NEW RELEASES
The much-anticipated new novel from the author of the Booker-winning The Luminaries is an eco-thriller that holds a mirror to our current political and environmental predicaments and the range of forces — personal, societal, global — that complicate our positions in and responses to those circumstances and to each other. A landslide in a small South Island community collides a group of guerrilla gardeners with an American billionaire in circumstances of increasing existential threat in this gripping novel that echoes Macbeth in its exposure of the darker workings of the human psyche and the corrosivity of power.
"I wanted the novel to explore the contemporary political moment without being itself partisan or propagandistic. I wanted it to be fateful but never fatalistic, and satirical, but not in a way that served the status quo. Most of all, though, I wanted it to be a thriller, a book of action and seduction and surprise and possibility, a book where people make choices and mistakes that have deadly consequences, not just for themselves, but for other people, too. I hope that it’s a gripping book, a book that confides in you and makes you laugh and – crucially, in a time of global existential threat – that makes you want to know what happens next." – Eleanor Catton
Memorial, 29 June by Tine Høeg (translated from Danish by Misha Hoekstra) $40
"I wanted the novel to explore the contemporary political moment without being itself partisan or propagandistic. I wanted it to be fateful but never fatalistic, and satirical, but not in a way that served the status quo. Most of all, though, I wanted it to be a thriller, a book of action and seduction and surprise and possibility, a book where people make choices and mistakes that have deadly consequences, not just for themselves, but for other people, too. I hope that it’s a gripping book, a book that confides in you and makes you laugh and – crucially, in a time of global existential threat – that makes you want to know what happens next." – Eleanor Catton
"Birnam Wood is electric: a spectacular book. It has the pace and bite of a thriller. It has an iron-willed morality. It feels like the product of astonishing skill, and formidable love. It’s literally, physically breathtaking." – Katherine Rundell
"What I admired most in Birnam Wood was the way that the rapid violence of the climax rises, all of it, out of the deep, patient, infinitely nuanced character-work that comes before. If George Eliot had written a thriller, it might have been a bit like this." — Francis Spufford
"Birnam Wood is terrific. As a multilayered, character-driven thriller, it's as good as it gets. Ruth Rendell would have loved it. A beautifully textured work — what a treat." — Stephen King
"Mysterious and marvelously unpredictable, Birnam Wood had me reading the way I used to as a kid―curiously, desperately and as if it was the whole world. Catton connects to the natural and unnatural ways in which we try to control our environments, our impulses and one another. A spectacular novel, conjured by a virtuoso." — Rivka Galchen
>>Precise entanglement.
>>"A great book."
>>Plotted novels and psychological immersion.
>>Every good novel is a warning.
>>"A great book."
>>Plotted novels and psychological immersion.
>>Every good novel is a warning.
Asta is invited to a memorial. It’s been ten years since her university friend August died. The invitation disrupts everything – the novel she is working on and her friendship with Mai and her two-year-old son – reanimating longings, doubts, and the ghosts of parties past. Soon a new story begins to take shape. Not of the obscure Polish sculptor Asta wanted to write about, but of what really happened the night of August’s death, and in the stolen, exuberant days leading up to it. The story she has never dared reveal to Mai. Moving between Asta’s past and present, Memorial, 29 June is a novel about who we really are, and who we thought we would become. It’s a novel about the intensity with which we experience the world in our twenties, and how our ambitions, anxieties, and memories from that time never relinquish their grasp on how we encounter our future.
>>Read an extract.
>>On translating the book.
A memoir of a turbulent time — and a chess game that broke all the rules. In 1989, two married women met by chance. They instantly hit it off, but little did they know that their new relationship would turn their lives upside-down. This is the true story of that relationship, which threatened to cost them their children, families and friends and forced them to reassess their sexuality, identity and heritage. Along the way, one — an acclaimed biographer — was to explore the power of objects, while the other — a painter — was to follow her whakapapa back to the first Maori king, Te Wherowhero. Against the odds, the couple’s new life together became rich in laughter, travel, unusual encounters, investigations into Viking raids, the Kingitanga movement, the death of a New Zealand artist, chicken claws, ghosts, eccentrics and much more.
Renato Cisneros's great-great-grandmother Nicolasa bore seven children by her long-term secret love, who was also her priest, raising them alone in nineteenth century Peru. More than a century later, Renato, the descendent of that clandestine affair, struggles to wring information about his origins out of recalcitrant relatives, whose foibles match the adventures and dalliances of their ancestors. As buried secrets are brought into the light, the story of Nicolasa's progeny unfolds, bound up with key moments in the development of the Republic of Peru since its independence.
Julio and Emilia, two Chilean students, seek truth in great literature but find each other instead. Like all young couples, they lie to each other, revise themselves, and try new identities on for size, observing and analysing their love story as if it's one of the great novels they both pretend to have read. As they shadow each other throughout their young adulthoods, falling together and drifting apart, Zambra spins a formally innovative, metafictional tale that brilliantly explores the relationship among love,art, and memory.
"The 'last truly great book' I read has to be Alejandro Zambra's Bonsai. A subtle, eerie, ultimately wrenching account of failed young love in Chile among the kind of smartypant set who pillow-talk about the importance of Proust. A total knockout.' —Junot Diaz
"Every beat and pattern of being alive becomes revelatory and bright when narrated by Alejandro Zambra. He is a modern wonder." —Rivka Galchen
Belgium has long forged a distinctive culinary identity through its seasonal feasts and festivals. In this follow-up to her internationally lauded Pride and Pudding and Oats in the North, Wheat from the South, Regula Ysewijn turns her attention to the baking traditions of this unique country — the place of her birth. Regula uses history and art to guide the reader through a fascinating period, and introduces us — through her stunning photography and recipes — to the region's rich baking culture. There are waffles and winter breads for the 12 days of Christmas, pancakes for Candlemas and Carnival, pretzels for Lent, vlaai and fried dough for Kermis and all the special sweet treats that make up Saint Nicholas and Saint Martin. With this beautifully presented collection of timeless recipes, Ysewijn reveals the origins of her country's food culture and brings a little Belgian baking into every home.
>>Look inside.
>>Look inside.
A book about romantic love, Eros the Bittersweet is Anne Carson's exploration of the concept of eros in both classical philosophy and literature. Beginning with, It was Sappho who first called eros 'bittersweet.' No one who has been in love disputes her. Carson examines her subject from numerous points of view, creating a lyrical meditation in the tradition of William Carlos Williams's Spring and All and William H. Gass's On Being Blue. Epigrammatic, witty, ironic, and endlessly entertaining, Eros is an utterly original book.
"What we learn from Eros the Bittersweet while being spun alive by its brilliance is that its author is a philosopher of much cunning and an agile reader, a scholar with a mind as fresh as a spring meadow, no dust anywhere on her." —Guy Davenport
There is a line that stretches from the northernmost tip of Denmark to where the Wadden Sea meets Holland in the south-west. Dorthe Nors, one of Denmark's most acclaimed contemporary writers, grew up on this line; a native Jutlander, her childhood was spent among the storm-battered trees and wind-blasted beaches of the North Sea coast. In A Line in the World, her first book of non-fiction, she recounts a lifetime spent in thrall to this coastline — both as a child, and as an adult returning to live in this mysterious, shifting landscape. This is the story of the violent collisions between the people who settled in these wild landscapes and the vagaries of the natural world. It is a story of storm surges and shipwrecks, sand dunes that engulf houses and power stations leaching chemicals into the water, of sun-creased mothers and children playing on shingle beaches. Nicely written.
"A beautiful, melancholy account of finding home on a restless coast. In Dorthe Nors's deft hands, the sea is no longer a negative space, but a character in its own right. I loved it." —Katherine May, author of Wintering
In 1346, a catastrophic plague beset Europe and its neighbours. The Black Death was a human tragedy that abruptly halved entire populations and caused untold suffering, but it also brought about a cultural and economic renewal on a scale never before witnessed. The World the Plague Made is a panoramic history of how the bubonic plague revolutionised labour, trade, and technology and set the stage for Europe's global expansion. James Belich takes readers across centuries and continents to shed new light on one of history's greatest paradoxes. Why did Europe's dramatic rise begin in the wake of the Black Death? Belich shows how plague doubled the per capita endowment of everything even as it decimated the population. Many more people had disposable incomes. Demand grew for silks, sugar, spices, furs, gold, and slaves. Europe expanded to satisfy that demand—and plague provided the means. Labour scarcity drove more use of waterpower, wind power, and gunpowder. Technologies like water-powered blast furnaces, heavily gunned galleons, and musketry were fast-tracked by plague. A new 'crew culture' of 'disposable males' emerged to man the guns and galleons. Setting the rise of Western Europe in global context, Belich demonstrates how the mighty empires of the Middle East and Russia also flourished after the plague, and how European expansion was deeply entangled with the Chinese and other peoples throughout the world.
In the historic tradition of calendar stories and calendar illustrations, author and film director Alexander Kluge and visual artist Gerhard Richter have composed a collection of thirty-nine stories and thirty-nine snow-swept photographs for the darkest Northern month of the year. In stories drawn from modern history and the contemporary moment, from mythology, and even from meteorology, Kluge toys as readily with time and space as he does with his characters. In the narrative entry for December 1931, Adolf Hitler avoids a car crash by inches. In another, we relive Greek financial crises. There are stories where time accelerates, and others in which it seems to slow to the pace of falling snow. In Kluge's work, power seems only to erode and decay, never grow, and circumstances always seem to elude human control. Accompanied by the ghostly and wintry forest scenes captured in Gerhard Richter's photographs, these stories have an alarming density, one that gives way at unexpected moments to open vistas and narrative clarity.
A couple travel to a strange, snowy European city to adopt a baby, who they hope will resurrect their failing marriage. Their difficult journey leaves the wife desperately weak, and her husband worries that her apparent illness will prevent the orphanage from releasing their child. The couple check into the cavernous and eerily deserted Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel where they are both helped and hampered by the people they encounter: an ancient, flamboyant chanteuse, a debauched businessman, an enigmatic faith healer, and a stoical bartender who dispenses an addictive, lichen-flavoured schnapps. Nothing is as it seems in this baffling, frozen world, and the longer the couple endure the punishing cold the less they seem to know about their marriage, themselves, and even life itself.
"Like a Kafka story and a Wes Anderson movie combined." —Literary Hub
Keith Gessen had always assumed that he would have kids, but couldn't imagine what parenthood would be like, nor what kind of parent he would be. Then, one Tuesday night in early June, Raffi was born, a child as real and complex and demanding of his parents' energy as he was singularly magical. Fatherhood is another country: a place where the old concerns are swept away, where the ordering of time is reconstituted, where days unfold according to a child's needs. Like all parents, Gessen wants to do what is best for his child. But he has no idea what that is. Written over the first five years of Raffi's life, Raising Raffi examines the profound, overwhelming, often maddening experience of being a father. How do you instil in your child a sense of his heritage without passing on that history's darker sides? Is parental anger normal, possibly useful, or is it inevitably destructive? And what do you do, in a pandemic, when the whole world seems to fall apart? By turns hilarious and poignant, Raising Raffi is a story of what it means to invent the world anew.
The Collection | Te Kohinga edited by Julia Waite $45
We Don't Serve Maori Here: A recent history of Māori racism in New Zealand by Robert Bartholomew $30
Endless Flight: The life of Joseph Roth by Keiron Pim $55
A Short History of Queer Women by Kirst Loehr $25
No, they weren't 'just friends'! Female same-sex desire has been written out of history. From Anne Bonny and Mary Read who sailed the seas together disguised as pirates, to US football captain Megan Rapinoe declaring 'You can't win a championship without gays on your team', via countless literary salons and tuxedos, A Short History of Queer Women sets the record straight on women who have loved other women through the ages.
"I absolutely adored it, quite literally couldn't put it down once I started and devoured it in one sitting. It was heartfelt and hilarious, and full of so much love for, not just all lesbians, but all walks of the LGBT+ community. A real witty sucker-punch of lesbian history — reading it is like uncovering a secret; it's shocking, romantic, infuriating, and all of it clawing at the pages with a need to finally be heard." —Connie Glyn
The High Desert. Black. Punk. Nowhere. A memoir by James Spooner $53
A formative coming-of-age graphic memoir by the creator of Afro-punk: a young man’s immersive reckoning with identity, racism, clumsy teen love and belonging in an isolated California desert, and a search for salvation and community through punk.
"My brother wrote a book about my nephew, and this book made me laugh and tear up. It's a book about love: the love of a father for his child, of course, and also the love of an adult son for his parents (our parents), the love an emigre feels for the language (Russian) and culture (Soviet Jewish emigre) of his home. It's a book about the way love makes us feel powerless one minute and strong the next." —Masha Gessen
The Collection Te Kohinga presents Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki’s rich and diverse art holdings, providing a frame through which we can view and understand the past while looking forward to imagine the future. With illustrations of more than 220 New Zealand and international artworks in the Gallery’s permanent and loan collections, this book includes a detailed history of how the collection, numbering some 17,000 works, was built. The introductory essay, by curator and art historian Julia Waite, shows how turning points in the Gallery’s history reflect New Zealand’s cultural and political shifts over the past 135 years and demonstrates the power art has to speak cross-culturally.
>>Have a look inside.
>>Have a look inside.
Based on historical archives and firsthand interviews, this book reveals a history of racism against Māori that — until now — has not been taught in our schools. While students usually learn about the Treaty of Waitangi and early encounters with the first European settlers, more needs to be taught on recent cases of discrimination during the 20th and 21st centuries. Examples of discrimination in housing, employment and education are provided from across the country. The book also looks at controversies today such as the continued use of Golliwog dolls, and fanciful but ultimately racist claims that a group of Celts settled the country before Māori. From the author of No Maori Allowed, this book reveals how deeply racism is ingrained in our culture.
Endless Flight travels with Roth from his childhood in the town of Brody on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to an unsettled life spent roaming Europe between the wars, including spells in Vienna, Paris and Berlin. His decline mirrored the collapse of civilized Europe: in his last peripatetic decade, he opposed Nazism in exile from Germany, his wife succumbed to schizophrenia and he died an alcoholic on the eve of WWII. Exploring the role of Roth's absent father in his imaginings, his attitude to his Jewishness and his restless search for home, Keiron Pim's gripping account of Roth's chaotic life speaks to us in our era of uncertainty, refugee crises and rising ethno-nationalism.
"A superb biography — fascinating, shrewd, insightful. Finally, Joseph Roth's extraordinary life is recounted for his multitude of English readers in compelling detail." —William Boyd
"Utterly engrossing. Endless Flight is a biography of deep humanity, one that captures the individual, the place and the times with acute and affecting brilliance. I loved it." —Philippe Sands
No, they weren't 'just friends'! Female same-sex desire has been written out of history. From Anne Bonny and Mary Read who sailed the seas together disguised as pirates, to US football captain Megan Rapinoe declaring 'You can't win a championship without gays on your team', via countless literary salons and tuxedos, A Short History of Queer Women sets the record straight on women who have loved other women through the ages.
"I absolutely adored it, quite literally couldn't put it down once I started and devoured it in one sitting. It was heartfelt and hilarious, and full of so much love for, not just all lesbians, but all walks of the LGBT+ community. A real witty sucker-punch of lesbian history — reading it is like uncovering a secret; it's shocking, romantic, infuriating, and all of it clawing at the pages with a need to finally be heard." —Connie Glyn
A formative coming-of-age graphic memoir by the creator of Afro-punk: a young man’s immersive reckoning with identity, racism, clumsy teen love and belonging in an isolated California desert, and a search for salvation and community through punk.
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