NEW RELEASES
Never Did the Fire by Diamela Eltit (translated by Daniel Hahn) $36
Never Did the Fire unfolds in the humdrum of everyday working class existence, making the afterlife of an agitator that of anyone living next door. For one old couple, brought together years ago in an underground cell, the revolution has ended in a small apartment, a grinding job caring for the bodies of the unwell well-to-do, and all the aches and pains that go with a long life and a long marriage. Untethered from the political action that defined them, and mourning the loss of their child, their bonds dissolve, but the consequences of their former life, and their dependence on each other, won't let them go. A literary icon in Chile and a major figure in the anti-Pinochet resistance, Diamela Eltit is at the height of her powers in this novel of breakdowns. Never Did the Fire evokes the charged air of Chile's violent past, and the burdens it carries into the present-day. What happens, when the structures we built, and the ones we succumbed to, no longer offer us any comfort or prospect of salvation?
In Catching Fire, the translation of Diamela Eltit's Never Did the Fire unfolds in real time as a conversation between works of art, illuminating both in the process. The problems and pleasures of conveying literature into another language — what happens when you meet a pun? a double entendre? — are met by translator Daniel Hahn's humour, deftness, a deep appreciation for what sets Eltit's work apart, and his evolving understanding of what this particular novel is trying to do. The book offers superb insight into the process of translation.
Stuart won the 2020 Booker Prize for Shuggie Bain, and the new book is said to be even better. Set in an area of 1990s Glasgow knocked hard by unemployment, alcohol, Margaret Thatcher and violence, Young Mungo is a story of a family under stress but also of love and of romantic and sexual awakening.
>>"Stuart is a genius."
The author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space. Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics firmly rooted in the reality of our current moment.
“One of Mandel’s finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet.” —The New York Times
"What a nation or society chooses to remember and forget speaks to its contemporary priorities and sense of identity. Understanding how that process works enables us to better imagine a future with a different, or wider, set of priorities." History has rarely felt more topical or relevant as, all across the globe, nations have begun to debate who, how and what they choose to remember and forget. In this BWB Text addressing ‘difficult histories’, a team of five researchers, several from iwi invaded or attacked during the nineteenth-century New Zealand Wars, reflect on these questions of memory and loss locally.
>>Remembering and forgetting difficult histories.
>>Remembering and forgetting difficult histories.
In northern India, an 80-year-old woman slips into a deep depression at the death of her husband, then resurfaces to gain a new lease of life. Her determination to fly in the face of convention confuses her bohemian daughter, who is used to thinking of herself as the more ‘modern’ of the two. To her family’s consternation, Ma then insists on travelling to Pakistan, confronting the unresolved trauma of her teenage experiences of Partition.
"Despite its serious themes, Geetanjali Shree’s light touch and exuberant wordplay ensures that Tomb of Sand remains constantly playful — and utterly original." —Judges' commendation on short-listing the book for the 2022 International Booker Prize
A visual essay, a poem, a study of Princess Diana, image, celebrity and identity. Leanne Shapton has painted Princess Diana from the hundreds of photographs of her getting out of cars, examining her iconography and meaning in gesture and form. In Cars: On Diana is about photography, celebrity, identity, facsimile, and where to hold the beheld. It is also an obsessive and loving collection of studies, abstracted and haunting.
"Leanne Shapton is one of the most broadly creative and gifted people at work today; a true artist, both visual and verbal." —David Rakoff
"Leanne Shapton writes with such curiosity ruefulness intelligence and grace.' —Sheila Heti
"A strange and evocative poem, nesting in a sequence of paintings, both the art and the words examining Diana having her photograph taken getting out of cars — each path taking us inevitably to the final car ride. Like a gentler, kinder, J. G. Ballard, Leanne takes us on a journey into cars and iconography and the spirit of ecstasy." — Neil Gaiman
>>"We're on a definite warped thing."
>>The desire to always go bigger.
Cain's Jawbone by 'Torquemada' [Edward Powys Mathers] $23
>>The desire to always go bigger.
Six murders. One hundred pages. Millions of possible combinations... but only one is correct. Can you solve Torquemada's murder mystery? In 1934, the Observer's cryptic crossword compiler, Edward Powys Mathers (a.k.a. Torquemada), released a novel that was simultaneously a murder mystery and the most fiendishly difficult literary puzzle ever written. The pages have been printed in an entirely haphazard order, but it is possible — through logic and intelligent reading — to sort the pages into the only correct order, revealing six murder victims and their respective murderers. Only three puzzlers have ever solved the mystery of Cain's Jawbone: do you have what it takes to join their ranks?
Warning: This puzzle is extremely difficult and not for the faint-hearted.
It is the winter following the summer they met. A couple, Bell and Sigh, move into a remote house in the Irish countryside with their dogs. Both solitary with misanthropic tendencies, they leave the conventional lives stretched out before them to build another—one embedded in ritual, and away from the friends and family from whom they've drifted. They arrive at their new home on a clear January day and look up to appraise the view. A mountain gently and unspectacularly ascends from the Atlantic, "as if it had accumulated stature over centuries. As if, over centuries, it had steadily flattened itself upwards." They make a promise to climb the mountain, but—over the course of the next seven years—it remains unclimbed. We move through the seasons with Bell and Sigh as they come to understand more about the small world around them, and as their interest in the wider world recedes.
>>"I will probably live to see the end of the world."
>>"I will probably live to see the end of the world."
With its diverse cuisine and intriguing culinary history, Portugal is a focus for food lovers worldwide. Portugal: The Cookbook gathers together over 550 recipes from every region of the country, including fish and shellfish dishes from the Algarve coast, hearty stews from the Douro Valley, and the famous pastries of Lisbon.
>>Delicious.
Unorthodox devotions have seen Prince Philip deified on a small island in the South Pacific, while a National Geographic article elevated Haille Selassie from Emperor toMessiah. Unlikely Gods blossomed in India, where British officers and bureaucrats found themselves at the centre of new religions. When Spanish explorers landed in the New World they spoke with the natives and heard the word 'God' on their lips. These transformations have attended on moments of emancipation and rebellion; they have excused enslavement and fuelled revolution. Spanning the globe and five centuries, Accidental Gods is a revelatory history of the unwanted divine, which tells the stories of the men and women who have profited and suffered from these curious apotheoses. In its bravura final part, Subin traces the colonial desire for deification through to the creation of 'race' and the white power movement today, and argues that it is time we rid ourselves of the 'White Gods' among us.
From 1927 to 1933, Walter Benjamin wrote and presented more than eighty broadcasts over the new medium of radio. Radio Benjamin gathers, for the first time in English, the surviving transcripts. This eclectic collection shows the range of Benjamin's thinking and includes stories for young and old, plays, readings, book reviews, a novella, and discussions of topics ranging from finding a job to the architecture of Berlin to an account of the railway disaster at the Firth of Tay. Now in paperback.
Nistisima: The secret to delicious vegan cooking from the Mediterranean and beyond by Georgina Hayden $55
Nistisima means 'fasting food' — food traditionally eaten during lent and other times of fasting observed by those of Orthodox faith. Mostly this involves giving up meat and dairy and instead using vegetables, pulses and grains to create easy, delicious dishes that all just happen to be vegan. In this book, Hayden draws on the history and culture around nistisimo cooking in the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Eastern Europe to share the simple, nutritious and flavour-packed recipes at the heart of the practice.
It is a little over a decade since Fiona Kidman wrote her last volume of memoir. But her story did not end on its last page; instead her life since has been busier than ever, filled with significant changes, new writing and fascinating journeys. From being a grandmother to becoming a widow, from the suitcase-existence of book festivals to researching the lives and deaths of Jean Batten and Albert Black, she has found herself in new territory and viewed the familiar with fresh eyes. She takes us with her to Paris and Pike River, to Banff, Belfast and Bangkok, searching for houses in Hanoi and Hawera, reliving her past in Waipu and experiencing a stint in Otago.
Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books — selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude — have been described as virtuoso performances, and small masterpieces. From Highgate Cemetery to the interior of a psychiatric hospital, from Tottenham Court Road to the icebergs of Antarctica, Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? is an interrogation of universal experience from a very particular psyche: original, opinionated — and mordantly funny. With an afterword by her daughter, Chloe Diski, this is a must-have for essay lovers everywhere. Now in paperback. Recommended.
"Diski expanded notions about what nonfiction, as an art form, could do and could be." —New Yorker
When first published in 1970, The Uses of Disorder was a call to arms against the deadening hand of urban planning upon the thriving chaotic city. Written in the aftermath of the 1968 student uprising in the US and Europe, it demands a reimagination of the city and how class, city life and identity combine. Too often, this leads to divisions, such as the middle class flight to the suburbs, leaving the inner cities in desperate straits. In response, Sennett offers an alternative image of a dense, disorderly, overwhelming cities that allow for change and the development of community. Fifty years later this book is as essential as it was when it first came out, and remains an inspiration to architects, planners and urban thinkers everywhere.
There is a world hidden underneath this great city... The London Silver Vaults — for well over a century, the largest collection of silver for sale in the world. It has more locks than the Bank of England and more cameras than a celebrity punch-up. Not somewhere you can murder someone and vanish without a trace — only that's what happened. The disappearing act, the reports of a blinding flash of light and memory loss amongst the witnesses all make this a case for Detective Constable Peter Grant and the Special Assessment Unit. Alongside their boss DCI Thomas Nightingale, the SAU find themselves embroiled in a mystery that encompasses London's tangled history, foreign lands and, most terrifying of all, the North! And Peter must solve this case soon because back home his partner Beverley is expecting twins any day now. But what he doesn't know is that he's about to encounter something -—and somebody — that nobody ever expects.
Dementia, heart failure and cancer are now the leading causes of death in industrialised nations, where life expectancy is mostly above 80. A century ago, life expectancy was about 50 and people died mainly from infectious diseases. In the Middle Ages, death was mostly caused by famine, plague, childbirth and war. In the Palaeolithic period, where our species spent 95% of its time, we frequently died from violence and accidents. Causes of death have changed irrevocably across time. In the course of a few centuries we have gone from a world where disease or violence were likely to strike anyone at any age, and where famine could be just one bad harvest away, to one where in many countries excess food is more of a problem than a lack of it. Why is this? Why don't we die from scurvy or smallpox any more? And why are heart attacks, Alzheimer's and cancer so prevalent today? This Mortal Coil explains why we died in the past, the reasons we die now and how causes of death are about to profoundly change.
Explores the idea that all of us have different perspectives and opinions in life. This Aotearoa picture book for young children explores the wonder of nature and shows the importance of listening and respecting other opinions, even when we see things differently.
Welcome to the Witherward, and to a London that is not quite like the one we know. Here, it's summertime in February, the Underground is a cavern of wonders and magic fills the streets. But this London is a city divided, split between six rival magical factions, each with their own extraordinary talents – and the alpha of the Changelings, Gedeon Ravenswood, has gone rogue, threatening the fragile accords that have held London together for decades. Ilsa is a shapeshifting Changeling who has spent the first 17 years of her life marooned in the wrong London, where real magic is reviled as the devil's work. Abandoned at birth, she has scratched out a living first as a pickpocket and then as a stage magician's assistant, dazzling audiences by secretly using her Changeling talents to perform impossible illusions. When she's dragged through a portal into the Witherward, Ilsa finally feels like she belongs. But her new home is on the brink of civil war, and Ilsa is pulled into the fray. The only way to save London is to track down Gedeon, and he just so happens to be Ilsa's long-lost brother, one of the last surviving members of the family who stranded her in the wrong world. Beset by enemies on all sides, surrounded by supposed Changeling allies wearing faces that may not be their own, Ilsa must use all the tricks up her sleeve simply to stay alive.
Ways of Looking at Art: 50 cards to shift your perspective by Martin Jackson and George Wylesol $30
Transform your relationship to art with fifty illustrated prompts. Rethink how you see. Each card offers a different way of looking at anything from graffiti to sculpture, painting to tapestry. Have a fresh encounter with whatever artwork comes your way.
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