Our Book of the Week is Cheon Myeong-Kwan's lively and inventive novel WHALE, translated from Korean by Chi-Young Kim. On listing the book for the 2023 International Booker Prize, the judges described it as "a carnivalesque fairy tale that celebrates independence and enterprise, a picaresque quest through Korea’s landscapes and history, Whale is a riot of a book. Cheon Myeong-Kwan’s vivid characters are foolish but wise, awful but endearing, and always irrepressible. This is a hymn to restlessness and self-transformation." 
>>Read an extract. 
>>Part of the world. 
>>Revenge plays. 
>>The news in Korea. 
>>Your copy of Whale. 
>>Other books long-listed for the 2023 International Booker Prize.

Book of the Week. Alice Vincent suspected that the histories of women who gardened had been buried, and she set out to dig them up. As she was doing so, she met some interesting people (including Ali Smith and Cosey Fanni Tutti) and began to speculate on a relationship between women and the soil, a relationship that sometimes pushes other relationships into the background. Vincent 's book, Why Women Grow: Stories of soil, sisterhood and survival, is beautifully presented and a joy to read. 
>>A host of new friends. 
>>The joy of growing things. 
>>Read an extract. 
>>Compost and nasturtiums. 
>>Rootbound. 
>>Other books on gardening. 
>>Your copy of Why Women Grow.  

  

Book of the Week: Always Italicise: How to write while colonised by Alice Te Punga Somerville       

"Always italicise foreign words," a friend of the author was advised. In her first book of poetry, Māori scholar and poet Alice Te Punga Somerville does just that. In wit and anger, sadness and aroha, she reflects on how to write in English as a Māori writer, and how to trace links between Aotearoa and wider Pacific, Indigenous and colonial worlds.

>>Always Italicise has been short-listed for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book awards. 
>>Writing while colonised. 
>>English has broken my heart.
>>English has broken my heart on the radio. 
>>Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay About Captain Cook.
>>Our stories about Cook.
>>(Not quite) 250 ways.
>>250 ways.
>>Writing the new world.
>>Interconnections.
>>Te Punga Somerville wrote a standout essay in Ngā Kete Mātauranga.
>>Environment and identity. 
>>Challenging stories. 
>>A bibliography of writing by Māori in English.
>>Your copy of Always Italicise. 

Book of the Week: Affinities by Brian Dillon. Why is it that some things seem particularly to resonate with us personally, causing such a feeling of attunement that they seem to be telling us something about ourselves? Why these things and not others? Brian Dillon, whose books are always deeply thoughtful and nicely written, considers different photographs, artworks, texts and objects with which he feels an affinity (something akin to longing but without the separation), looks closely into his own life for the reason for this connection, and speculates a web of affinities that circulates the aesthetic lifeblood of our world. (This book is also an excellent way of discovering new affinities of your own.) 

>>In the eye of the beholder. 
>>On art and fascination. 
>>Barthes and Me. 

>>Dillon on Essayism. 
>>Read Thomas's review of Essayism. 

>>Read Thomas's review of Suppose a Sentence. 

>>Read Thomas's review of In the Dark Room. 
>>Your copy of Affinities. 

 

 

This week we are featuring the books of the remarkable Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, who has developed a method he calls 'slow prose' to explore the depths and subtleties of memory and experience and to grapple with the complex predicaments of human existence, language, time, and personhood. His prose is hypnotic, looping, emotionally resonant, philosophical, and often also funny. 
>>It's not me who's seeing. 
>>The mystical realist. 
>>A search for peace. 
>>Pure prose. 
>>Frames and levels. 
>>Revisions and the ear. 
>>A new name.
>>Thomas reviews The Other Name. 
>>Septology (also available as The Other Name, I Is Another, and A New Name). 
>>Trilogy. 
>>Aliss at the Fire. 
>>Scenes from a Childhood. 
>>Melancholy 1—2. 

Our Book of the Week is Joy Williams's astounding haywire dystopia, Harrow, which charts the remaking of meaning through ecological disaster (or at least through the failure to prevent ecological disaster (or even to notice the apocalypse)). Full of characters and situations that will burn themselves into your memory for ever, this is a book that is at once a deeply serious and madly funny portrayal of the world we are making (or destroying) for ourselves. "Harrow gets under your skin and, just when you’re confused, the lightbulb clicks on and it’s so bright you hope you’ll be in the dark again." —Stella
>>Read Stella's review. 
>>Collapsing reality. 
>>Joy Williams does not write for humanity. 
>>Ecological ruin and postmodernism. 
>>Reset. 
>>A millennial's purgatory.
>>Fruitless taxonomies. 
>>Where are the great climate novels? 
>>See also Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement. 
>>Uncanny the singing that comes from certain husks. 

>>Maybe more people should have writer's block. 
>>Your copy of Harrow.
>>Thomas reviews 99 Stories of God. 
>>The Changeling. 
>>The Visiting Privilege. 

 

 

This week we are featuring the work of the superb Chilean author, Alejandro Zambra. Growing up under the Pinochet dictatorship, Zambra became acutely aware of the power of words to both reveal and conceal, to both save and condemn. His work is deeply humane, wryly playful, and fired by an underlying anger at injustice and oppression.
>>Each book suggests its own form.
>>Signs of hope. 
>>Author and translator present Chilean Poet.  
>>Chatting with Megan and Daniel. 
>>'Skyscrapers'. >>Omitted characters. 
>>Read Bonsai, Zambra's breakthrough novel. 
>>Read Thomas's review of My Documents. 
>>Read Thomas's review of Multiple Choice. 
>>Read Thomas's review of the essay collection Not To Read. 
>>Read Zambra's most recent novel Chilean Poet. 

 

Our Book of the Week is the much-anticipated new novel from Eleanor Catton, the author of the Booker-winning The Luminaries. BIRNAM WOOD 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

"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. 

"Realty is no obstacle," reads the epigraph to our Book of the Week, Spadework for a Palace: Entering the madness of others by László Krasznahorkai (translated by John Batki), a single, book-length, wonderfully hysterical sentence pouring from the mind of a seemingly unremarkable librarian obsessed with his near-namesake Herman Melville, with the psychogeography of their shared part of New York, and with his dream of building a Permanently Closed Library that would isolate and protect his selective version of the world from the realities and that would otherwise dissolve it.  
>>A box built in the abyss.
>>Krasznahorkai on the trail of Melville. 
>>Archive fever. 
>>The narrator becomes obsessed with the apocalyptic architecture of Lebbeus Woods... 

>>And with the work of Bela Bartók...
>>And with Malcolm Lowry's drunken stalking of Melville's ghost to the point of madness, as described in Lunar Caustic.  
>>The real windowless building (with a sinister use) where the narrator would like to house his locked library. 
>>Obsession and goodwill. 
>>Other books by Krasznahorkai. 
>>The excellent 'Storybook ND' series. 
>>Your copy of Spadework for a Palace. 

 

Our Book of the Week, All Sorts of Lives by Clare Harman, re-examines the life of Katherine Mansfield through the lenses of ten of her stories, written at different stages in her trajectory, and reveals a writer and a person driven to remake both literature and the ways in which she might exist in the world. Harman shows us a woman confronting a very modern set of difficulties, trying to find ways forward into uncertain territory. Mansfield feels again hugely relevant one hundred years after her death. 

>>A Modernist's Modernist. 

>>Eating and reading. 
>>Still dividing opinion. 
>>Where to start with K.M.

>>Read the stories!

>>Mansfield and Me. 

>>Home and away.
>>No sort of life. 

 

Our Book of the Week is Making Space: A history of New Zealand women in architecture, edited by Elizabeth Cox. Diligently compiled, thoughtfully written and beautifully presented, this book presents the remarkable and remarkably diverse contributions of women to architectural practice in Aotearoa, contributions to the built environment all the more notable in the face of the social mores and professional exclusion that often opposed achievements and then caused them to be overlooked. 
>>Have a look inside!
>>We see their work but do we know their names? 

>>Missing a key element. 
>>There all along. 

>>In Small Rooms. 

>>Substance to its style. 

>>If you can't see it, you can't be it. 

>>An interview with the editor. 
>>How the project grew. 

 

Our Book of the Week correlates the lives and works of three fiercely unconventional creative women: electronic music pioneer Delia Derbeyshire, medieval mystic Margery Kempe, and the book's author, sonic artist Cosey Fanni Tutti. RE-SISTERS explores the wellsprings and consequences of artistic passion in a world of unforgiving conventional forces. 
>>Take three outsider women. 
>>Delia Derbyshire feature Trailer. Cosey Fanni Tutti wrote this book after being commissioned to write a soundtrack for the film about Derbeyshire's life. 
>>The Delian Mode. 
>>A nice tune by DD. 
>>Margery Kempe online. 
>>A playlist for Margery Kempe. 
>>A playlist for the book. 
>>'Cowboys in Cuba'.

 

In a world in which we are blown from place to place like dandelion seeds, what does it mean to belong? Where or what is home? Where are we from? Are these things up to us to decide, or are they dictated to us by culture and politics? In DANDELIONS, this week's Book of the Week, Thea Lenarduzzi pieces together four generations of her family's migrations between Italy and England, and finds that seemingly unremarkable lives are full of information that provides deep insight into our endless struggle to reconcile our individual and collective lives. 
>>Where do we come from? What ae we? Where are we going? 
>>Migration, cooking, living. 

>>Why are people so hesitant to ask their grandparents about their lives? 
>>Fascism and illness. 
>>Your copy. 

Our Book of the Week is Barbara Kingsolver's wonderful new novel Demon Copperhead. Told by its eponymous protagonist, a red-headed child born to a teenage mother in an opiate-infused Appalachia, Kingsolver's novel, like a modern-day parallel to Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, is full of sharp observation of social ills underlaid with deep compassion and expressed with a great joy for language, character and story. 
>>The book she was born to write. 
>>In conversation with Ann Patchett. 
>>A literary ancestor. 
>>Seething with love and outrage. 
>>The voice of Demon Copperhead. 
>>Hillbillies not included. 
>>Get your copy now!

 

Book of the Week: The Golden Mole, And other living treasure by Katherine Rundell  
The animal world is endlessly varied, fascinating and inspiring, and needs to be preserved both for its own sake and for the richness it adds to human experience and thought. Rundell considers 22 animals (including the human) whose existence is endangered by humans, and reveals the depths of wonder embodied in these animals. For instance, did you know that the Golden Mole is luminescent, but blind and therefore unable to see its own radiance? This hardback book is beautifully presented (it even has gilt edges), and illustrated by Tayla Baldwin. 
>>Startling astonishments. 
>>Consider the golden mole.
>>Consider the hummingbird. 
>>Consider the hare. 
>>The world will not starve for want of wonders. 
>>On the illustrations. 
>>Weird and wonderful. 
>>A 21st century bestiary. 
>>Consider a copy of the book. 
>>Other books by Katherine Rundell. 

Our Book of the Week is Gotcha! A funny fairy tale hide-and-seek by Clotilde Perrin. Chased by monsters, each more comically hideous than the last, a child hides here and there inside three fairytale houses (the three little pigs' brick house, Cinderella's palace, the gingerbread house visited by Hansel and Gretel) before coming out and frightening the monsters away. Each house is a wonderland of lift-the-flap discoveries and hilarious details. This is a large, very enjoyable and very special book. 

>>Look inside. 

>>Quick! Hide inside!

>>Let's talk illustration. 

>>Walk in!

Also by Clotilde Perrin: 

>>Inside the Suitcase.

>>Inside the Villains.

>>The House of Madame M.

We gift-wrap, and send books anywhere!

 

Our Book of the Week, Diego Garcia by Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams, has just been awarded the 2022 Goldsmiths Prize ("for fiction at its most novel"). This unique multivocal multilocational collaborative novel tells of two friends, blocked writers struggling with the relationship between fiction and reality, who make friends with a man whose mother was forced to leave one of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean under the unlawful administration of the British government. Will fiction provide the friends with a way to tell a story that is not their own without appropriating or colonising that story? 

>>Not a closed book. 
>>Protest fiction for a new generation. 

>>Against the dogmatism of single-voiced fiction. 
>>The urge to write in solidarity. 
>>Art, life, and fiction. 
>>Fifty years of state fiction. 
>>The Last Colony by Philippe Sands tells of the injustices committed on Chagossians. 
>>What can be done about half a century of unlawful administration? 
>>Your copy. 
>>Read the other books on the Goldsmiths short list.

Our Book of the Week is The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, the winner of the 2022 Booker Prize. The judges said, "The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida takes readers on a journey at once horrific and humorous — beyond life and beyond death, to the world’s dark heart. There, astonishingly and encouragingly, we find tenderness, laughter, loyalty and love." The novel addresses the trauma of the civil war in Sri Lanka, but is funny, audacious, and full of verve and compassion. Now back in stock!
>>Read an extract. 
>>Jokes rob the tyrants of power.
>>A coping mechanism. 

>>Massey grad wins Booker. 
>>The hero is dead, and he'd like to know why. 
>>A photographer in the afterlife. 

>>Is the afterlife a bureaucracy? 
>>What the judges said. 
>>Readers' questions answered. 
>>Robbing Uncle Kurt. 
>>Get your copy of the hardback.
>>Get your copy of the paperback. 
>>The other books short-listed for the Booker are excellent, too. 

 

Our Book of the Week is Catherine Chidgey's latest inventive, acute and entertaining novel The Axeman's Carnival. Narrated by Tama, a magpie who very cleverly 'does all the voices' and mimics even an author's relationship to their story and characters, the novel treats life in the backblocks of rural Aotearoa as a scenario in which humans fail to suppress their inner faults and play out their ambivalences towards each other and toward the so-called natural world.
>>Book of the Week: Bird of the Year. 
>>Life on the farm. 
>>Pecky reviews the book. 
>>An excellent conversation with Sara Baume (author of Seven Steeples). 
>>"There's a fire under me."
>>The New Zealand 12" Championship. 
>>Read Stella's review of The Wish Child. 
>>Read Thomas's review of The Beat of the Pendulum. 
>>Remote Sympathy was short-listed for the 2021 Acorn Prize. 
>>Your copy of The Axeman's Carnival.  

 

Book of the Week: Sarah Laing and Joanna Emeney have produced an inspiring graphic biography of Sylvia Durrant, who helped over 140,000 sick, injured and lost birds during her lifetime and serves as an exemplar of caring for and learning about the natural world around us. SYLVIA AND THE BIRDS: How The Bird Lady saved thousands of birds, and how you can, too is also a practical — and enjoyable — guide to protecting our birdlife. It blends natural history and mātauranga Māori, photographs and Laing's wonderful illustrations, and details the wonders of our native birds, the threats they face and how we can help them.  
>>Genius. 
>>But who has the most cats? 
>>Anyone can be a hero in their own back yard. 
>>Look inside the book. 
>>Hungry penguins. 
>>See some images/buy the book!