NEW RELEASES
Having returned to the Mackenzie Country to deal with the unexpected death of his brother, Roland has more than enough on his plate. The last thing he needs are the demands of a cantankerous neighbour, the complaints of his partner back in Australia and to find that someone is impersonating him on Facebook, stirring up the locals against him. Even the weather is hostile, rendering roads unpassable, his old home an icebox and the fire offering little comfort. And yet, when cycling on the empty roads, cocooned in a snow-muffled landscape, he finds he can confront what he actually feels.
"Fearnley's prose is precise, spare, springy with cadences of colloquial Kiwispeak, yet resonant with imagery." —David Hill
>>Read an extract.
>>Other books by Laurence Fearnley.
Galatea by Madeline Miller $13
How To Be A Bad Muslim by Mohamed Hassan $35
>>Other books by Laurence Fearnley.
In this short story, Miller boldly retells the legend of Galatea and Pygmalion, focussing on Galatea's plight as the 'creation' of an obsessively controlling husband, and her determination to secure her own independence and personhood. A beautifully produced little hardback from the author of The Song of Achilles and Circe.
From Cairo to Takapuna, Athens to Istanbul, How To Be A Bad Muslim maps the personal and public experience of being Muslim through essays on identity, Islamophobia, surveillance, migration and language. Traversing storytelling, memoir, journalism and humour, Hassan speaks authentically and piercingly on mental health, grief and loss, while weaving memories of an Egyptian immigrant fighting childhood bullies, listening to life-saving '90s grunge and auditioning for vaguely ethnic roles in a certain pirate movie franchise.
>>Hassan introduces the book.
>>Hassan's poetry collection National Anthem was short-listed in the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
>>Hassan introduces the book.
>>Hassan's poetry collection National Anthem was short-listed in the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
A genuinely heartwarming but not-at-all cloying, beautifully illustrated book — an instant favourite. Raccoon decides to bake an apple cake. But he has no eggs, so visits his friend Fox, who needs a ladder to mend the roof. Badger will have one, but he needs help too, so they set off to find Bear. They stroll through meadows, meet up with Crow, nibble blackberries and find Bear fishing at the river. Soon the five friends are having the best day out--the sun shining on their fur, fishing, swimming, picnic and finally home to bake the cake — two cakes, because bears have big appetites.
The genuinely heartwarming story of how a teenager beat depression through baking — and a whole batch of her bakery's favourite recipes, too.
"If you had told me at 14 when I couldn't even get out of bed with depression and anxiety that three years later I would have written a book I would never have believed you. But here it is — the story of the Orange Bakery. How I went from bed to bread and how my Dad went from being a teacher to a baker. You reading it means everything to me." —Kitty Tait
>>Kitty's story — and some recipes!
>>Kitty's story — and some recipes!
On the morning of October 21, 1966, Kathleen Middleton, a music teacher in suburban London, awoke choking and gasping, convinced disaster was about to strike. An hour later, a mountain of rubble containing waste from a coal mine collapsed above the village of Aberfan, swamping buildings and killing 144 people, many of them children. Among the doctors and emergency workers who arrived on the scene was John Barker, a psychiatrist from Shelton Hospital, in Shrewsbury. At Aberfan, Barker became convinced there had been supernatural warning signs of the disaster, and decided to establish a “premonitions bureau,” in conjunction with the Evening Standard newspaper, to collect dreams and forebodings from the public, in the hope of preventing future calamities. Middleton was one of hundreds of seemingly normal people, who would contribute their visions to Barker’s research in the years to come, some of them unnervingly accurate. As Barker’s work plunged him deeper into the occult, his reputation suffered. But in the face of professional humiliation, Barker only became more determined, ultimately realizing with terrible certainty that catastrophe had been prophesied in his own life.
:To probe the past is to submit the memory of one's ancestors to a certain kind of trial. In this case, the trial came to me." A few years ago Linda Kinstler discovered that a man fifty years dead, a former Nazi who belonged to the same killing unit as her grandfather, was the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation in Latvia. It looked as if the proceedings might pardon his crimes. They put on the line hard-won facts about the Holocaust at the precise moment that the last living survivors were dying. With no living witnesses, how secure are the facts of history? What is the nature of memory and justice when revisionism, ultra-nationalism and denialism make it feel like history is slipping out from under our feet?
A Gentle Radical: The life of Jeanette Fitzsimons by Gareth Hughes $40
Changing Track by Michel Butor (translated from French by Jean Stewart) $32
Winchelsea by Alex Preston $37
Life as Told by a Sapiens to a Neanderthal by Juan José Millás and Juan Luis Arsuaga $37
The King of the Copper Mountains by Paul Biegel $18
Modern Times: Temporality in art and politics by Jacques Rancière $28
Notes from Deep Time: A journey through our past and future worlds by Helen Gordon $25
Love and Youth: Essential stories by Ivan Turgenev (newly translated by Nicolas Slater) $28
Out of the Sun: Essays at the crossroads of race by Esi Edugyan $40
New Zealand Nurses: Caring for our people, 1880—1950 by Pamela Wood $45
An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life by Paul Della Rosa $33
"A masterpiece." —Peter Pomerantsev
How did a girl from a conservative rural family get to the front lines of radical political thought and then into the front benches of Parliament? How did she become the first Green MP in the world to win an electorate seat? How did she survive the brutal world of politics and get through the death of her co-leader Rod Donald? How did the world's first national Green Party form in New Zealand, and what was Jeanette's role? What can we learn from her politics and what did she think of the Green Party that followed her?
On a train from Paris to Rome on his way to surprise his lover, the businessman Leon Delmont begins to mull over his past and question the decisions he has made about his future. These musings — together with his impressions of the unfolding scenery, conjectures about his fellow passengers and some recurring leitmotifs — form the basis of a narrative that provides a psychological case study of an everyman and subtly illustrates the onset of the protagonist's doubts and fears. Published in 1957 as La Modification and awarded the prestigious Prix Renaudot, Michel Butor's groundbreaking novel remains the most widely read work of the nouveau roman genre. Written in the second person in order to immerse the reader more fully into the psyche of the main character, Changing Track pulls off the rare feat of being at once experimental and accessible, disquieting and engrossing.
>>A brief sample.
>>A brief sample.
The year is 1742. Goody Brown, saved from drowning and adopted when just a baby, has grown up happily in the smuggling town of Winchelsea. Then, when Goody turns sixteen, her father is murdered in the night by men he thought were friends. To find justice in a lawless land, Goody must enter the cut-throat world of her father's killers. With her beloved brother Francis, she joins a rival gang of smugglers. Facing high seas and desperate villains, she also discovers something else: an existence without constraints or expectations, a taste for danger that makes her blood run fast.
"Imagine Daphne du Maurier crossed with Quentin Tarantino, and you will have some idea of just what a thrilling, bloody and heady ride this novel is." —Tom Holland
"I was riveted. Winchelsea is a great read — terrific narrative drive, credible characters, and such an elegant creation of the backdrop in terms of both time and place." —Penelope Lively
"What a story! What a heroine! What an adventure! Alex Preston sweeps you from scene to scene, surprise to surprise with all the deft theatricality and fluency of a modern Robert Louis Stevenson. I have rarely read anything so vivid or that makes the 18th century, with all its ambitions, terrors, desires and sheer juiciness, so grippingly alive." —Adam Nicolson
Juan Jose Millas has always felt like he doesn't quite fit into human society. Sometimes he wonders if he is even a Homo sapiens at all, or something simpler. Perhaps he is a Neanderthal who somehow survived? So he turns to Juan Luis Arsuaga, one of the world's leading palaeontologists and a super-smart sapiens, to explain why we are the way we are and where we come from. Over the course of many months, the two visit different places, many of them common scenes of our daily lives, and others unique archaeological sites. Arsuaga tries to teach the Neanderthal how to think like a sapiens and, above all, that prehistory is not a thing of the past.
At the end of his thousand-year reign of the Copper Mountains, old King Mansolain is tired and his heart is slowing down. When his attendant, the Hare, consults The Wonder Doctor, he is told he must keep the King engaged in life by telling him a story every night until the Doctor can find a cure. The search is on for a nightly story more wonderful than the last, and one by one the kingdom's inhabitants arrive with theirs; the ferocious Wolf, the lovesick Donkey, the fire-breathing three-headed Dragon. Last to arrive is the Dwarf, with four ancient books and a prophecy that the King will live for another thousand years — but only if the Wonder Doctor returns in time.
Time is more than a line drawn from the past to the future. It is a form of life, marked by the ancient hierarchy between those who have time and those who do not. This hierarchy, continued in the Marxist notion of the vanguard and nakedly exhibited in Clement Greenberg's modernism, still governs a present which clings to the fable of historical necessity and its experts. In opposition to this, Rancière shows how the break with the hierarchical conception of time, formulated by Emerson in his vision of the new poet, implies a completely different idea of the modern. He sees the fulfilment of this in the two arts of movement, cinema and dance, which at the beginning of the twentieth century abolished the opposition between free and mechanical people, at the price of exposing the rift between the revolution of artists and that of strategists.
The story of the Earth is written into our landscape: it's there in the curves of hills, the colours of stone, surprising eruptions of vegetation. Gordon's odyssey takes her from the secret fossils of London to the 3-billion-year-old rocks of the Scottish Highlands, and from a state-of-the-art earthquake monitoring system in California to one of the world's most dangerous volcanic complexes, hidden beneath the green hills of Naples. At every step, she finds that the apparently solid ground beneath our feet isn't quite as it seems. "In deep time," Gordon finds, "everything is provisional. Bones become rock. Sands become mountains. Oceans become cities."
This collection places Turgenev's novella 'First Love' alongside a selection of his classic stories, from the evocative rural scenes of 'Bezhin Meadow' and 'Rattling Wheels', to the pathos and humanity of 'The District Doctor' and 'Biryuk'.
A searing analysis of the relationship between race and art. What happens when we bring stories consigned to the margins up to the light? How does that complicate our certainties about who we are, as individuals, as nations, as human beings? As in her fiction, the essays in Out of the Sun demonstrate Esi Edugyan's commitment to seeking out the stories of Black lives that history has failed to record. Edugyan reflects on her own identity and experiences as the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants. She delves into the history of Western Art and the truths about Black lives that it fails to reveal, and the ways contemporary Black artists are reclaiming and reimagining those lives. She explores the legacy of Afrofuturism, the complex and problematic practice of racial passing, the place of ghosts and haunting in the imagination, and the fascinating relationship between Africa and Asia dating back to the 6th Century. 
Matariki: The Maori New Year by Libby Hakaraia $21
A good survey of the traditions and practices associated with the rising of the Matariki stars that marked on of the most significant periods of the year. Includes information on astronomy, celestial navigation, mahi whai (string patterns), celebrations, the planting and harvesting calendar, gathering practices, and the reading of omens.
In the late nineteenth century, British nurses who had been trained in the system established by Florence Nightingale began to spread across the world. This was the British nursing diaspora and New Zealand was its southernmost landfall. New Zealand Nurses explores the growth of a distinctly Kiwi nursing style and how nurses in this part of the globe responded to, and ultimately came to challenge, imperial influences. New Zealand Nurses examines the nursing cultures that emerged in a range of different settings and circumstances: from hospitals to homes, rural backblocks to Maori settlements, and from war and disaster zones to nursing through a pandemic.
"A pleasure to read - there are lots of lively stories and it will have great appeal to nurses and former nurses." —Barbara Brookes
Whether working in food service or in high-end retail, lit by a laptop in a sex chat or by the camera of an acclaimed film director, sharing a dangerous apartment in the city, a rooming house in China or a vacation rental in Mallorca, the protagonists of the ten stories comprising this collection navigate the spaces between aspiration and delusion, ambition and aimlessness, the curated profile and the unreliable body. By turns unsparing and tender, Dalla Rosa explores our lives in late-stage Capitalism, where globalisation and its false promises of connectivity and equity leave us all further alienated and disenfranchised.
"An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life is an existential prayer of a book that attempts to find meaning in a rapidly changing and absurdly disconnected, occasionally nightmarish, modern world. Often bleakly hilarious, while remaining relatably, fiercely, melancholic, Dalla Rosa's characters quietly yearn for love, for change, for those childlike demands that went unfulfilled: to be seen and heard." —Oliver Mol
Anna: The biography by Amy Odell $40
The Adventure of French Philosophy by Alain Badiou $33
Eating to Extinction: The world's rarest foods and why we need to save them by Dan Saladino $40
Yellow Notebook: Diaries, Volume one: 1978—1987 by Helen Garner $30
A major biography of Anna Wintour, the hugely influential editor of Vogue.
Lionel Eats All By Himself by Éric Veillé $15
Lionel may have a mane but in other respects he is just taking his first steps towards independence. Sitting in his high-chair, he decides that it is about time for him to start feeding himself. Most of the food gets into his mouth, but quite a bit gets in other places. What fun! A very relatable board book.
Guided by a small set of fundamental questions concerning the nature of being, the event, the subject, and truth, Badiou pushes to an extreme the polemical force of his thinking. Against the formless continuum of life, he posits the need for radical discontinuity; against the false modesty of finitude, he pleads for the mathematical infinity of everyday situations; against the various returns to Kant, he argues for the persistence of the Hegelian dialectic; and against the lure of ultraleftism, his texts from the 1970s vindicate the role of Maoism as a driving force behind the communist Idea.
A thrilling journey through the history of humankind's relationship with food, revealing a world at a crisis point. From a tiny crimson pear in the west of England to great chunks of fermented sheep meat in the Faroe Islands, from pistachios in Syria to flat oysters in Denmark, from a wild honey harvested with the help of birds to an exploding corn that might just hold the key to the future of food - these are just some of the thousands of foods around the world today that are at risk of being lost for ever. Dan Saladino spans the globe to uncover the stories of these foods. He meets the pioneering farmers, scientists, cooks, food producers and indigenous communities who are preserving food traditions and fighting for change. All human history is woven through these stories, from the first great migrations to the slave trade to the refugee crisis today.
Helen Garner has kept a diary for almost all her life. But until now, those exercise books filled with her thoughts, observations, frustrations and joys have been locked away, out of bounds, in a laundry cupboard. Finally, Garner has opened her diaries and invited readers into the world behind her novels and works of non-fiction. Now in paperback.
Some of the most disruptive ideas in modern art were invented in Japan in the 1700s and expressed like never before in the designs of such masters as Hokusai, Utamaro, and Hiroshige in the early 19th century. This volume presents Japanese woodblock prints in their historical context. Ranging from the 17th-century development of decadent ukiyo-e, or "pictures of the floating world," to the decline and later resurgence of prints in the early 20th century, the images collected here are a record not only of a unique genre in art history, but also of the shifting mores and cultural development of Japan.
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