NEW RELEASES
Eddy Smallbone (orphan) is grappling with identity, love, loss, and religion. It's two years since he blew up his school life and the earthquakes felled his city. Home life is maddening. His pet-minding job is expanding in peculiar directions. And now the past and the future have come calling — in unexpected form. As Eddy navigates his way through the Christchurch suburbs to Christmas, juggling competing responsibilities and an increasingly noisy interior world, he moves closer and closer to an overdue personal reckoning. Eddy, Eddy is a richly layered novel, deftly written with humour and pathos: a love story, peopled with flawed and comical characters, both human and animal; and a story of grief, the way its punch may leave you floundering — and how others can help you find your way back. Loosely mirroring A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, Eddy, Eddy revels in language's stretch and play, the importance of story and songs, and the giddy road to adulthood.
"Intense, funny, shocking and exuberant, Eddy, Eddy is a brilliant, rich and effervescent novel about the myriad ways — sometimes right and sometimes dazzlingly wrong — that we find to save ourselves, when, like Eddy, the plates shift underneath our feet and the chasm opens." —Ursula Dubosarsky
"Intense, funny, shocking and exuberant, Eddy, Eddy is a brilliant, rich and effervescent novel about the myriad ways — sometimes right and sometimes dazzlingly wrong — that we find to save ourselves, when, like Eddy, the plates shift underneath our feet and the chasm opens." —Ursula Dubosarsky
Meet Vanessa Salomon, a privileged and misanthropic French-American translator hailing from a wealthy Parisian family. Her twin sister is a famous movie star, which Vanessa resents deeply and daily. The only man Vanessa ever loved recently killed himself by jumping off the roof of her building. It's a full life. Vanessa has just started working on an English translation of a titillating, experimental thriller by a dead author when she's offered a more prominent gig: translating the latest book by an Extremely Famous French Writer who is not in any way based on Michel Houellebecq. As soon as she agrees to meet this writer, however, her other, more obscure project begins to fight back, leading Vanessa down into a literary hell of traps and con games and sadism and doppelgangers and mystic visions and strange assignations and, finally, the secret of life itself. Peppered with 'sponsored content' providing cocktail recipes utilizing a brand of liquor imported by the film director Steven Soderbergh, and with a cameo from the actress Juno Temple, Bad Eminence is at once an old-school literary satire in the mode of Vladimir Nabokov as well as a jolly thumb in the eyes of contemporary screen-life and digital celebrity.
"I take exception to the characterization of my hair as "difficult", as my hair is in fact perfect, which I can prove in a court of law. Everything else James wrote is exactly as it happened, to the best of my memory." —Juno Temple, prodigiously talented actress with perfect hair
"This is a work of lacerating style that shook my faith in the tangible world. It preys upon the real in capricious ways, like so much of the best fiction, toying with the reader's memories until we're not sure what we see, or what we have seen. James Greer is a circus-master of great humour, malevolence and allusion, a fabricator of eerie truths. It's terrifying to enter his world." —Michael Lesslie
"James Greer is the Daphne de Maurier of psychological French literary translation thrillers that don't in any legally actionable way involve Michel Houellebecq. Bad Eminence is a funny, witty walk into a world where words, memories, people, life, death, and truth have more than one meaning." —Ben Schwartz
>>Read an extract.
>>Not not Michel Houellebecq.
>>Read an extract.
>>Not not Michel Houellebecq.
In these disarming true stories, Kate Camp moves back and forth through the smoke-filled rooms of her life: from a nostalgic childhood of the Seventies and Eighties, through the boozy pothead years of the Nineties, and into the sobering reality of a world in which Hillary Clinton did not win. "Never apologise, never explain," Kate’s mother used to say, and whether visiting her boyfriend in prison, canvassing door-to-door for Greenpeace, in a corporate toilet with sodden underwear, or facing the doctor at an IVF clinic, she doesn’t. The result is a memoir brimming with hard-won wisdom and generous humour; a story that, above all, rings true.
"I didn’t want it to end. Kate is clever, observant, funny, moving yet never sentimental, wise, and as brave as they come. She takes risks. Combine these attributes with her exceptional ability to craft the perfect phrase, sentence, paragraph, story—and there you have it: a deeply rewarding read." —Linda Burgess
"Kate Camp trains her poet’s eye on topics as diverse as bad relationships, smoking, misheard songs, the fallibility of memory, and the wrong turns we take—all with a deliciously close focus that draws us right in. Her essays shine with wit, intelligence, and a humanity that is both intimate and universal. An unmissable read." —Catherine Chidgey
After co-authoring the hugely loved cookbook Flavour with Otam Ottolenghi, Belfrage returns with a collection of her own stimulating recipes which are a fusion of Mexican, Brazilian and Italian cuisines, each with her own signature sensibilities and inventive combinations of ingredients and flavours. Mouthwatering, foolproof, surprising.
"I've been a mega fan of Ixta for years. The way she expresses life and color and soul into every dish is dang inspirational. And now you can have this feeling all to yourself, in book form! I keep mine on my bedside table and read it before I sleep and the first thing when I rise in the morning. Gives me that pep in my step just like her beautiful bold cooking!" —Eric Wareheim
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Narrated in a series of brief vignettes, The Illiterate is Kristóf’s memoir of her childhood, her escape from Hungary in 1956 with her husband and small child, her early years as a refugee working in factories in Switzerland, and the writing of her first novel, The Notebook.
"One of the last books she wrote, slim and clean, but containing the accumulations of a lifetime." –John Self, Independent on Sunday
"Her descriptions – of those with whom she escaped and whose sense of isolation eventually leads them back to Hungary even at the cost of their lives, as well as those whose sense of despair brings them to suicide – offer an uncomfortable insight into the extreme vulnerability of those obliged to seek asylum abroad." –Eimear McBride, Times Literary Supplement
"This story of exile and loss, of how, for the refugee, the country in which she eventually settles, however kind and well-meaning its inhabitants, will always be a poor and inadequate substitute for the country of one’s birth, its language always an alien thing, however proficient she becomes in it – this is the story of so many people today that it is perhaps the story of our time, and Ágota Kristóf should perhaps be seen as our transnational bard." –Gabriel Josipovici
Since the early 1960s, outspoken Wellington GP Carol Shand has spent her life fighting for change in medical, social and legal issues that she considered important: maternity care, access to contraception, abortion law change, and improved response to sexual assault complaints. Carol is the daughter of Claudia and Tom Shand - a rural GP and a politician respectively. She was born at the outbreak of the Second World War and lived through post-war hardships, and then the peace and prosperity of the latter 20th century and into the 21st. Shand worked in general medical practice in Wellington for 56 years, 34 with her husband Dr Erich Geiringer. She retired in 2017, and still lives in her quarter-acre paradise in Karori, Wellington, surrounded by family, and spending time gardening, playing chamber music, and keeping a small finger in many pies. "Carol emerges with her own strong personality, and, contributing to the richness of her life, describes her love of travel and music, and the family's infectious enthusiasm for outdoor theatre." —Dame Margaret Sparrow
Learn to cook authentic Japanese food from scratch at home, with step by step recipes for the traditional classics like ramen noodles, broth, sushi rice or homemade tofu as well as recipes for more contemporary fusion dishes. Maori Murota takes you to the heart of today's Japanese family home cooking, sharing the recipes she learned while she watched her own mother and grandmother cook. Here are 100 recipes - eggplant spaghetti, pepper and miso sauce, donburi, baked sweet potato, soba salad, roast chicken with lemongrass, onigiri, hot dog, Japanese curry, steamed nut cake - many of which are vegan friendly and plant-based, to take you to the heart of Japanese home cooking. From the author of Tokyo Cult Recipes. Recommended!
In distinctive writing as poetic as it is precise, Jarre depicts an exceptionally multinational and complicated family: her elusive, handsome father — a Jew who perished in the Holocaust; her severe, cultured mother — an Italian Lutheran who translated Russian literature; and her sister and Latvian grandparents. Jarre narrates her passage from childhood to adolescence, first as a linguistic minority in a Baltic nation and then in traumatic exile to Italy after her parents' divorce, where she lives with her maternal grandparents among a community of French-speaking Waldensian Protestants and discovers that fascist Italy is a problematic home for a Riga-born Jew. First published in Italy in1987 and now translated into English for the first time, this powerful and incisive memoir is steeped in the history of twentieth-century Europe, and probes questions of time, language, womanhood, belonging and estrangement, while asking what homeland can be for those who have none, or many more than one.
"This is a beautifully ingenious memoir, saturated in the history of the European 20th century, and made all the more compelling by Ann Goldstein's luminous translation." —Vivian Gornick
The Old Man and the Sea in te reo Māori.
Herne the hunter, mischief-maker, spirit of the forest, leader of the wild hunt, hurtles through the centuries pursued by his creator. A shapeshifter, Herne dons many guises as he slips and ripples through time - at candlelit Twelfth Night revels, at the spectacular burning of the Crystal Palace, at an acid-laced Sixties party. Wherever he goes, transgression, debauch and enchantment always follow in his wake. But as the forest is increasingly encroached upon by urban sprawl and gentrification, and the world slides into crisis, Herne must find a way to survive - or exact his revenge.
"A dark-dazzling archive of enchantments, pursuit, and desire." —Eley Williams
"This is the most adventurous, stylistically magnificent thing I've read for years. Nobody does fantasy like Zoe Gilbert." —Natasha Pulley
The Night Ship by Jess Kidd $37
1629: Embarking on a journey in search of her father, a young girl called Mayken boards the Batavia, the most impressive sea vessel of the age. During the long voyage, this curious and resourceful child must find her place in the ship's busy world, and she soon uncovers shadowy secrets above and below deck. As tensions spiral, the fate of the ship and all on board becomes increasingly uncertain. 1989: Gil, a boy mourning the death of his mother, is placed in the care of his irritable and reclusive grandfather. Their home is a shack on a tiny fishing island off the Australian coast, notable only for its reefs and wrecked boats. This is no place for a teenager struggling with a dark past and Gil's actions soon get him noticed by the wrong people. The Night Ship is a tale of human cruelty, fate and friendship, of two children, hundreds of years apart, whose fates are inextricably bound together.
Thief, Convict, Pirate, Wife: The many histories of Charlotte Badger by Jessica Ashton $35
No Other Pace To Stand: An anthology of climate change poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Jordan Hamel, Rebecca Hawkes, Erik Kennedy and Essa Ranapiri $30
Friends Like These by Meg Rosoff $19
Ulysses Unbound: A reader's companion to James Joyce's Ulysses by Terence Killeen $26
The Fabric of Civilisation: How textiles made the world by Virginia Postrel $28
How to Raise an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi $45
Life in the Shallows: The wetlands of Aotearoa New Zealand by Karen Denyer and Monica Peters $65
The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka $35
Hotel Magnifique by Emily J. Taylor $23
"Kidd's imagination is a thing of wonder." —New York Times
"Kidd's writing is never less than surprising and original." —Irish Independent
"Kidd has imagination to die for." —Guardian
“Lyrical, haunting, a beautiful and elegant fictional interpretation of history, I loved it." —Kate Mosse
Charlotte Badger is a woman around whom many stories have been woven: the thief sentenced to death in England and then transported to New South Wales; the pirate who joined a mutiny to take a ship to the Bay of Islands; the first white woman resident in Aotearoa; the wife of a rangatira, and many more. In this remarkable piece of historical detective work, Jennifer Ashton shows what we know about Charlotte Badger, and how the stories about her have shifted over time.
Ninety-one writers with connections to these islands grapple with the biggest issue facing people and the planet. What, then, for the work of poetry? It's at the very periphery of popular speech, niche even among the arts, yet it's also rooted in the most ancient traditions of oral storytelling, no matter where your ancestors originate from. A poem may not be a binding policy or strategic investment, but poems can still raise movements, and be moving in their own right. And there is no movement in our behaviours and politics without a shift in hearts and minds. Whether the poems you read here are cloaked in ironic apathy or bare their hearts in rousing calls to action, they all arise from a deep sense of care for this living world and the people in it.
New York City. June, 1982. When eighteen-year-old Beth arrives in Manhattan for a prestigious journalism internship, everything feels brand new and not always in a good way. A cockroach-infested sublet and a disaffected roommate are the least of her worries, and she soon finds herself caught up with her fellow interns preppy Oliver, ruthless Dan and ridiculously cool, beautiful, wild Edie. Soon, Beth and Edie are best friends the sort of heady, all-consuming best-friendship that's impossible to resist. But with the mercury rising and deceit mounting up, betrayal lies just around the corner. Who needs enemies — when you have friends like these? A gritty, intoxicating novel about a summer of unforgettable firsts — of independence, lies, love and the inevitable loss of innocence — from the author of (most recently) The Great Godden.
"Killeen's impulse is to create a commentary on Ulysses that opens the book for anyone to read. He writes clearly; his companion to Ulysses makes the book easier to follow without simplifying anything. His book is not his own insistent interpretation of Ulysses; rather, it is a guide for others that is systematic and supremely helpful. Each reader will have different moments when Ulysses Unbound becomes essential, when it comes to our aid most practically and succinctly." —Colm Tóibín
From Minoans exporting wool colored with precious purple dye to Egypt, to Romans arrayed in costly Chinese silk, the cloth trade paved the crossroads of the ancient world. Textiles funded the Renaissance and the Mughal Empire; they gave us banks and bookkeeping, Michelangelo's David and the Taj Mahal. The cloth business spread the alphabet and arithmetic, propelled chemical research, and taught people to think in binary code. Now in paperback,
How do we talk to our children about racism? How do we teach children to be antiracist? How are kids at different ages experiencing race? How are racist structures impacting children? How can we inspire our children to avoid our mistakes, to be better, to make the world better? These are the questions Ibram X. Kendi found himself avoiding as he anticipated the birth of his first child. Like most parents or parents-to-be, he felt the reflex to not talk to his child about racism, which he feared would stain her innocence and steal away her joy. But research into the scientific literature, his experiences as a father and reflections on his own difficult experiences as a student ultimately changed his mind. In the accessible mode of his How To Be an Antiracist, Kendi combines a century of scientific research with a vulnerable and compelling personal narrative to argue that it is only by teaching our children about the reality of racism and the myth of race from the earliest age that we can actually protect them and preserve their innocence and joy.
Rich and diverse but often unloved, Aotearoa's wetlands are the most vulnerable of our ecosystems. Only a tiny fraction of their original extent remains, and we continue to lose this vital habitat. The race is on to discover more about them while we still can. This highly illustrated and absorbing book introduces and explores the wetlands of Aotearoa through the work and experiences of our leading researchers. It also explores the deep cultural and spiritual significance they have for Maori, and the collaboration of matauranga Maori and western science in continuing to improve our understanding of these special places. Featuring wetlands to visit all around the country, descriptions of the rich bird, insect and plant life that can be found there, and some of the innovative ways we can protect and restore them, Life in the Shallows is a key resource for those who want to explore, understand and care for these precious places.
Lost Possessions by Keri Hulme $25
We Want Our Books by Jake Alexander $18
The Dark Queens by Shelley Puhak $53
First published in 1983, shortly before Hulme was awarded the Booker Prize for The Bone People, this novella is marked with her characteristic poetic sensibility, mix of registers, and fluid form.
When Rosa finds out that the local authorities are going to close her public library, she and her sister help to bring the community together and take action to retain this vital social institution.
The remarkable, little-known story of two trailblazing women in the Early Middle Ages who wielded immense power, only to be vilified for having it. Brunhild was a foreign princess, raised to be married off for the sake of alliance-building. Her sister-in-law Fredegund started out as a lowly palace slave. And yet—in sixth-century Merovingian France, where women were excluded from noble succession and royal politics was a blood sport—these two iron-willed strategists reigned over vast realms, changing the face of Europe. The two queens commanded armies and negotiated with kings and popes. They formed coalitions and broke them, mothered children and lost them. They fought a decades-long civil war—against each other. They battled to stay alive in the game of statecraft, and in the process laid the foundations of what would one day be Charlemagne's empire. Yet after the queens' deaths-one gentle, the other horrific—their stories were rewritten, their names consigned to slander and legend.
Rogues: True stories of grifters, killers, rebels and crooks by Patrick Radden Keefe $40
"Shelley Puhak presents a believable and vividly drawn portrait of the Frankish world, and in doing so restores two half-forgotten and much-mythologized queens, Brunhild and Fredegund, to their proper place in medieval history." —Dan Jones
The author of the sensational Empire of Pain brings together a dozen of his most celebrated articles from the New Yorker. As Keefe says in his preface: "They reflect on some of my abiding preoccupations: crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial." Keefe explores the intricacies of forging $150,000 vintage wines, examines whether a whistleblower who dared to expose money laundering at a Swiss bank is a hero or a fabulist, spends time in Vietnam with Anthony Bourdain, chronicles the quest to bring down a cheerful international black-market arms merchant, and profiles a passionate death-penalty attorney who represents the ‘worst of the worst’, among other bravura works of literary journalism.
Up above there are wildfires, smog alerts, epic droughts, paper jams, teachers' strikes, insurrections, revolutions, record-breaking summers of unendurable heat, but down below, at the pool, it is always a comfortable twenty-seven degrees. Alice is one of a group of obsessed recreational swimmers for whom their local swimming pool has become the centre of their lives — a place of unexpected kinship, freedom, and ritual. Until one day a crack appears beneath its surface. As cracks also begin to appear in Alice's memory, her husband and daughter are faced with the dilemma of how best to care for her. As Alice clings to the tethers of her past in a Home she feels certain is not her home, her daughter must navigate the newly fractured landscape of their relationship.
The legendary Hotel Magnifique is like no other: a magical world of golden ceilings, enchanting soirees and fountains flowing with champagne. It changes location every night, stopping in each place only once a decade. When the Magnifique comes to her hometown, seventeen-year-old Jani hatches a plan to secure jobs there for herself and her younger sister, longing to escape their dreary life. Luck is on their side, and with a stroke of luminous ink on paper the sisters are swept into a life of adventure and opulence. But Jani soon begins to notice sinister spots in the hotel's decadent facade. Who is the shadowy maitre who runs the hotel? And can the girls discover the true price paid by those who reside there — before it's too late?
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