed by the story of the love he lost nearly two decades earlier. And in present-day London, an Irish journalist is forced to confront her conflicting notions of identity and family when her Jewish boyfriend asks her to make a true leap of faith. Three strands weave diverse stories of Jewish immigration to (and from) Ireland.
A woman searching for her estranged husband in a Greek fishing village is revealed to be the ultimate unreliable narrator - how much of what she tells us is true?
>> Writing ugly.
Technological transhumanism is causing us to rethink what it means to be human and is enabling us to rethink old problems in new ways.
"A beautifully written powerhouse of a novel that defies all expectations." - Independent
A gentle graphic novel about a lonely man whose life revolves around visiting art galleries, painting copies of artworks in his room and thinking about the woman in the apartment blcok opposite, but who can make no real contact with others.
"This beautiful, moving book isn't only about what it is like to be too much alone; to turn its almost wordless pages is briefly to replicate the experience. The deafening silence of its frames are at moments as crushing as lead. This book's emotional and visual economy is extraordinary, Gijsemans showing such (precocious) daring when he devotes six, nine, even 12 frames to the smallest ceremonies. His drawings, washed out but somehow lush, too, are so tender and telling." - Rachel Cooke, Guardian
One of history's most tragic and inspiring love stories, that of the academically brilliant Heloise and her equally brilliant and unconventional tutor Peter Abelard, is treated from Heloise's perspective in this novel for adults by this New Zealand author.
Starting with contemporary sources, the legends surrounding this remarkable woman, who flourished at the turn of the fifth century in Alexandria, have threatened to obscure the facts. Booth compares the stories with the evidence.
>> Hypatia's death (2009).
On the outskirts of South Korea's glittering metropolis is a place few people know about, a vast landfill site called Flower Island. Populated by those driven from the city by poverty, is it here that 14-year-old Bugeye and his mother arrive, following his father's internment in a 're-education camp'.
The third decade issue of Granta's selection of the most exciting younger voices in American fiction.
>> Who is on the list?
Steve Braunias entered Auckland's Lincoln Road a moderately healthy middle-aged man, and emerged from the other end infused with sugar and saturated in fat, having eaten at every food joint along the strip. Never shying from a public service, what can we learn from the rigours of his experience? A journey through the belly of New Zealand culture.
>> The difficult birth of the man who ate Lincoln Road.
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