NEW RELEASES
Is literature a good guide to life? If not, is anything a good guide? It is 1996. Selin is in her second year studying literature at Harvard, but life itself is hard to read. She wonders about the meaning of everything that happened over the summer. Why did Selin's elusive crush, Ivan, find her that job in the Hungarian countryside? What was up with all those other people in the Hungarian countryside? Why is Ivan's weird ex-girlfriend now trying to get in touch with Selin? On the plus side, her life feels like the plot of an exciting novel. On the other hand, why do so many novels have crazy, abandoned women in them? How does one live a life as interesting as a novel-—a life worthy of becoming a novel-without becoming a crazy, abandoned woman oneself? These are important questions. Guided by her literature syllabus and by her more worldly and confident peers, Selin reaches certain conclusions about the universal importance of parties, alcohol, and sex, and resolves to execute them in practice-no matter what the cost.
"Batuman has a gift for making the universe seem, somehow, like the benevolent and witty literary seminar you wish it were. This novel wins you over in a million micro-observations." —The New York Times
"Our funniest overthinker — and the queen of the campus novel. Selin is a droll and disarming narrator, and takes her place as one of the finest hapless scholars in the literary canon." —Sunday Times
>>The need for novels.
"Batuman has a gift for making the universe seem, somehow, like the benevolent and witty literary seminar you wish it were. This novel wins you over in a million micro-observations." —The New York Times
"Our funniest overthinker — and the queen of the campus novel. Selin is a droll and disarming narrator, and takes her place as one of the finest hapless scholars in the literary canon." —Sunday Times
>>The need for novels.
>>Refusing to be a crazy, abandoned woman.
>>The ethical versus the aesthetic life.
>>Books are magic.
>>Either/Both.
>>Controlling words.
>>We first met Selin in The Idiot.
>>The ethical versus the aesthetic life.
>>Books are magic.
>>Either/Both.
>>Controlling words.
>>We first met Selin in The Idiot.
In a Florida almost claustrophobic with life, New Zealand-born Georgie's marriage has stagnated. But there's no room to attend to it, as dangers small and large crowd in: teeth break, her son can't find his words, there's something in her husband's eye, termites swarm the neighbourhood, and she finds a dead boy in the burning woods. And then there's Jason. As the repercussions of her discovery of the body, and her affair, come to land, Georgie digs deep, examining the undercurrents of her actions with curiosity, humour and cutting emotional intelligence. Arms & Legs is a deliriously insightful excavation of love, desire, parenthood and relationships at their best, and worst.
"An astute, fine-grained novel about the fires we light to sustain ourselves — and what happens when they get out of control." —Emily Perkins
"Arms & Legs is gritty, sexy novel that will have you aching for its characters, for the things they can and cannot say to each other. Lane's taut control of the narrative echoes the story's fecund, humid Florida landscape — controlled burn-offs, nature's relentless assaults on besieged boundaries of civilised urban life — and her ability to sustain suspense lasts well beyond the final page." —Sue Orr
In the land of Lapvona, the lord of the land Villiam is cheating the local villagers of their food, their water, their livelihoods. Grotesque and ridiculous, he marries the pregnant and tongueless ex-nun Agata, whom he believes will make him God, and his son will be the second Christ. It's a land of murder, cannibalism, incest and rape. Despite all of the characters' individual inadequacies and madness, you find yourself completely engrossed in each character's fate, be it Marek, Jude, Agata, Villiam, Lispeth, Ina, Father Barnabas. It's an anti-fairytale within a fairytale - maybe this is what hell on earth looks like? Is it an indictment of humanity, of religion, of grotesque despots?
"Moshfegh's genius is her ability to rip away the veil, revealing the horrors beneath, in writing so compelling, and bleakly funny, that we can't bear to look away." —i
"What impresses here is the qualities Lapvona shares with a Francis Bacon painting: depicting in blood-red vitality, without morals or judgment, the human animal in its native chaos." —Guardian
"I have decided to write down everything that happens, because I feel, I suppose, I may be putting myself in danger." London, 1965. An unworldly young woman suspects charismatic psychotherapist Collins Braithwaite of involvement in a death in her family. Determined to find out more, she becomes a client of his under a false identity. But she soon finds herself drawn into a world in which she can no longer be certain of anything. In Case Study, Graeme Macrae Burnet presents both the woman's notes and the life of Collins Braithwaite. The result is a dazzling, page-turning and wickedly humorous meditation on the nature of sanity, identity and truth itself. From the author of His Bloody Project.
"A novel of mind-bending brilliance. Graeme Macrae Burnet is a master of muddying the waters, of troubling ideas of truth and identity, fiction and documentary, and Case Study shows him at the height of his powers." —Hannah Kent
"Enormous fun. A mystery and a psychological drama wrapped up in one. Case Study is a triumph." —Observer
"Brilliant, bamboozling. Burnet captures his characters' voices so brilliantly that what might have been just an intellectual game feels burstingly alive and engaging." —Telegraph
Will you climb a hill with me? Dive into a lake with me? Reach the starry sky with me, and watch the clouds parade? Love can feel as vast as a sky full of breathtaking clouds or as gentle as a sparkling, starlit night. It can scale the tallest mountains and reach the deepest depths of the sea. Standing side by side with someone you love, the unimaginable can seem achievable. But not every magical moment is extraordinary. Simply being together is the best journey of all.
"This stirring ode to the love between parent and child is a must-have for all collections." —School Library Journal
A collection of weird stories from the author of Convenience Store Woman. An engaged couple falls out over the husband's dislike of clothes and objects made from human materials; a young girl finds herself deeply enamoured with the curtain in her childhood bedroom; people honour their dead by eating them and then procreating. Mixing taboo-breaking body horror with feminist revenge fables, old ladies who love each other and young women finding empathy and transformation in unlikely places, Life Ceremony is a wild ride to the outer edges of one of the most original minds in contemporary fiction.
"These stories laid complete claim to me. Ominous and charming. Brilliantly sad. There is not one word wasted here. I lost significant sleep over this collection." —Kiley Reid
>>'A Clean Marriage'.
The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till, a young black boy lynched in the same town 65 years before. The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that similar murders are taking place all over the country. In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in a fast-paced style that ensures the reader can't look away.
Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize.
Poor People With Money by Dominic Hoey $37
An Autobiography by Angela Y. Davis $48
Strandings: Confessions of a whale scavenger by Peter Riley $40
Return to Harikoa Bay by Owen Marshall $37
Adopted: Loss, love, family and reunion by Brigitta Baker and Jo Willis $40
Cult Classic by Sloane Crosley $33
A Riderless Horse by Tim Upperton $25
Bad Gays: A homosexual history by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller $33
Brave New World: A graphic novel by Aldous Huxley and Fred Fordham $48
The Greatest Invention: A history of the world in nine mysterious scripts by Silvia Ferrara $50
Under a Big Sky: Facing the elements on a New Zealand farm by Tim Saunders $37
"Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knockout comedy."—The New York Times Book Review
"The Trees is unlike any other novel. Everett draws from a series of genres—literary novel, police procedural, horror—to create a book that's both unique and difficult to describe. It's a delicate balancing act that he pulls off masterfully, another brilliant book by one of the most essential authors in American literature." —Alta Journal
Monday Woolridge is a fighter with a face covered in scars and life full of debt. Her Avondale flat has no furniture, her father's dead, her catatonic mother's in an expensive nursing home and her kickboxing gym is going to Thailand. Monday's shitty bartending job pays fifty cents over minimum wage, and she desperately needs another way to generate income. Dealing drugs off the dark web with her flatmate JJ looks like it's working — until it really doesn't, and the pair have to flee Tamaki Makaurau to escape the gangsters, the vampires and the ghosts of Monday's past. This is a pacy, heart-twisting, punch-in-the-guts, darkly comic novel that captures life on the poverty line in Aotearoa now.
"It's kind of renegade literature. This book has an energy conspicuously absent in much New Zealand fiction." —Steve Braunias on Iceland
A powerful account of the life of trailblazing political activist Angela Davis Edited by Toni Morrison and first published in 1974, An Autobiography is a classic of the Black Power era which resonates just as powerfully today. Long hard to find, it is reissued now with a new introduction by Davis, for a new audience inspired and galvanised by her ongoing activism and her extraordinary example. In the book, she describes her journey from a childhood on Dynamite Hill in Birmingham, Alabama, to one of the most significant political trials of the century- from her political activity in a New York high school to her work with the U.S. Communist Party, the Black Panther Party, and the Soledad Brothers; and from the faculty of the Philosophy Department at UCLA to the FBI's list of the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. Told with warmth, brilliance, humour, and conviction, it is an unforgettable account of a life committed to radical change.
When Peter Riley was thirteen, a woman with blue hair and a comet tattoo asked him to help load the jaw of a sperm whale into the back of a Volvo 245. The encounter set Riley on a decades-long quest to make sense of what had happened. Enter the secretive world of whale scavengers. When a whale washes up on one of Britain's coasts, a fugitive community descends to claim trophies from the carcass. Some are driven by magical beliefs. Some are motivated by profit: there is a black market for everything from ambergris to whaletooth sex toys. But for others, the need goes much deeper. Join Riley on a tour of a stranded kingdom's weird outer reaches, where nothing is as it seems. Meet witches, pedlars, fetishists, conspiracy theorists and fallen aristocrats. And prepare for a final revelation, as the mystery of the comet woman tangles with the enigmatic symbol of Leviathan itself, beached on Britain's fatal shore.
"A wild and wonderful whale chase, of cetaceans real and surreal and imagined, Peter Riley's beautifully written book adopts the sceptical/obsessive tone of a modern Melville (or perhaps that should be Captain Ahab) as he roams Britain from east to west, north to south, in search of usually dead and often rotting whales and the stories they leave in their wake. There's no box of dusty bones he won't stick his nose in, no dubious character on a beach he won't shake down for stolen whale teeth. Indeed, Riley's so interwoven with his subject that I doubt anyone will ever match Strandings for its sheer bravura, its wry insight, and its absolute, engulfing, and brilliantly enlivening whaleheadedness." —Philip Hoare
"Whenever I think of coming to punish my father, it's always in a strong wind, and that's blowing now as I drive up the long, unsealed track to the house and sheds." So begins one of Owen Marshall's superbly subversive stories. He offers up a wide range of subjects, from untimely deaths to unusual discoveries made about friends or neighbours, from burnishing an overseas trip to a tale about saving a business venture.
To not know your family story is a huge loss of your sense of self. It has the potential to undermine your wellbeing and your relationships across a lifetime. Adopted is the account of two of the thousands of children adopted during the era of closed adoption in Aotearoa New Zealand, from 1950 to the mid 1970s. Jo Willis and Brigitta Baker each sought and found their respective birth parents at different stages of their lives and have become advocates for other adopted New Zealanders. They share the complexity of that journey, the emotional challenges they faced, and the ongoing impacts of their adoptions with candour and courage.
Lola - a die-hard New Yorker with the ex-boyfriends, late nights, cigarette-habit and sharp wit to prove it - is out to dinner with old colleagues in Chinatown; people she's grown apart from, but with whom she shares an unshakeable connection. While reminiscing about the past, Lola runs into an ex-boyfriend. They get a late night drink and she returns home to her fiancé, a man she knows should be the perfect choice. But is he? The next day, near the same place, Lola runs into another ex. And another. And another. Something strange is happening. Lola has become the experimental mark of a hipster cult, headed up by her enigmatic former boss and headquartered in an abandoned synagogue. They are using their collective meditative energy (along with social media and the power of intention) to reorder her experience of the world - which just might be the push she needs to understand her past and get on with her future.
"This twisted and very funny New York anti-rom-com may ruin your love. Crosley is a caustic skewerer of internet millennial life on a par with Patricia Lockwood." —The Times
"A book about regret, about hoping you made the right choice, about the noxious power of our memories, but also about one of the worst things a woman can do in a big city: date men." —New York Times
In his third poetry collection, award-winning poet Tim Upperton takes us to the end of the driveway, over the Manawatū – twisting like an eel – and on to Topeka and Paris. These are poems of acid wit (‘I have been to Paris / and apart from the architecture / and the food and some very fine cemeteries / and of course the language / it’s quite like Palmerston North’), intimations of loss (‘The wrong life cannot be lived rightly. I should know’) and unexpected resolution (‘like pollen, / like grace so available nobody wanted it’). Unpredictable and restive, A Riderless Horse stands in the everyday and then runs with it.
A unconventional history of homosexuality. Too many popular histories seek to establish heroes, pioneers and martyrs but as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and/or dastardly deeds have been overlooked. We all remember Oscar Wilde, but who speaks for Bosie? What about those 'bad gays' whose un-exemplary lives reveals more than we might expect? Part-revisionist history, part-historical biography and based on the hugely popular podcast series, Bad Gays subverts the notion of gay icons and queer heroes and asks what we can learn about LGBTQ history, sexuality and identity through its villains and baddies. From the Emperor Hadrian to notorious gangster Ronnie Kray, the authors excavate the buried history of queer lives. This includes fascist thugs, famous artists, austere puritans and debauched bons viveurs, Imperialists, G-men and architects. Together these amazing life stories expand and challenge the mainstream assumptions of sexual identity. They show that homosexuality itself was an idea that emerged in the nineteenth century and that its interpretation has been central to major historical moments of conflict from the ruptures of Weimar Republic to red-baiting in Cold War America.
"Why must liberatory history be populated by heroes? And what if it isn't? Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller confront the shadowy side of queer history, a seamy underworld populated by evil twinks and psychopathic villains. Delectable gossip aside, this revelatory book is really an account of toxic power relations, always with an eye to a better, stranger, wilder future." —Olivia Laing
"This book will keep your bedside light burning long into the night. Fred Fordham's subtly futuristic illustrations may bring to mind Fritz Lang or even Steven Spielberg. Their retro styling is superbly dynamic: every frame full of adventure or pathos, or both." —Rachel Cooke, Observer
>>Look inside.
What are the origins of our greatest invention: writing? The L where a tabletop meets the legs, the T between double doors, the D of an armchair's oval backrest--all around us is an alphabet in things. But how did these shapes make it onto the page, never mind form complex structures such as this sentence? In The Greatest Invention, Silvia Ferrara takes a profound look at how—and how many times—human beings have managed to produce the miracle of written language, traveling back and forth in time and all across the globe to Mesopotamia, Crete, China, Egypt, Central America, Easter Island, and beyond.
Tim Saunders writes about his life and work on the farm that's been in his family for five generations. He encompasses drought, farming during lockdown, illness, financial pressure and the drive to become more viable and environmentally friendly. Woven throughout is Tim's love of, and respect for, the land, animals and the environment. He describes how farming is intertwined with the weather, how the weather has changed, how the changes affect farmers and what they are doing to counteract this. Tim describes how his forebears farmed, and how methods have changed. With the impact of climate change there is a need to change farming practices. Like other farmers Tim and his family are closely studying their farming system, deciding what needs to be done to stay viable. 
New Zealand's Foreign Service: A history edited by Ian McGibbon $60
During war, humanitarian and natural disasters and flashpoints of global tension, one government department has been charged with the critical role of representing New Zealand's interests overseas. In doing so, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (and its predecessors) has needed to respond to ever-evolving political and military allegiances, trade globalisation, economic threats, natural disasters and military conflict on behalf of a small nation that seeks to engage on the global stage while maintaining the principles that underpin its political institutions.
Birds and Us: A 12,000-year history from cave art to conservation by Tim Birkhead $65
Birkhead takes us on an epic and dazzling journey through our mutual history with birds, from the ibises mummified and deified by Ancient Egyptians to Renaissance experiments on woodpecker anatomy, from Victorian obsessions with egg collecting to the present fight to save endangered species and restore their habitats. Weaving in stories from his own life as a scientist, including far-flung expeditions to Neolithic caves in Spain and the guillemot colonies of the Faroe Islands, this ambitious book is the culmination of a lifetime's research and unforgettably demonstrates how birds shaped us, and how we have shaped them.
"Thought-provoking at every turn, this inspiring, shocking, wonder-filled exploration of our relationship with birds from earliest times delivers a sobering challenge to us living with birds today." —Isabella Tree
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