NEW RELEASES
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The much anticipated new novel from the author of The Flame Throwers. It is 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at a women's prison. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth, and her young son. Inside is a world operating on its own mechanisms: thousands of women scrabbling to survive, and a power structure based on violence and absurdity.
"The Mars Room is so sensually convincing it leaves its imprint of steel mesh on your forehead, while its compassion embraces baby-killer and brutal cop alike in the merciless confines of the American justice system. An extraordinary literary achievement." - Adam Thorpe
"Mysterious and irreducible. The writing is beautiful - from hard precision to lyrical imagery, with a flawless feel for when to soar and when to pull back." - Dana Spiotta
"Her best book yet." - Jonathan Franzen
>> "Prisons should exist only in fiction."
In this 'novel in essays', a brief romantic dalliance, a fizzle, is bookended by lengthy digital correspondence and speculative fretting and regret. Is this delusion or romance? Is this the blueprint of modern relationships? Has the balance between the actual and the virtual aspects of our lives altering to the point where it is becoming impossible to (actually) have a relationship with another (actual) person?
"A smart, allusive meditation on longing, on solitude, on the lure of cities and on the sheer fragility of experience and feeling." - Colm Toibin
"Reminiscent of Marcel Schwob, Clarice Lispector, Roland Barthes and Lydia Davis." - Paris Review
>> Read an excerpt.
>> Walsh reads and talks.
The eleven stories in this book seem (quite reasonably and refreshingly) preoccupied with what may (to the mind at least) be termed ‘the body problem’, which is (of course) not a problem but a number of interrelating problems (or potentials) clustered around the disjunction between the kinds of relationships had by bodies and the kinds of relationships had by their correlated minds. Minds and bodies are subject here to differing momentums, and one bears the other away before the two can coalesce. Tan is concerned also with the interchangeability of persons, and with the contortion of persons, physically or psychologically, that enables this interchangeability. Whether it is twins who both fall in love with the same amnesiac, or the narrator of ‘Legendary’ who discovers photographs of her boyfriend’s previous partners in his drawer and becomes obsessed with one, an ex-aerialist once badly injured in a fall, stalking her and attempting to enter her experience using a playground swing, the stories have a raw elegance and precision and are full of intense and sometimes surprising images.
Dripping with blood and gold, fetishised and tortured, gateway to earthly delights and point of contact with the divine, forcibly divided and powerful even beyond death, there was no territory more contested than the body in the medieval world. Hartnell investigates the complex and fascinating ways in which the people of the Middle Ages thought about, explored and experienced their physical selves, and the ways in which they left evidence of this. Beautifully illustrated.
What we think of as our selves is held in its precarity by contrary forces, some within our control, some not, some intrinsic to our natures, some visited upon us, which are constantly changing us. To be human is to be subject to innumerable tendencies to change. This book surveys, fascinatingly, some of the notable ones, both beneficial and malign. From the author of the excellent Adventures in Human Being.
A bookish interview with pop star Olly Alexander, and riffs (including from Deborah Levy) on the ramifications of the floricultural thriller The Black Orchid by Alexandre Dumas.
From the authors of the hugely influential The Spirit Level, this new book looks at the horrendous impacts of inequality on the individual.
Ali revisits his formative years as a young radical. Through his own story, he recounts a counter history of the 60s rocked by the effects of the Vietnam war, the aftermath of the revolutionary insurgencies led by Che Guevara, the brutal suppression of the Prague Spring and the student protests on the streets of Europe and America. It is a story that takes us from Paris and Prague to Hanoi and Bolivia, encountering along the way Malcolm X, Bertrand Russell, Marlon Brando, Henry Kissinger, and Mick Jagger.
Today's Russia is an oligarchy propped up by illusions and repression. But it also represents the fulfilment of tendencies already present in the West. What will happen?
War has always provided the opportunity for crimes either against art or against its established ownership structures. A well illustrated survey, from Classical antiquity to the present. New Zealand author.
>> Tompkins talks with Kim Hill.
Every neighbourhood in London has its own cuisine. This book is the culinary London A-Z.
A novel based on the author's experiences among ordinary people in remote areas of Colombia whose lives are impacted by the jostling between paramilitaries, guerrillas and drug cartels.
A Pussy Riot member's account of her arrest, trial and imprisonment for feminist punk anti-State protests in Russia.
"One of the most brilliant and inspiring things I've read in years. Couldn't put it down. This book is freedom." - Chris Kraus
"A women's prison memoir like no other! One tough cookie!" - Margaret Atwood
>> A short cut to Siberia.
Three men washed up on the beach create a dreadful intrusion on the inhabitants of the island: three sisters and their mother.
"Extraordinary.' - The Guardian
>> A review by Jessie Bray Sharpin on Radio New Zealand.
How has the same woman attracted the love of nine very-different people? In the absence of her own story, do their nine very-different accounts form a useful picture of the person at their centre?
A chronicle of everyday life in a makeshift refugee camp on the forecourt of a petrol station in northern Greece. In the first two months of 2016, more than 100,000 refugees arrived in Greece. Half of them were fleeing war-torn Syria, seeking a safe haven in Europe. As the numbers seeking refuge soared, many were stranded in temporary camps, staffed by volunteers like Teresa Thornhill.
Tamara has been living on a star freighter in deep space, and her kidnappers are terrifying Crowpeople - the only aliens humanity has ever encountered. No-one has ever survived a Crowpeople attack, until now - and Tamara must use everything she has just to stay alive.
Short-listed for the 2018 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.
Henry Nicholls's inability to stay awake led him into the world of sleep science. How bad is it really, not to get eight hours of sleep? What happens to our brain when we're sleep deprived? How much sleep should we really be getting?
Newfoundland, Canada, 1992. When all the fish vanish from the waters, and the cod industry abruptly collapses, it's not long before the people begin to disappear from the town of Big Running as well. As residents are forced to leave the island in search of work, 10-year-old Finn Connor suddenly finds himself living in a ghost town. There's no school, no friends and whole rows of houses stand abandoned. And then Finn's parents announce that they too must separate if their family is to survive. But Finn still has his sister, Cora, with whom he counts the dwindling boats on the coast at night, and Mrs Callaghan, who teaches him the strange and ancient melodies of their native Ireland. That is until his sister disappears, and Finn must find a way of calling home the family and the life he has lost. From the author of Etta and Otto and Russell and James.
With a death toll of between 50 and 100 million people and a global reach, the Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was the greatest human disaster, not only of the twentieth century, but possibly in all of recorded history. And yet, in our popular conception it exists largely as a footnote to World War I. Spinney recounts the story of an overlooked pandemic, tracing it from Alaska to Brazil, from Persia to Spain, and from South Africa to Odessa. She shows how the pandemic was shaped by the interaction of a virus and the humans it encountered; and how this devastating natural experiment put both the ingenuity and the vulnerability of humans to the test. The Spanish flu was as significant as two world wars in shaping the modern world; in disrupting, and often permanently altering, global politics, race relations, family structures, and thinking across medicine, religion and the arts.
A 50th anniversary edition of this stunning classic of American nature writing, evoking the time Abbey spent in the canyonlands of Moab, Utah, a world of terracotta earth, empty skies, arching rock formations, cliffrose, juniper, pinyon pine and sand sage.
"My favourite book about the wilderness." - Cheryl Strayed
Inosia, a fan of science and Star Trek, accepts a ride to Apia from her favourite high school teacher to buy thread for White Sunday. This sparks an intimate relationship between the two as they discover much more about each other through science, knowledge and love. A story about taboos, loyalty and the lingering impact of colonialism in Samoa.
>> An interview with the author.
>> "Reclaiming colonised attitudes towards the sexuality of Samoans."
Reads like a book of make-believe. The hook is: it is all true." - The New York Times
This survey of Soviet design from 1950 to 1989 features more than 350 items from the Moscow Design Museum's collection. From children's toys, homewares, and fashion to posters, electronics, and space-race ephemera, each object reveals something of life in a planned economy during a fascinating time in Russia's history.
>> Visit the Moscow Design Museum.
The stories that inspired Elena Farrente's 'Neapolitan Quartet'. Beautifully translated by Ferrante's translator Ann Goldstein.
An account for teen readers of the author's childhood and adolescence in Palestine from 1972-1981, in the aftermath of the Six-Day War.
A grippingly honest account of her ten-year transition from man to woman - its pains and joys, its frustrations and discoveries. First published in 1974.
A beautiful set of etchings with the feel of 17th century bestiaries.
>> Click through and look at the etchings.
A child names Kid and a dog named Cat live among the eccentric denizens of a New York apartment building. The goat lives on the roof.
DIZZEE RASCAL. WILEY. KANO. STORMZY. SKEPTA. JME. SHYSTIE. WRETCH 32. GHETTS. LETHAL BIZZLE. TINCHY STRYDER. DURRTY GOODZ. DEVLIN. D DOUBLE E. CRAZY TITCH. ROLL DEEP. PAY AS U GO. NASTY CREW. RUFF SQWAD. BOY BETTER KNOW. The year 2000. As Britain celebrates the new millennium, something fluorescent and futuristic is stirring in the crumbling council estates of inner city London. Making beats on stolen software, spitting lyrics on tower block rooftops and beaming out signals from pirate radio aerials, a group of teenagers raised on UK garage, American hip-hop and Jamaican reggae stumble upon a new genre.
>> SKEPTA - 'No Security'.
From Immanuel Kant to Rosa Luxemburg to Sophie Scholl to Joan Baez to Daniel Barenboim to Malala Yousafzai - meet 40 people who stood up for what they believed in to make the world a better place for all.
He never took his foot off the accelerator.
>> Hunter S. Thompson's America.
>> Other 'Last Interviews'.
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