THE 'BOOKER DOZEN'

These thirteen excellent books have been long-listed for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. The short list will be announced on 13 September. 

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster       $37
Paul Auster’s first book in seven years, 4 3 2 1, follows the life of Archibald Isaac Ferguson born March 3, 1947. It’s not one life though: this Jewish boy born in Newark has 4 lives. Auster tells the story in parts - four strands - in sliding door style. In each part a fateful event at Archibald's father’s business (a burglary, a fire, a tragic accident and a buyout) leads to a change in circumstances for the family, and Archie’s life is determined by how his immediate family respond. Fate plays her part and Archie’s life is altered. The minutiae of Ferguson’s life are delightfully told and, despite the variations in his circumstances, his characteristics along with those of his immediate family keeps the four strands linked together. 

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry        $37
After signing up for the US army in the 1850s, aged 17, Thomas McNulty and his brother-in-arms, John Cole, go on to fight in the Indian wars and, ultimately, the Civil War. They find these days to be vivid and filled with wonder, despite the horrors they both witness and are complicit in. Their lives are further enriched and endangered when a young Shawnee woman crosses their path, and the possibility of lasting happiness emerges. 
"Days Without End is a work of staggering openness; its startlingly beautiful sentences are so capacious that they are hard to leave behind, its narrative so propulsive that you must move on. In its pages, Barry conjures a world in miniature, inward, quiet, sacred; and a world of spaces and borders so distant they can barely be imagined." - Guardian

History of Wolves by Emily Fridland        $33

Linda, age 14, lives on a dying commune on the edge of a lake in the Midwest of America. She has grown up isolated both by geography and her understanding of the world, and is an outsider at school, regarded as a freak. One day she notices the arrival of a young family in a cabin on the opposite side of the lake. She starts to befriend them, and for the first time she feels a sense of belonging that has been missing from her life. Leo, the father, is a university professor and an enigmatic figure, perpetually absent. When he returns home, Linda is shunned by the family unit. Desperate to be accepted again, she struggles to resume her place in their home and fails to see the oncoming consequences. 
"So much is accomplished here, not least a kind of trust that this writer will make everything count, including the kind of data that is usually left for dead in a story." - Ben Marcus

Exit West by Moshin Hamid          $37
What place is there for love in a world torn by crisis? From the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. 
"Exit West is a novel about migration and mutation, full of wormholes and rips in reality. It is animated by a constant motion between genre, between psychological and political space, and between a recent past, an intensified present and a near future." - The Guardian

Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor                 $35
A teenage girl on holiday has gone missing in the hills at the heart of England. The villagers are called up to join the search, fanning out across the moors as the police set up roadblocks and a crowd of news reporters descends on their usually quiet home. Meanwhile, there is work that must still be done: cows milked, fences repaired, stone cut, pints poured, beds made, sermons written, a pantomime rehearsed. The search for the missing girl goes on, but so does everyday life. One tragedy affects the lives of many people. 
"Absolutely magnificent; one of the most beautiful, affecting novels I've read in years. The prose is alive and ringing. There is so much space and life in every sentence. I don't know how he's done it. It's beautiful." - Eimear McBride 
"McGregor writes with such grace and precision, with love even, about who and where we are, that he leaves behind all other writers of his generation." - Sarah Hall

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack          $23
Written in one long sentence (in which line breaks perform as a higher order of comma), McCormack’s remarkable and enjoyable book succeeds at both stretching the formal possibilities of the novel (for which it was awarded the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize) and in being a gentle, unassuming and thoughtful portrait of a very ordinary life in a small and unremarkable Irish town. The flow of McCormack’s prose sensitively maps the flow of thought, drawing feeling and meaning from the patterning of quotidian detail as the narrator dissolves himself in the memories of which he is comprised. This wash of memory suggests that the narrator may in fact be dead, the narrative being the residue (or cumulation) of his life, the enduring body of attachments, thoughts and feelings that comprise the person. Few novels capture so well the texture of a person’s life, and this has been achieved through a rigorous experiment in form. 

Elmet by Fiona Mozley         $35
A beautifully written novel about the relationship between a family and a landscape after the father's decision to withdraw from society.  
"An impressive elemental, contemporary rural noir steeped in the literature and legend of the Yorkshire landscape and its medieval history." - Guardian
"I already feel like I've won." 

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy         $38
"How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything." Twenty years after The God of Small Things, Roy's second novel braids together many lives and strands as they pass through harm and healing. 
>> "Fiction takes its time."
>> Where do old birds go to die? (an extract from the novel).
>> Roy speaks with Kim Hill.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders      $33
Is this The American Book of the Dead? Abraham Lincoln's 11-year-old son Willie died of typhoid in 1862. This inventive and much-anticipated novel from the author of the Folio Prize-winning Tenth of December has a president, "freshly inclined toward sorrow," driven by grief into communion with the disembodied spirits of the dead in what becomes a meditation on the force of death in personal and collective histories, notably the American Civil War. 
>> Read the review in The New York Times. 
>> Saunders speaks.

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie         $27
Family, society, love and religion clash in this modern reworking of the themes of Antigone. 
"Home Fire left me awestruck, shaken, on the edge of my chair, filled with admiration for her courage and ambition. Recommended reading for prime ministers and presidents everywhere." - Peter Carey 

Autumn by Ali Smith          $26
In a nation divided against itself, who is looking to the future and who to the past, and how is love won and lost?
"Transcendental writing about art, death and all the dimensions of love. It's not so much 'reading between the lines' as being blinded by the light between the lines - in a good way." - Deborah Levy 
"Smith is more valuable than a whole parliament of politicians." - Financial Times 
"Undoubtedly Smith at her best. Puckish, yet elegant; angry, but comforting." - The Times

Swing Time by Zadie Smith          $26
Two brown girls dream of being dancers – but only one has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early 20s, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either.
"Brilliant." - Guardian
"Superb." - Financial Times 
"Virtuosic and breathtaking." - Times Literary Supplement 

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead        $25
A young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia takes the opportunity to escape to the North and freedom aboard the Underground Railroad, which, in this Pulitzer-prize winning novel, is a boxcar railway literally under the ground. A meditation on race and the way that history is perceived. 
"A brutal, vital, devastating novel. This is a luminous, furious, wildly inventive tale that not only shines a bright light on one of the darkest periods of history, but also opens up thrilling new vistas for the form of the novel itself." - Observer


Come and tell us which book you would choose to win the 2017 Man Booker Prize. 

BOOKS @ VOLUME  #39   (2.9.17)

Our latest newsletter (reviews, news, new releases).

Our Book of the Week this week will takes you places that you have never been and to which you are unlikely ever to go (except by opening this book). Judith Schalansky's ATLAS OF REMOTE ISLANDS: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will is a beautifully produced volume that does everything an atlas can do to engage the imagination: the maps of each island are spare and mysterious and beautifully drawn, the text accompanying each delineates fact but, largely due to the incompletely resolved nature of the histories, there is plenty of room for the reader to activate their imagination to occupy the spaces, and the whole book is well and subtly made. The stories of travellers to or inhabitants of these remote spots of land surrounded by vast oceans are stories of loneliness, refuge and utopianism, of human dreams washed up on rocky shores, of the oddities of nature or society that can flourish only away from the masses, either of land or of people. This is a completely absorbing book. 

>> Keep an eye on our FaceBook page this week, for our daily Remote Island of the Day.

>> "You can tell world history by islands. That is why I call them footnotes to the mainland."

>> "Books are not a form of fetishism."

>> Is the appearance of a book as important as its content? 

>> "I don't even trust my own memory."

>> Schalansky goes to an island.

>> And how many bones are there in a giraffe's neck? 

Minicry   {Review by STELLA} In the case of Minicry, smallness is a gem, a very small zine that will fit into your wallet or purse. I suggest you carry a Minicry with you wherever you go. This special limited edition from the Mimicry literary journal team, is printed in three colours (blue, yellow and pink), hand stitched, illustrated by Kate Depree with line drawings of little bits and pieces (a thimble, a leaf, those bread bag tags, a chess piece (notably just a pawn), a reel of cotton, an ant, a screw, a ring… and more) for the endpapers along with specific drawings to illustrate the texts. The writings include an email message, a tweet, some short poems, a headline and a list. The writers include Ashleigh Young, Kirsten McDougall, Courtney Sina Meredith, Henry Cooke and Uther Dean. Each day I have a new favourite page - today it is the email extract from Guy Montgomery “I had my headphones in, Google maps open and no music playing: the perfect crime.”  Only a few pages long, it is surprising how much pleasure this little publication gives - a reminder that it pays to slow down and look at each page with awareness, to read carefully, to explore, think and enjoy. The hand-made aesthetic definitely adds to the pleasure of Minicry, the illustrations are simple yet spot on, and the writing is brief and thoughtful, full of humour and pathos.

Pulse Points by Jennifer Down    {Review by STELLA} Pulse Points could have been named Nerve Endings. Jennifer Down’s short story collection starts quietly, feeling much like many slice-of-life episode tales. It’s not long into the stories that the tempo increases and you are struck by the edginess of these moments. These pulse points. I wondered about the title: why pulse points? As I read on, I felt I was standing beside each protagonist, a silent witness to their loss, despair, realisations and moments of clarity: as a reader taking their pulse - watchful and caring. Often in short stories, the lives of the characters can be fleeting, sometimes forgettable. Down has a knack of making each one count, largely due to her skill at capturing those small moments of anger, self-doubt, love and failing that make us human. There is nothing out of the ordinary here, yet one feels that every moment is special, is defined for just that person, a turning point, a resting point or a moment of connection. In 'Aokigahara' a sister makes a pilgrimage to the final resting place of her brother. The story is evocative and captures the strange forest known as The Sea of Trees, as well as the difficulties of a family dealing with suicide. In 'We Got Used to Here Fast', two siblings are whisked away from their depressive mother to a happier life with their grandparents. On their tedious, long and unsettling journey, they stop for the night in the middle of nowhere, parked in front of a huge satellite dish. Two smaller satellite dishes provide a portal for telling secrets, a connection for Sam and Lally which never falters, despite the hardships that come later in their lives. 'Vox Clamantis' sees Abby having to pretend to be still engaged to the self-centred Johnny. His mother is dying and she is fond of Abby. You sit, on edge, in the car with Johnny, and, like Abby, are riven by both frustration and compassion. These stories are set in both America and Australia, in small towns where characters are simultaneously sucked down, suffocated and protected by the nature of a close community, in cities which are anonymous, free and lonely, and in the suburbs which are safe, yet yell drudgery. The landscapes are rich in emotion and charged with electricity. Yet these dim in comparison to the rawness, the closeness and the sparking dialogue and relationships between the characters, their internal emotional lives, their human failings and achievements, the violence that infiltrates their lives or the sadness that captures them unsuspectingly. These stories at all turns are tragic and tender. Down keeps a fine finger on the pulse.

Such Small Hands by Andrés Barba     {Review by THOMAS} “It was once a happy city: we were once happy girls. It was as if we were all one mouth eating the ham, as if our cheese were all the same cheese: wholesome and creamy and tasting the same to all of us.” When a young girl arrives in an orphanage following the deaths of her parents in a car accident, she brings an unhealable wound into the community of girls. The identity of the group, which had hitherto subsisted in a single collective consciousness begins to differentiate by contact with a new and unassimilable member. “Her first triumph was this: we were no longer all the same. It was as if, in a short space of time, we had all become aware of so many things. Those things hurt, they flowed down like a river from upstairs, where the principal and the adults lived.” The otherness of Marina is both threatening and alluring, hateful and attractive, and as the girls rub up against each other both poles of this ambivalence are potentised without being able to discharge their energy. Such Small Hands is narrated alternately by Marina, her immature mind incapable of accepting the death of her parents and accordingly unable to grieve for them, unable to release the hurt that instead grows and spreads under the surface of the whole orphanage society, bringing awkwardness to what hitherto been facile and unexamined, and by the collective voice of the orphans, desperate to retain the integrity of their undeveloped state, their stifling innocence, and at the same time fascinated by the adult knowledge that Marina represents, the scar on her torso, her familiarity with death (though they also are orphans they are preconscious orphans, ‘natural’ orphans, orphans without specific loss). “Marina had been there watching over our mistake. Everything around her was contaminated, and so were we.” Marina is both one of them and an outsider, a watching eye that divides them, both offering and threatening to pull them into awareness of their individuality (an awareness that cannot be distinguished from an awareness of death). “Now we knew we were inescapably the way we were. It was a discovery you could do nothing with, a discovery that served no purpose.” Awareness of one’s separation from the world is the awareness of trauma, or, more specifically, is the trauma. What we think of as our pleasures are those things that relieve us from the awareness of our not being the world we are aware of. Sports and religion and nationalism reinstate the ‘magical’ group thinking of the undeveloped mind, relieving their adherents from individual identity and individual responsibility. The harmony of the underlying unity, without the individualising angst that comes with self-awareness, will at all costs maintain itself in the face of any threat to its claustrophobic innocence, and will commit whatever atrocity will suppress a developmental threat. When the orphans steal Marina’s doll, also called Marina, which had been given to her by the psychologist, presumably to encourage her to express and release her devastation, they dismember it and return it to her in parts. Later, Marina institutes a nighttime game in which each of the girls takes a turn to be a doll, to be passively undressed and dressed and manipulated and treated as a doll, to be ‘small’, depersonalised, objectified, relieved of individuality to become nothing but the projection and plaything of the group, the ‘other’ completely at its mercy, the vector both of the desire for experience and of the simultaneous desire to unmake or unhave that experience. A game, a ritual, a sport, a sacrifice, a mob: each relieves us of the angst of our individual experience and becomes also the collective expression of that angst. When Marina insists on taking a turn as the doll in the nighttime ritual, her passivity, her objectification, allows the discharge of the contradictory forces, the longing and repulsion, that have threatened the immaturity of the group since her arrival. It is “as if the living were suddenly possessed by a violent covetousness of the dead ones’ peace.” Fascination and destruction can no longer be distinguished from one another: “desire was a big knife and we were the handle.” Barba is convincing in his recreation of the inherently psychotic thinking of childhood (no, this is surely too glib: the progression from childhood is one made against the pull of retrograde ‘psychotic’ forces which are discharged when experienced in adulthood by the psychotic/antipsychotic collective rituals of sport, religion, nationalism and so forth or held at bay by angst), the instability of identity and nausea of aetiological inconstancy that is inherent in the horribleness (as well as in the wonders) of childhood.

A Short History of Decay by E.M. Cioran   {Review by THOMAS} Emil Cioran is the philosopher of personal and collective frailty and failure, of emptiness, of hopelessness, of the eschewing of all answers (“Having resisted the temptation to conclude, I have overcome the mind.”). He rails against society, against both choice and necessity, against all values. I thought I would like him more than I do. Perhaps it is that he trumpets his nihilism, that he shouts out the immanence of our demise from the event horizon of whatever black hole we are heading towards, that his pessimism is, above all, dramatic (does this call its authenticity into question? (I don’t think so)), that makes me tire of him (he should perhaps be read (by me, at least) in small doses). Our differences are perhaps more of temperament than of territory; to me the underlying nullity of existence is more irredeemable than tragic, and I am to a degree suspicious of the heroic trappings and lyricism of his despair. That said, Cioran is an important, interesting (and frequently amusing) thinker, an heir to Nietzsche, and there is much to admire (and be amused by) in his books. His words dissolve civilisation as acetone dissolves paint (that’s got to be a good thing). The contents page of this book reads like the publishing list of an American academic publisher (“Genealogy of Fanaticism – In the Graveyard of Definitions – Civilisation and Frivolity – Supremacy of the Adjective – Apotheosis of the Vague – The Reactionary Angels – Militant Mourning – Farewell to Philosophy – Obsession of the Essential” &c, &c), and the book itself contains enough nihilistic aphorisms to fill a lifetime’s worth of anti-inspirational calendars (now, there’s a publishing project…), for example: “One is ‘civilised’ insofar as one does not proclaim one’s leprosy.” Great stuff. >> Six pleasant minutes with the miserabilist. >> "Without the idea of suicide I would surely have killed myself." >> The Apocalypse according to Cioran.

NEW RELEASES
These interesting books seek shelf-space in your home.

These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy           $21
Jaeggy, whose brief fictions, such as those in I am the Brother of XX, remain as pleasant burrs in the mind long after the short time spent reading them, has here written three brief biographies, of Thomas De Quincey, John Keats and Marcel Schwob, each as brief and effective as a lightning strike and as memorable. Jaeggy is interested in discovering what it was about these figures that made them them and not someone else. By assembling details, quotes, sketches of situations, pin-sharp portraits of contemporaries, some of which, in a few words, will change the way you remember them, Jaeggy takes us close to the membrane, so to call it, that surrounds the known, the membrane that these writers were intent on stretching, or constitutionally unable not to stretch, beyond which lay and lies madness and death, the constant themes of all Jaeggy’s attentions, and, for Jaeggy, the backdrop to, if not the object of, all creative striving. >> Read Thomas's review. 

Belladonna by Daša Drndić      $38
The life and health of a retired psychologist have declined to the extent that he gains insight into the disadvantaged of society and into the forces that oppress them, and also into the faculty of memory that can either liberate or condemn the one who remembers. A novel of Sebaldean scope and resonance. 
>>"There are no small fascisms."  

My Dad Used to Be So Cool by Keith Negley       $28
Why doesn't Dad do all those cool things he used to do? Why did he stop? (Could it be because having a child was somehow cooler?) From the author/illustrator of Tough Guys Have Feelings Too. 

My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent         $35
Turtle lives with her father, Martin - her mother disappeared when she was very little. She struggles at school yet in her internal world she is intelligent - knowledgeable and philosophical. Her home life is controlled and confined by a set of predetermined rules and expectations laid down by her disturbed father: a father who believes that the apocalypse is upon them, a paranoid survivalist who insists he is training his daughter to exist against all odds. "This is a tough, but an incredible, novel that reveals the internal world of damage and explores the psyche of Turtle humanely and honestly. With a remarkable character, a plot that keeps you wired, lyrical writing about relationships and nature, My Absolute Darling is compelling and unsettling." - Stella

Such Small Hands by Andrés Barba        $28
A girl arrives at an orphanage after the deaths of her parents in a car accident. Her presence is a wound to the orphans' idea of themselves, and they also begin to have a disturbing effect upon the incomer. What role does the girl's doll play in the hazards that soon beset the inmates of the orphanage? 
"Barba inhabits the minds of children with an exactitude that seems to me so uncanny as to be almost sinister. Lying behind the shocks is a meditation on language and its power to bind or loosen thought and behaviour. It is about language, wounding, wickedness; but it is also about how fleeting and how vulnerable is the state of childhood innocence – that 'nothing which we are to perceive in this world/equals the power of its intense fragility'." - Sarah Perry, Guardian
>> "All writers have a corpse in their closet."

Paintings in Proust: A visual companion to In Search of Lost Time by Eric Karpeles       $45
A beautifully presented survey of all the artworks mentioned in In Search of Lost Time, with quotes and contextual notes. 

Franklin's Flying Bookshop by Jen Campbell and Katie Harnett        $28
Franklin loves books and he loves reading to children, but people tend to be scared of him because he is a dragon. Fortunately, Luna knows all about dragons from reading many books about them, and the two spend many hours together discussing the books they have read. To share their love of books with others, they decide to open a flying bookshop (good idea). 

Beg, Steal and Borrow: Artists against originality by Robert Shore       $28
If "all art is theft" (Picasso), what can we make of art that deliberately appropriates, subsumes, samples or reconfigures other art? Interesting. 

The Seabird's Cry: The lives and loves of puffins, gannets and other ocean voyagers by Adam Nicolson        $40
At the heart of the book are the Shiant Isles, a cluster of Hebridean islands in the Minch but Nicolson has pursued the birds much further-across the Atlantic, up the west coast of Ireland, to St Kilda, Orkney, Shetland, the Faeroes, Iceland and Norway; to the eastern seaboard of Maine and to Newfoundland, to the Falklands, South Georgia, the Canaries and the Azores - reaching out across the widths of the world ocean which is the seabirds' home. 
"I was entranced - my mind thrilling to the veers and lifts of thought, to the beautiful deftness of the prose. This marvellous book inhabits with graceful ease both the mythic and the scientific, and remains alert to the vulnerability of these birds as well as to their wonder. It is a work that takes wing in the mind." - Robert Macfarlane

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie         $27
Family, society, love and religion clash in this modern reworking of the themes of Antigone. Long-listed for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. 
"Home Fire left me awestruck, shaken, on the edge of my chair, filled with admiration for her courage and ambition. Recommended reading for prime ministers and presidents everywhere." - Peter Carey 

Ostro by Julia Busuttil Nishimura         $50
"My approach to food favours intuition over strict rules and is about using your hands, rushing a little less and savouring the details. It's not food that needs to be placed on a pedestal or admired from afar; it is food that slowly weaves its way into the fabric of your daily life - food for living and sharing."
The online slow food phenomenon has now produced this very beautiful cookbook. Very satisfying - even just to look through. 

Petite Fleur by Ioso Havilio         $30
When a young father kills his over-friendly neighbour and discovers that he is alive again the next day, he repeats the experiment on a regular basis and begins to wonder if he is exempt from the laws of causality. What effect does this have on his relationship with his wife and daughter?
"As vertiginous, airtight and intense as a dream." - Yuri Herrera

The Grammar of Spice by Caz Hildebrand         $45
Explains not only the history of every imaginable sort of spice, but imparts an understanding that enables the reader to use and combine them effectively when cooking. Wonderful illuminated illustrations throughout. 

Aukati by Michalia Arathimos         $38
Alexia is a law student escaping the Greek family that stifles her, and Isaiah is a young Maori returning home to find the family he's lost. Cut loose from their own cultures, they have volunteered to help Isaiah's Taranaki iwi get rid of the fracking that's devastating their land and water. The deeper Alexia and Isaiah go into the fight, the closer they get to understanding the different worlds they inhabit.

The Epic City: The world on the streets of Calcutta by Kushanava Choudhury           $37
Everything that could possibly be wrong with a city was wrong with Calcutta. When Choudhury returned to the city as an adult he found it much unchanged from his childhood, a city of intense localism, very different from the new age of consumption that was revolutionising other Indian cities. Why?
"Beautifully observed and even more beautifully written, The Epic City marks the arrival of a major new talent." - William Dalrymple

The Greedy Queen: Eating with Victoria by Annie Gray        $40
Victoria's appetite for life was expressed in her appetite for food: the queen consistently over-ate all her life. Her appetites presided over a revolution in English cuisine. 
"Had me at the first sentence." - Nigel Slater 
"Zingy, fresh, and unexpected: Annie Gray, the queen of food historians, finds her perfect subject." - Lucy Worsley 
>> Gray on the importance of dinner to the British Empire. 

Firecrackers: Female photographers now by Fiona Rogers and Max Houghton         $66
Features 30 cutting-edge women photographers from around the world.
>>fire-cracker.org/

Every Word is a Bird We Teach to Sing: Encounters with the mysteries and meanings of language by Daniel Tammet        $37
Interesting and eclectic set of essays about the diverse characteristics of various languages, and of humans' instinct to communicate.

 The King's Assassin: The fatal affair of George Villiers and James I by Benjamin Woolley       $50
Following the death of James I in 1625, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham and the king's 'wife' for ten years, was accused of poisoning him. A parliamentary enquiry found cleared him and the circumstance was relegated to the sidelines of history, but Woolley in this groundbreaking book suggests the allegations were in fact true.

 White Bicycles: Making music in the 1960s by Joe Boyd        $25
When Muddy Waters came to London at the start of the '60s, a kid from Boston called Joe Boyd was his tour manager; when Dylan went electric at the Newport Festival, Joe Boyd was plugging in his guitar; when the summer of love got going, Joe Boyd was running the coolest club in London, the UFO; when a bunch of club regulars called Pink Floyd recorded their first single, Joe Boyd was the producer; when a young songwriter named Nick Drake wanted to give his demo tape to someone, he chose Joe Boyd. Who better to give a deep insight into the creative maelstrom of the '60s music scene than Joe Boyd? 

The City Always Wins by Omar Robert Hamilton         $33
"Omar Robert Hamilton brings vividly to life the failed revolution of 2011 on the streets of Cairo, in all its youthful bravery and naive utopianism." - J.M. Coetzee
"I finished this novel with fascination and admiration. It gives a picture of the inside of a popular movement that we all saw from the outside, in countless news broadcasts and foreign-correspondent reports, a picture so vivid and powerful that it gives a passionate life and reality to what might have been perceived only as abstract principles. A thousand vivid details print themselves on the reader's memory: it will be a long time before we read anything so skilfully brought to life." - Philip Pullman
"Few writers could capture the frenetic speed of an Internet-fuelled uprising alongside the time-stopping corporeal reality of bullet-ridden bodies, all while never losing sight of the love that powered Egypt's revolutionary moment. Omar Robert Hamilton can do all that and more. Crossing borders and generations, he brings us into the movement's effervescent hope and its crushing heartbreak, probing timeless questions about what the living owe to the dead. Unbearable. Unmissable. A dazzling debut." - Naomi Klein

On a Magical, Do-Nothing Day by Beatrice Alemagna        $28
A beautifully illustrated invocation of the wonders to be found outside on a rainy day. 

Every Third Thought: On life, death and the endgame by Robert McCrum        $38
"A brilliant, wise, compassionate and consoling account of death and dying in a secular age. McCrum moves seamlessly from personal testimonies to medical case studies to recent developments in neuroscience. He asks profound philosophical questions about mortality, finitude and the unknown. A uniquely beautiful and significant book." - Joanna Kavenna
"Thoughtful, subtle, elegantly clever and oddly joyous, Every Third Thought is beautiful and - most of all - true." - Kate Mosse

The London Jungle Book by Bhajju Shyam        $30
Bhajju Shyam, an artist from the Gond tribe in central India, was commissioned to paint the walls of an Indian restaurant in London, and spent two months in the city. The book that emerged from the journey is a visual travelogue of his first encounter with a western metropolis. Bhajju brings the signs of the Gond forest to bear on the city, turning London into an exotic jungle.

That Was a Shiver by James Kelman         $33
Short stories written with great precision and sympathy for the emotional depths below the surfaces of everyday life. 
"Kelman brings alive a human consciousness like no other writer can." - Alan Warner
"What Kelman creates here and elsewhere in this collection is an atmosphere of Kafka-esque anxiety and menace, of things falling apart, of centres unable to hold. Like the best short story writers – James Joyce, Kafka, John Cheever, Alice Munro – he has reinvented the form through his audacity not to conform to the expectations of those who underestimate the intelligence and perceptiveness of the reading public. His stories may concern dossers and delusionists, no-hopers and chancers, petty criminals and serial gamblers, but each one is an individual who has been dealt a hand that he must learn to play or lose his lot. What he is offering are slices of lives that most western literature ignores." - Herald Scotland 

Catching Breath: The making and unmaking of tuberculosis by Kathryn Lougheed         $28
For forty thousand years, TB has accompanied humans in all their migrations and endeavours, keeping pace even with medical attempts to eradicate it. As TB is developing antibiotic resistance worldwide - has humanity met its match? 

The Cocktail Garden: Botanical cocktails for every season by Adriana Picker and Ed Loveday          $30
A beautifully illustrated guide to making the most mouthwatering cocktails from fruits and herbs that might be in your own garden.

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1916 by Richard J. Evans         $38
A period in which what was seen as modern with amazing speed appeared old-fashioned, in which huge cities sprang up in a generation, new European countries were created and in which, for the first time, humans could communicate almost instantly over thousands of miles. Evans accounts for revolutions, empire-building and wars that marked the nineteenth century, but also treats illness, serfdom, religion or philosophy, and a host of other things.

Dr James Barry: A woman ahead of her time by Michael du Preez and Jeremy Dronfield         $22
Dr James Barry: Inspector General of Hospitals, army surgeon, duellist, reformer, ladykiller, eccentric. He performed the first successful Caesarean in the British Empire, outraged the military establishment and gave Florence Nightingale a dressing down at Scutari. At home he was surrounded by a menagerie of animals, including a cat, a goat, a parrot and a terrier. Long ago in Cork, Ireland, he had also been a mother. This is the amazing tale of Margaret Anne Bulkley, the young woman who broke the rules of Georgian society to become one of the most respected surgeons of the century.

Play With Me: Dolls, women, art by Grace Banks         $55
The inanimate female form has often been used by artists to make statements about the objectification of women and to explore the frontiers of individual identity and the replicability of experience. Banks surveys how artificial women can generate political and ethical debate. 

Psychedelia, And other colours by Rob Chapman         $40
The discovery of the psychoactive consequences of LSD was soon followed by its cultural manifestations. These, however took on quite different characteristics depending on their host culture: the psychedelia of the west coast of the US differed in texture from that of the UK. Chapman's fascinating book explores the territory.
 >> Chapman's playlist to accompany the book. 

Tin Man by Sarah Winman        $30
From the author of When God Was a Rabbit. 
"Tin Man is Winman's best novel yet. The playful subversiveness still bubbles away but there's a new candour there, an acceptance of needs and flaws that proves deeply touching. This is storytelling as cruelly kind as fate itself." - Patrick Gale

The Children of Willesden Lane: A true story of hope and survival during World War II by Mona Gobalek and Lee Cohen        $19
Jewish musical prodigy Lisa Jura Gobalek escaped Vienna to London on the Kindertransport, where she eventually studies at the Royal Academy. How can she learn the fates of her sisters and the rest of her family she left behind?

The Broken Ladder: How inequality changes the way we think, live and die by Keith Payne         $38
Regardless of their average incomes, countries or states with greater levels of income inequality have much higher rates of all the social maladies we generally associate with poverty: lower than average life expectancies, mental illness and crime. 

Bitch Doctrine: Essays for dissenting adults by Laurie Penny        $27
Penny is ready to confront injustice wherever she finds it.
"I can't really think of another writer who so consistently and bravely keeps thinking and talking and learning and trying to make the world better." - Caitlin Moran
>> A manifesto for change.