NEW RELEASES
Karolina is a professor of art history who specializes in the portrayal of women at the turn of the 20th century. She’s forty-something, childless, and lives alone in Stockholm — in a smaller apartment and crummier neighbourhood than those she recently shared with her partner of 11 years, Karl Johan. For someone outwardly so successful, why does she feel such a failure? For someone seemingly so liberated, why does she feel so constrained?
"Intelligent, impassioned, and compelling, Bohman explores complex inner worlds with great sensitivity and insight." - Kirkus
A novel in which a 19-year-old woman leaves her West Midlands home and travels through the frozen wilderness of the Arctic Circle by foot, husky sled and commercial fishing boats, on across the entire breadth of the American continent and finally to a lonely cabin in the wilds, exploring ideas about wilderness and womanhood as she goes.
"Unlike any published work I have read, in ways that are beguiling and audacious, this book rises to its own challenges in engaging intellectually as well as wholeheartedly with its questions about gender, genre and the concept of wilderness. The novel displays wide reading, clever writing and amusing dialogue." - Sarah Moss, Guardian
Eighty-year-old Herra Bjornsson lives alone in a garage with her laptop, an oxygen tank and her father's old hand grenade. Neglected by her family, she spends her days spying on her children by hacking their emails and preparing to lose the race against the ticking time bomb of lung cancer, even making an appointment for her own cremation. As she counts down her final days, Herra looks back at her own remarkable life. Her happy childhood in Iceland was disrupted by the outbreak of war and her father's fervent love of Hitler. Shipped off to supposed safety, Herra spent the war trekking alone across war-torn Europe in a desperate bid to survive. Funny and sad.
"Bridget Kendall is renowned for her coverage of the Soviet Union. In her understanding of Russia she has few peers. Her collection of first-hand stories of the experience of the Cold War is chilling, powerful and important. These memories are the more compelling for being placed with her own experience and knowledge of those grim days." - Jonathan Dimbleby
An interview with the last speaker of a language. A chronicle of the final seven days of a town that is about to be razed to the ground by an invading army. The lonely voyage of an elephant from Kerala to a princess's palace in Morocco. A fabled cook who flavours his food with precious stones. A coterie of international diplomats trapped in near-Earth orbit. Stories from the tradition of the Arabian Nights, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges and Angela Carter.
A single mother with a young child becomes increasingly withdrawn after she moves to a light-filled apartment but finds her life more constrained than liberated. The book covers the first year of her life after her divorce and was originally published in Japan in 1978/79) in monthly installments to match its timeframe.
"Wonderfully poetic. The book has an extraordinary freshness and a Virginia Woolf quality." - Margaret Drabble
What sort of nature writing can be written in the anthropocene - an epoch where everything is being determined by the activities of just one soft-skinned, warm-blooded, short-lived, pedestrian species? How best to make our way through the ruins that we have made? Where is nature? An interesting anthology of responses and speculations from Julia Blackburn, Tessa Hadley, John Burnside, Philip Hoare, Marina Warner, Adam Thorpe, Richard Mabey, Philip Marsden, Helen Macdonald and others.
An intimate glimpse into life in a traditional Venetian neighbourhood (beautifully photographed!), with 130 delicious and achievable recipes of authentic everyday family dishes. Another excellent book from the author of Polpo.
"A timely collection about race and immigration in Paris by one of France’s most revered cult comic book artists. Alagbé uses stark, endlessly inventive black-and-white brushwork to explore love and race, oppression and escape." —Publishers Weekly
"Nègres is one of those works that becomes emblematic not just of its publisher, but of a particular moment in comics. It is a bold and nakedly intense effort to represent the way bereavement may trigger memories, dreams, and rationalization, as well as to describe how, like it or not, family dictates our lives." —The Comics Journal
>> Sample pages.
Three stories in which the past, through nostalgia or through the mindset associated with nostalgia, spills into the present and subtly transforms it. Two of the stories concern a Japanese narrator in France.
Based on a series of lectures given by Ginsberg in 1977, this book gives unparalleled (albeit Ginsbergian) insight into the literary and social revolutionaries who loosened conventions in the 1950s.
"Marvellous. Spellbinding, preserving intact the story of the literary movement Ginsberg led, promoted and never ceased to embody." - The New York Times
>> 'Howl'
>> Ginsberg and Dylan.
>> Silent Beats.
Darlingtron set out to track down all thirteen species of owl endemic in Europe.
"Achingly beautiful." - Guardian
Where do animals live? Young children will learn a lot about the habitats of New Zealand native animals from the pages of this attractively illustrated book. See also: Whose Beak is This? and Whose Feet are These?
Should a recording document reality as faithfully as possible, or should it improve upon or somehow transcend the music it records?
"Very, very, very few books will make you change the way you listen to music. This is one suck book. Read it." - Jarvis Cocker
Also in stock: The World's Din: listening to records, radio and films in New Zealand by Peter Hoar
Gravitational waves - ripples in the fabric of space and time - are unrelenting, passing through barriers that stop light dead.At the two 4-kilometre long LIGO observatories in the US, scientists developed incredibly sensitive detectors, capable of spotting a movement 100 times smaller than the nucleus of an atom. In 2015 they spotted the ripples produced by two black holes spiralling into each other, setting spacetime quivering. What can we learn from this?
Intriguing.
Also available: Ancient Rome on 5 Denarii a Day by Philip Matyszak
In the 1990s, during the turbulent and deeply corrupt years of Alberto Fujimori's presidency in Peru, two wealthy couples of Lima's high society become embroiled in a disturbing vortex of erotic adventures and politically driven blackmail.
Try your hand at making yoghurt, labneh, mozzarella and matured cheeses. Clear and useful.
A fuel tanker crashes during the night on the autobahn outside Berlin, and a wolf is glimpsed as flames illuminate the surroundings. Not seen in the region for a century, the animal becomes a symbol of change that links the lives of disparate individuals and events: a young couple who have been separated, a bloody incident in a speeding car. Lives change as the wolf makes its way through the city.
"The exhilarating narrative is wonderfully concise, and the imagery is intensely cinematic." - Guardian
Two thousand years of female mathematicians feature in this illustrated collective biography.
"I long for the ice. The sharp cut of freezing water on my feet. The immeasurable black of the lake at its coldest. Swimming then means cold, and pain, and elation." Seeking to overcome depression, Lee undertakes to swim 52 German lakes in 52 weeks.
"A lovely, poetic, sensuous and melancholy book." - Irish Examiner
"Turning is many things: a snapshot of Berlin seen through the prism of its lakes; the story of a broken and healing heart; a contemplation of identity; a coming-of-age story." - Guardian
Explore 100 routes around 15 cities as they were at the beginning of the 20th century, and find unexpected stories and a lot of type ornaments.
>> Find out more about Lorenzo Petrantoni's love affair with type ornaments.
Josef is a Jewish boy in 1930s Nazi Germany. With the threat of concentration camps looming, he and his family board a ship bound for the other side of the world. Isabel is a Cuban girl in 1994. With riots and unrest plaguing her country, she and her family set out on a raft, hoping to reach America. Mahmoud is a Syrian boy in 2015. With his homeland torn apart by violence and destruction, he and his family begin a long trek toward Europe. The experience of these three children is remarkably similar.
"Mallory Ortberg has created a Frankenstein's monster of familiar narratives that swings between Terry Pratchett's satirical jocularity and Angela Carter's sinister, shrewd storytelling, and the result is gorgeous, unsettling, splenic, cruel, and wickedly smart. I've never read anything quite like them." - Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
"A wholly satisfying blend of silliness, feminist critique, and deft prose makes this a collection of bedtime stories that will keep you up at night for all the right reasons." - Kirkus
Short-listed for the 2018 Wellcome Prize.
Learn how to prepare classic yakitori and traditional Japanese fish robata dishes such as Miso Black Cod or a selection of vegetarian robata dishes on the unique Japanese charcoal grill.
China’s new nationalism, Robert Bickers says, is rooted not in its present power but in shameful memories of its former weaknesses. Invaded, humiliated, and looted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by foreign powers, China has worked hard to regain its independence, but still looks to the future in terms of this history.
Ascending the throne in 1474 at the age of 23, Isabella began to pull Spain into the Renaissance and to make it a significant power in a modernising and increasingly outward-looking Europe.
A stonemason turned architect turned engineer, Telford (1757-1834) invented the modern road, built churches, harbours, canals, docks, the famously vertiginous Pontcysyllte aqueduct in Wales and the dramatic Menai Bridge. Almost everything he ever built remains in use today.
>>Pontcysyllte aqueduct.
>> The Menai Bridge in 1939.
Fallen behind the sofa, nobody hears the lost marzipan pig's cries for help. After many months, a mouse discovers him and eats him up, having never known such sweetness. A longing to be loved passes from the marzipan pig to the mouse and so begins a curious chain of events featuring a dancing owl, a glowing taxi meter, a buzzing bee and a pinky-orange hibiscus flower.
Really this book ought to at last put to rest all that nonsense about 'male' and 'female' brains. There are just brains - the rest is up to us. Now in paperback.
Winner of the 2017 Royal Society Science Book Prize.
To what extent is the syndrome that makes sailor Kevin Hall believe he is constantly obeying The Director, someone nobody else can see, also responsible for his sporting success? What are the ties between mental illness and other, more celebrated, forms of exceptionality?
Representing safety on dangerous coasts, lighthouses are structures of precise technology standing in the roughest natural locations. This book includes architectural plans and elevations, and period drawings and photographs showing the innovative designs and technologies behind fifty lighthouses built around the world from the 17th to the 20th century. Appealing.
>> Life in a lighthouse.
>> A reassuring lighthouse in a storm (10 hours).
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