NEW RELEASES

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro           $37

A hugely empathic AI, Klara is bought as an Artificial Friend for a girl suffering from an undefined illness. As the full extent of the girl's predicament becomes apparent, Klara, with her wonderful mixture of naivety and capacity, does all she can for the girl, and makes us question what it is to be human. Ishiguro's first novel since being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. 

 "People will absolutely love this book, in part because it enacts the way we learn how to love." —Anne Enright

>>Bomb under the table. 
>>"Oh you darling robot."

On We Go by Catherine Bagnall and L. Jane Sayle            $35

This exquisite little hardback of 21 poems and 26 watercolour paintings is the result of a long-time poet-and-artist collaboration and grew out of their thinking about the natural world, childhood memories and thoughts about the climate change crisis. It’s part of a growing literary genre based on emerging forms of ecological thinking that cross genres and scientific disciplines. An adult picture book to be read aloud to all ages, and a gesture of playful joy, this small treasure can be enjoyed in one sitting and returned to on a regular basis.

>>Look inside. 

>>Meet the poet and the illustrator. 

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, In which four Russians give a masterclass in writing, reading, and life by George Saunders          $48

For the last twenty years, George Saunders (whose Lincoln in the Bardo won the Booker Prize) has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it's more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.
>>Read our reviews of Lincoln in the Bardo. 

From AK79 to The Class of 81: Photos from 1978 to 1982 (and a few more) by Anthony Phelps            $79

In 1978 a young man began to take photographs of the bands that visited his school, playing lunchtime concerts. From there, Anthony Phelps followed the bands to the other venues they were playing and over the next five years, he visually documented one of the most exciting eras in New Zealand rock and roll history: the punk and post-punk years. The 40 bands featured include Toy Love, Androidss, The Scavengers, Pop Mechanix, The Terrorways, The Spelling Mistakes and The Screaming Meemees, as well as touring acts The Clash, Madness and The Ramones.
>>More about the book (and a few of the photographs). 

>>The AK79 album brought an urgent new musical sensibility to a wider audience. 

>>The Class of 81 concert and record took the racing pulse of a changing cultural scene. 
>>The Enemy live at the Beneficiaries' Club. 

>>Androidss. 

>>The Screaming Meemees. 

Where We Swim by Ingrid Horrocks                $35

"I’d wanted to remember why it was we swam in the first place – to remember the pleasure of immersing in an element other than air." Ingrid Horrocks had few aspirations to swimming mastery, but she had always loved being in the water. She set out on a solo swimming journey, then abandoned it for a different kind of swimming altogether – one which led her to more deeply examine relationships, our ecological crisis, and responsibilities to collective care. Why do people swim, and where, how, with whom? Where We Swim ranges from solitary swims in polluted lakes and rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand, to swims in pools in Medellín, Phoenix and the Peruvian Amazon. Near Brighton, Horrocks is joined by an imagined community of early women swimmers; back home she takes her first tentative swim after lockdown. Part memoir, part travel and nature writing, this book is about being a daughter, sister, partner, mother, and above all a human animal living among other animals. 

Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford             $33

1944. It's a Saturday lunchtime on Bexford High Street. The Woolworths has a new delivery of aluminum saucepans, and a crowd has gathered to see the first new metal in a long time. Everything else has been melted down for the war effort. An instant later, the crowd is gone. Incinerated. Atomised. Among that crowd were five little children. What future did they lose? The only way to know is 'to let run some other version of the reel of time, where might-be and could-be and would-be still may be'.

"A brilliant, capacious experiment with fiction. An audacious meditation on life and death." —Guardian

The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen          $38

In this sequel to The Sympathiser, Nguyen takes up the story as the Sympathizer arrives in Paris as a refugee. There he and his blood brother Bon try to escape their pasts and prepare for their futures by turning their hands to capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing. No longer in physical danger, but still inwardly tortured by his re-education at the hands of his former best friend, and struggling to assimilate into a dominant culture, the Sympathizer is both charmed and disturbed by Paris. As he falls in with a group of left-wing intellectuals and politicians who frequent dinner parties given by his French Vietnamese "aunt," he finds not just stimulation for his mind but also customers for his merchandise—but the new life he is making has dangers he has not foreseen, from the oppression of the state, to the self-torture of addiction, to the seemingly unresolvable paradox of how he can reunite his two closest friends, men whose worldviews put them in absolute opposition.

Granta 153: Second Nature edited by Isabella Tree          $28

This issue encapsulates the state of nature and our different cultural relationships with it worldwide. It features interviews with Amazonian shaman Manari Ushigua, Inuit activist Siila Watt-Cloutier and Indigenous elder Rod Mason; fiction by Caoilinn Hughes and Amy Leach; poetry by John Kinsella and Daisy Lafarge; and photography by Xavi Bou and Merlin Sheldrake. Plus, reportage and memoir by: Rebecca Priestley, Patrick Barkham, Robert Becker, Ellen Coon, Tim Flannery, Cal Flyn, Derek Gow, Trevor Goward, Barry Lopez, Dino Martens, Charles Massy, Callum Roberts, Judith D. Schwartz, Sue Stuart-Smith, Samanth Subramanian, Ken Thompson, and Adam Weymouth.

Sumac: Recipes and stories from Syria by Anas Atassi          $55

Over eighty recipes, both traditional and contemporary, both from Atassi's family and from various parts of a country bursting with rich culinary traditions. 

Is Capitalism Broken? by Yanis Varoufakis,  Arthur Brooks,  Katrina vanden Heuvel and David Brooks             $17

There is a growing belief that the capitalist system no longer works. Inequality is rampant. The environment is being destroyed for profits. In some Western nations, life expectancy is even falling. Political power is wielded by wealthy elites and big business, not the people. But for proponents of capitalism, it is the engine of progress, not just making all of us materially better off, but helping to address everything from women's rights to political freedoms. We seem to stand at a crossroads: do we need to fix the system as a matter of urgency, or would it be better to hold our nerve, or completely rethink our approaches? Four thinkers debate the issues. 

Bluffworld by Patrick Evans           $35

Who better than Patrick Evans to produce a savage and hilarious satirical on literary academia and the bullshit, envy and plagiarism that underlies its operations? 

Things OK with You? by Vincent O'Sullivan         $25

This foremost poet's first collection since 2016. 

Raids and Settlements: On Seamus Heaney as translator edited by Marco Sonzogni and Marcella Zanetti         $30

This collection of essays is the first comprehensive discussion of Heaney as translator. The authors have approached their contribution from different perspectives but are united by their fascination or preoccupation with the works of one of the greatest poets and poet-translators in the English language. This interdisciplinary combination of individual expertise and shared interest was essential to offer a holistic appreciation of Heaney's translations from fifteen languages, literatures and cultures.

The Interior Design Handbook by Frida Ramstedt          $55

When interior designer Frida Ramstedt moved from a characterful old apartment to a functional new build, she started to think about design in a new way. Rather than relying on high ceilings and architectural features, she had to make full use of essential principles to transform a blank canvas into a cosy, attractive and harmonious home. In doing so, she distilled the secrets of successful interior design and styling. This is a book about what looks good and why, filled with practical tips and illustrations to help you work out what's best for your space and lifestyle—and to discover what your individual tastes really are.

Catherine Certitude by Patrick Modiano, illustrated by Sempé         $17

Catherine lives with her gentle father, Georges Certitude, who runs a shipping business in Paris with a failed poet named Casterade. Father and daughter share the simple pleasures of daily life: sitting in the church square, walking to school, going to her ballet class every Thursday afternoon. But just why did Georges change his name to Certitude? What kind of trouble with the law did Casterade rescue him from? And why did Catherine's ballerina mother leave to return to New York?

Ellis Island by Georges Perec            $28

Employing lyrical prose meditations, lists, and inventories, Perec conjures up the sixteen million people who, between 1890 and 1954, arrived in America as foreigners and stayed on to become Americans. Perec (who by the age of nine was an orphan: his father was killed by a German bullet, and his mother perished in Auschwitz) is awake to the elements of chance in immigration and survival: "To me Ellis Island is the ultimate place of exile. That is, the place where place is absent, the non-place, the nowhere. Ellis Island belongs to all those whom intolerance and poverty have driven and still drive from the land where they grew up." A new edition to re-emphasise the importance of migrants and refugees to a host culture. 

Kia Whakanuia te Whenua: People, place, landscape edited by Carolyn Hill          $55

A collection of essays, poems, photographs and other texts challenging us to consider better ways of listening to and responding to the needs of our land, environment and waterways, and to find these solutions in Māori perspectives in a changing world. 

A Mother is a House by Aurore Petit               $30

A mother is a nest, a mirror, a moon. The baby sees their mother in every aspect of their day. As the pages go by, the child grows. The mother who was a refuge becomes a road, a story, and a show. On the final page, the child is ready to take their first steps. This beautifully illustrated story looks through the baby's eyes for an unexpected and affecting picture of parents and home. 

There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura          $33

A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits- it is close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing and ideally, very little thinking. She is sent to a nondescript office building where she is tasked with watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods. But observing someone for hours on end can be so inconvenient and tiresome. How will she stay awake? When can she take delivery of her favourite brand of tea? And, perhaps more importantly, how did she find herself in this situation in the first place? As she moves from job to job, writing bus adverts for shops that mysteriously disappear, and composing advice for rice cracker wrappers that generate thousands of devoted followers, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all, but something altogether more meaningful...

Lote by Shola von Reinhold             $36

Mathilda has long been enamored with the ‘Bright Young Things’ of the 20s, and throughout her life, her attempts at reinvention have mirrored their extravagance and artfulness. After discovering a photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, who ran in the same circles as the Bright Young Things that she adores, Mathilda becomes transfixed and resolves to learn as much as she can about the mysterious figure. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists’ residency in Dun, a small European town Hermia was known to have lived in during the 30s. The artists’ residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination, but will she be able to break the thrall of her Transfixions? From champagne theft and Black Modernisms, to art sabotage, alchemy and lotus-eating proto-luxury communist cults, Mathilda’s journey through modes of aesthetic expression guides her to truth and the convoluted ways it is made and obscured.

Listed for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize. 

>>Encountering a baroque mind. 

Places of Poetry: Mapping the nation in verse by Paul Farley and Andrew McRae             $33

Arising from a public arts project which recorded submissions of poems associated with specific locations in Britain, the book presents the best poems of the 7500 submitted. Includes new work by Kayo Chingonyi, Gillian Clarke, Zaffar Kunial, Jo Bell and Jen Hadfield.

>>Visit the Places of Poetry website. 

>>Use the Nelson Poetry Map. 

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2021 edited by Tracey Slaughter           $40

182 poems by 129 poets, including Elizabeth Morton, Michele Leggott, essa may ranapiri, Bob Orr, Kiri Piahana-Wong, Jordan Hamel, David Eggleton and Mere Taito, the winning entries in the Poetry New Zealand Prize, essays, and reviews of 25 new poetry books. Featured poet: Aimee-Jane Anderson-O'Connor.

Where is the Dragon? by Leo Timmers            $20

The king can't sleep until the dragon is found. Luckily, three knights know everything about dragons and are armed to the teeth! Now they just have to find him. They set out into the night with a candle in hand. Soon they find something that looks very much like a dragon…

>>A day in the life of Leo Timmers. 
>>On translating the text. 

 

BOOKS @ VOLUME #219 (5.3.21)

Read our newsletter and find out what we've been reading and recommending, about new books that have arrived this week, and about the short-listed books for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. 

 

>> Read all Stella's reviews.

Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese woman and her worlds by Amy Stanley   {Reviewed by STELLA} An appealing history of Japan in the nineteenth history, Stranger in the Shogun’s City is a tale both personal and encompassing. Tsuneno is the daughter of a priest. Growing up in a small mountainous village, the temple is central to her life and expectations. Married at 12, life seems mapped out: she will be a diligent temple wife. Yet 15 years on and with no children in sight, she is sent home again with the divorce papers—not an uncommon occurrence in the nineteenth century, where women would be remarried—a failed relationship not necessitating disaster. Two more marriages down the road and the picture for Tsuneno isn’t quite as rosy, her family are losing patience with her and she has other ideas. Seeking independence, she goes against her family’s wishes and knowledge, pawns her belongings (mostly clothes), and makes her way to the city of Edo in the care of a family acquaintance—someone she thought she could trust. In a relatively short time, Tsuneno’s world is turned upside down. Not only has the trustworthy friend betrayed her, physically and emotionally, but he has also left her in financial peril and abandoned her in the city. Living in a tiny room, at the mercy of her landlord, without money or warm clothes, bedding or utensils, she is desperate to find work. Her dreams of a good position in a Shogun household are remote, but she does get a job working long hours as a housemaid. It isn’t ideal, but it enables her to stay in Edo, a lively city with prospects. Tsuneno rises and falls alongside the city. This is the story of a woman and the story of a city, Edo, at the end of a golden age, known as the Great Peace, a time just prior to the arrival of the American gunship and Commodore Perry. As we read we fall into step beside Tsuneno, seeing the informal structures of the city—the migrant workers and peddlers— that underpins the economic structure of the more formal organisations, the geisha and the theatre performers that brighten the evenings, the temple priests, the samurai of all classes (one of whom will impact this woman’s life more than she expected) and the hierarchies of the ruling shogunate classes. Pieced together from letters (between Tsueno and her family), family records kept at the temples, combined with historical events (famine, fire, political machinations) and research, Amy Stanley creates a gripping account of a woman who chose between family and freedom, who made the most of the hand she was dealt. Rich in detail with its vivid descriptions of the environs (urban and rural), and lively portraits of Tsuneno, her family and the people of Edo, Stranger in a Shogun’s City is a compelling history of an ordinary woman in a fascinating time and place.

 

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

The Weak Spot by Lucie Elven    {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Even on a blue day you could tell this sky had a knack for breaking into storms,” she writes, she someone, she the pharmacist-to-be, as she arrives in the Alpine town, a town anyway that seems like an Alpine town, high up, reached only by funicular railway, there’s a certain steepness involved, the town is depopulating, certainly you have the feeling that the only people living there are those you are aware of at any given time and that soon they too may be gone. When the narrator arrives she remembers visiting the town as a child in the company of her uncle and her mother at a time when her mother was ill but her uncle did not yet know that she was ill. From what has she run away to come here this time, or what has she otherwise left if it is not the case that she has run away? She takes a job as a pharmacist at the pharmacy owned by a Mr Malone, it seems she was a pharmacy student before she came here, though the main tasks of a pharmacist, at least in Mr Malone’s pharmacy, are not the main tasks of a pharmacist as we know them although certainly allied to those tasks. Mr Malone “believed that a pharmacist’s role was to enhance the locals’ potential by listening carefully,” to allow others to tell their stories, to reduce one’s presence to that of a listener only, to abnegate oneself, “the more absent I seemed, the more they talked,” she says, having a natural talent for the work of disappearing, a natural talent for undoing what we ordinarily think of as existing. “It occurred to me,” she says, “that there was something reassuring about the obviously dangerous Mr Malone to someone like me who worried all the time.” He is corrosive to her idea of herself; she wants to be corroded. Mr Malone eventually leaves the pharmacy to her and stands for mayor, though he hardly leaves, she supports his campaign, there hardly seems to be another candidate, Mr Malone becomes mayor, still he in the centre of his coterie of occupationally defined men, he is the centre of some void sucking at her always. Was there really a wolf-beast once in the town that ate little girls? Somehow it’s a fable but not exactly a fable, more a dream, everything is described with the same degree of portentious detail and the same lack of overall shape as an account of a dream, a dream in this case from which the dreamer, the young pharmacist, cannot awaken, from which waking will never be possible. Within this dream that the dreamer does not realise is a dream, the dreamer struggles to differentiate the actual from her reveries, the stories get away from her, “I was easy to derail,” she says. “I derailed myself on my own. Unless I was busy I was distracted by daydreams,” though she and we struggle and fail to tell what is actually the case and what is dreamed, the same residue remains in either case, the same damage done. “After I articulated this sort of reverie I felt a sense of revulsion,” she says. “I had started to feel as though I wouldn’t wake up, was scared I would disappear.” All stories are told stories, but the compounding of detail here erodes knowledge rather than constructs it, all detail is a subtraction, a relinquishment, written and rid of, the shape of things is lost, the self annulled. “I experimented with how little I could let pass over my face,” she says. All memory and identity are stripped away by iteration, vacancy expands, pushing everything out of sight and into non-existence, if there is such a place to be pushed. Even the descriptions eventually become descriptions primarily of absence: “The room had no decoration, nothing personal, no photographs of strict-looking characters standing in front of wrought-iron gates,” the narrator nothing more than a mirror: “I also was a reflective surface,” no longer sure even how to present herself before the customers of the pharmacy, “walking around in a long pause, an ellipsis,” her escape from herself complete, she has become the phantom she has unconsciously always sought to become. “All feelings would pass if I didn’t engage with them,” she says. “I have a weak spot, I had taken to telling people, a magic phrase that I used to trick my way out of an emotional hole,” out of existing, now ready to leave even this, the town of her attenuation. When her uncle comes to collect her he remembers nothing, he is a stranger to the town, he too has lost his history, he too has become nothing more than a label on an absence. And we are left with nothing, nothing that is except an oddly-shaped void, mountain air,  sublime sentences, surprising details, words, phrases, oddness coming at us like something beautiful, sharp and cold. On the iterative level, Elven’s book has something of the disconcerting clarity of the work of Fleur Jaeggy, but more as if a work of brilliance had been translated a little awkwardly and inaccurately and somehow enhanced by the process no matter what was lost, though if this is a translated work, and perhaps all works are translated works in the way in which this work is a translated work, it is not a work translated between languages but between minds if there are such things as minds. Elven describes a new employee at the pharmacy as “perching his opinions at the end of pointed lips,” and how, during a storm, the storm promised perhaps by blue skies mentioned earlier, “we saw slanted people walking along the grass, trees gesticulating like conjurors, the wind throwing water off the river.” We may forget the sentences but we are left with the strange effect upon us of these sentences, just as we may forget a dream but still be left strangely affected.

NEW RELEASES
Click through to reserve your reading!

Poetics of Work by Noémi Lefebvre         $34

Sparring with the spectre of an overbearing father, torn between the push to find a job and the pull to write, the narrator wanders into a larger debate, one in which the troubling lights of Kafka, Kraus, and Klemperer shine bright. Set against the backdrop of police brutality and rising nationalism that marked the state of emergency following the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, Poetics of Work takes a jab at the values of late capitalism. A blistering treatise of survival skills for the wilfully idle.

"A smart, timely, and novel proposal for poetics in the age of personal and political patriarchy." — Joanna Walsh

>>Read an extract. 

>>Read Thomas's reviews of Blue Self-Portrait. 

Dwelling in the Margins: Art publishing in Aotearoa edited by Katie Kerr        $45

On the periphery of Aotearoa New Zealand’s publishing scene, there is a rich and varied cottage industry of small press publishers. They work in collaboration, in gaps between paid gigs and with the support of like-minded peers: poets who print, curators-cum-editors, self-publishing photographers, and cross-disciplinary designers. Dwelling in the Margins introduces some leading figures of independent publishing in their own words. Through stories and essays, thirty practitioners reflect on their craft, speculate on the changing landscape of book-making, and imagine alternative frameworks for the future of publishing. Featuring Dominic Hoey, Imogen Taylor, Judy Darragh, Catherine Griffiths, Bruce Connew, Bridget Reweti, Matariki Williams, Luke Wood, Sarah Maxey, Ella Sutherland, Jonty Valentine, Haruhiko Sameshima, Matthew Galloway, Louise Menzies, Sophie Davis, Alan Deare, Chloe Geoghegan, Alice Connew, Anita Tótha, Balamohan Shingade, Chris Holdaway, Erena Shingade, Gabi Lardies, Simon Gennard, Harry Culy, Katie Kerr, Lizzie Boon, Melinda Johnston, Samuel Walsh, Sophie Rzepecky and Virginia Woods-Jack.

Me & Other Writing by Marguerite Duras           $40

In her nonfiction as well as her fiction, Marguerite Duras's curiosity was endless, her intellect voracious. Within a single essay she might roam from Flaubert to the scattering of desire to the Holocaust; within the body of her essays overall, style is always evolving, subject matter shifting, as her mind pushes beyond the obvious toward ever-original ground. Me & Other Writing is a guidebook to the extraordinary breadth of Duras's nonfiction. From the stunning one-page 'Me' to the sprawling 70-page 'Summer 80', there is not a piece in this collection that can be easily categorized. These are essayistic works written for their times but too virtuosic to be relegated to history, works of commentary or recollection or reportage that are also, unmistakably, works of art.

"While reading Marguerite Duras, it can be hard to tell if you are pressing your hands to her chest or if she is pressing her hands to yours. Has she mined your deepest feelings or have you caught her heart's fever? Her nonfiction, written in the same blood and seawater as her fiction, produces the same sensation." —Paris Review

National Anthem by Mohamed Hassan           $35

Hassan's poems chartan intimate course through memories from his childhood and upbringing in Egypt, New Zealand, Turkey and elsewhere to untangle the intersecting traumas of migration, Islamophobia and grief and ask difficult questions about the essence of nationalism and belonging.

>>Short-listed for the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. 

The Age of Wood: Our most useful material and the construction of civilisation by Roland Ennos           $55
How were humans able to develop civilizations and produce a globalised economy? Ennos shows that the key factor has been our relationship with wood. Synthesizing recent research with existing knowledge in fields as wide-ranging as primatology, anthropology, archaeology, history, architecture, engineering, and carpentry, Ennos reinterprets human history and shows how our ability to exploit wood's unique properties has profoundly shaped our bodies and minds, societies, and lives. 

I Am a Human Being by Jackson Nieuwland         $20

The first collecting from an exciting emerging poet. "Take part in a new transformation with every new page as the speaker becomes by turns an egg, multiple trees, a town crier, a needle in a haystack, and a cone of blue light in this incisive and pathos-filled exploration of what it means to be anything at all."

A River Called Time by Courttia Newland           $33

The Ark was built to save the lives of the many, but rapidly became a refuge for the elite, the entrance closed without warning. Years after the Ark was cut off from the world, a chance of survival within its confines is granted to a select few who can prove their worth. Among their number is Markriss Denny, whose path to future excellence is marred only by a closely guarded secret: without warning, his spirit leaves his body, allowing him to see and experience a world far beyond his physical limitations. Once inside the Ark, Denny learns of another with the same power, whose existence could spell catastrophe for humanity. He is forced into a desperate race to understand his abilities, and in doing so uncovers the truth about the Ark, himself and the people he thought he once knew.

"A masterful reimagining of the African diaspora's influence on England and on the world. It's a grand tale and still an intimate portrait of loss and love. What glory and influence would Africa enjoy if colonialism had never occurred? Courttia Newland reshapes our vision of the past, present and future by taking this one question seriously. The result is something truly special. No other way to put it, this book is true Black magic." —Victor LaValle

Metropolis: A history of the city, humankind's greatest invention by Ben Wilson        $60|

An exhilarating tour of more than two dozen cities and thousands of years, examining that invention’s good and bad effects. The bad effects (“harsh, merciless environments,” for instance) are produced not so much by roads and buildings but by what’s invisible. The city, as Wilson sees it, is less of a warehouse of architecture and more of an organism that shapes the creatures living inside.

The Penguin Book of OuLiPo edited by Philip Terry     $26

A fascinating look at the work and workings of the exclusive group of writers and mathematicians who use constraints as a laboratory to generate literary texts. Featuring work by Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino, and other OuLiPo members, as well as "anticipatory plagiarists" preceding them, the book gives a good introduction to the OuLiPo's novel ways of generating texts and exercising our literary capacities.

The Flying Couch, A graphic memoir by Amy Kurzweil           $40

Amy weaves her own coming-of-age as a young Jewish artist into the narrative of her mother, a psychologist, and Bubbe, her grandmother, a World War II survivor who escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto by disguising herself as a gentile. Captivated by Bubbe's story, Amy turns to her sketchbooks, teaching herself to draw as a way to cope with what she discovers. 
>>"How do you feel about being a character in my book?"
>>A page evolves. 
>>"The thing in the middle is drawing."
>>How to draw literary cartoons. 

How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm          $25

The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a booming fossil fuel industry, rising seas, rising emission levels, and a rising temperature. With the stakes so high, why haven't we moved beyond peaceful protest? In this manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse. Offering a counter-history of how mass popular change has occurred, from the democratic revolutions overthrowing dictators to the movement against apartheid and for women's suffrage, Malm argues that the strategic acceptance of property destruction and violence has been the only route for revolutionary change. Moving from the forests of Germany and the streets of London to the deserts of Iraq, Malm offers us a challenging and urgent discussion of the politics and ethics of pacifism and violence, democracy and social change, strategy and tactics.

With a Little Kelp from Our Friends: The secret life of seaweed by Mathew Bate and Liz Rowland         $35

Beyond the tideline, there are around 10,000 types of seaweed. An essential ingredient for life on Earth, seaweed has sustained animals and people for many thousands of years. From ancient history and mythology to modern uses in food, health and medicine, discover how seriously cool seaweed is, and how it can even help tackle climate change.

>>Beneath the sea. 

Tom Stoppard, A life by Hermione Lee       $70

"An astute study of the dazzlingly clever playwright, which details the parties and famous friends, but also identifies the emotions that drive much of his work. An exceptional biography." —Guardian

>>Read an extract. 

>>Noises off. 

L.E.L: The lost life and scandalous death of the 'female Byron' by Lucasta Miller         $30

On 15 October 1838, the body of a thirty-six-year-old woman was found in Cape Coast Castle, West Africa, a bottle of Prussic acid in her hand. She was one of the most famous English poets of her day—Letitia Elizabeth Landon, known by her initials 'L.E.L.' What was she doing in Africa? Was her death an accident, as the inquest claimed? Or had she committed suicide, or even been murdered? To her contemporaries, she was an icon, hailed as the 'female Byron', admired by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Heinrich Heine, the young Bronte sisters and Edgar Allan Poe. However, she was also a woman with secrets, the mother of three illegitimate children whose existence was subsequently wiped from the record. After her death, she became the subject of a cover-up which is only now unravelling.

Fifty Words for Snow by Nancy Campbell         $33

In Japan it is Yuki-onna - 'a goddess'. In Icelandic, Hundslappadrífa - 'flakes as big as a dog's paw'. In Hawai'ian, snow is hau - 'mother of pearl', but also 'love'.  From Iceland to Greenland, mountain top to frozen forest, school yard to park, snow is welcomed, feared, played with and prized. Arctic traveller and award-winning writer Nancy Campbell digs deep into the meanings, etymologies and histories of fifty words for snow from across the globe. Held under her magnifying glass, each of these linguistic snow crystals offers a whole world of myth, culture and story.  

Childhood, Youth, Dependency ('The Copenhagen Trilogy') by Tove Ditlevsen            $26

Following one woman's journey from a troubled girlhood in working-class Copenhagen through her struggle to live on her own terms, 'The Copenhagen Trilogy' is a searingly honest, utterly immersive portrayal of love, friendship, art, ambition and the terrible lure of addiction, from one of Denmark's most celebrated twentieth-century writers.

"Utterly, agonisingly compulsive. A masterpiece." —Guardian

"Sharp, tough and tender, wrenching sadness and pitch-black comedy. Ditlevsen can pivot from hilarity to heartbreak in a trice." —Spectator

"Astonishing, honest, entirely revealing and, in the end, devastating. Ditlevsen's trilogy is remarkable not only for its honesty and lyricism; these are books that journey deep into the darkest reaches of human experience and return, fatally wounded, but still eloquent." —Observer

A Chronology of Film by Ian Haydn Smith          $45

Organized around a central timeline that charts the development of film from the earliest moving images to present-day blockbusters, this volume features key films, film commentaries, and contextual information about the period in which they were produced. By revealing the social, political, and cultural environments in which these films were created.

Red Sands: Reportage and recipes through Central Asia by Caroline Eden        $55

In a quest to better understand the vast heartland of Asia, Caroline navigates a course from the shores of the Caspian Sea to the sun-ripened orchards of the Fergana Valley. The book is filled with human stories, forgotten histories and tales of adventure. Eden is a guide using food as her passport to enter lives, cities and landscapes rarely written about. From the author of the equally wonderful Black Sea. 

A Crooked Tree by Una Mannion           $33

This is the story of Libby and her siblings over one long hot summer, and how one decision can have terrible unintended consequences. Rage. That's the feeling engulfing the car as Ellen's mother swerves over to the hard-shoulder and orders her daughter out onto the roadside. Ignoring the protests of her other children, she accelerates away, leaving Ellen standing on the gravel verge in her school pinafore and knee socks as the light fades. What would you do as you watch your little sister getting smaller in the rear view window? How far would you be willing to go to help her? The Gallagher children are going to find out. This moment is the beginning of a summer that will change everything.
"Yoking a classic coming-of-age narrative to the pacier engine of a thriller takes skill and A Crooked Tree is more than persuasive, emanating nostalgia, foreboding and clear-eyed empathy." —Guardian

The African Lookbook: A visual history of 100 years of African women by Catherine E. McKinley         $55

Featuring photographs from African studios and photographers from 1870—1970, this collection contrasts the fresh and vital information in these images with those of colonial photographers who all to often figuratively crushed their subjects under their prejudice, projections and expectations. 

>>Find out more about the book. 

 

Book of the Week. What are the Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops, and, more importantly, which kind are you? Shaun Bythell, who brought us the cuttingly accurate Diary of a Bookseller and Confessions of a Bookseller, has devised this hilarious handbook to the types of people booksellers encounter every day. He has some words about booksellers too...
>>"Pantomime misanthropy tempered with bursts of sweetness."
>>Bythell attempts to justify the book. 
>>Live (eventually) at the Wigtown Book festival. 
>>The perils of being a bookseller. 
>>The bookshops of Wigtown. 
>>Diary of a Bookseller
>>Confessions of a Bookseller
>>How to fix a Kindle. 
>>And a Kindle Fire. 
>>A shop with books in. 
>>As it happens. 
>>Your copy of Seven Kinds. 
>>To Shaun with love (more bookselling truths (>>and there's a book of these, too!))

 Find out about the books short-listed for the 2021 OCKHAM NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS!

Read the judges' citations below and click through to our website to obtain your copies. 

Use the VOLUME OCKHAMETER to vote for your favourite book in each category and to go in the draw for a copy of each of the eventual winners. 

JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION

Bug Week, And other stories by Airini Beautrais (Victoria University Press)

Atmospheric and refined, Bug Week is compelling from start to finish. A tightly wound collection of short stories which explore the weird, the eerie and the mordantly funny, there’s a sense of quiet unease and slow-burning rage. A talking albatross at an open mic night, an envious sibling, a desperate ex-lover and a melancholy brothel owner are some of the characters encountered in this collection, which delves into the female experience, anger, male entitlement and restless malaise.

Nothing to See by Pip Adam (Victoria University Press)

Looking at surveillance, identity, gender and people living on the margins under the fallout of capitalism, Nothing to See follows the lives of Peggy and Greta, who are recovering alcoholics (or rather, one alcoholic who has splintered off into two). And just when you think you’ve cracked what is going on, Pip Adam turns everything in this dazzling novel inside out, leaving the reader momentarily disoriented but exhilarated.

Remote Sympathy by Catherine Chidgey (Victoria University Press)

This transcendent novel about ‘wilful blindness’ is written as a series of letters, interviews and diary entries told from four different angles — the newly-appointed camp administrator at Buchenwald labour camp Sturmbannführer Dietrich Hahn, his wife Frau Greta Hahn, Dr Lenard Weber, who has invented a machine called a Sympathetic Vitaliser which he believes can cure cancer by using a process called ‘remote sympathy’, and the collective reflections of Weimar citizens. Immersive, profound and plotted with a breathtaking dexterity, Remote Sympathy is vividly evoked.

Sprigs by Branavan Gnanalingam (Lawrence & Gibson)

A searing novel which examines violence, racism and toxic masculinity, Sprigs looks at the consequences of a sexual assault at a high school rugby game aftermatch, and the ripple effect of trauma that follows. Brannavan Gnanalingam deftly brings together a hefty cast of characters, skillfully orchestrating multiple voices and perspectives. Written with sensitivity, nuance and not without bursts of comic relief, Sprigs is an unflinching novel which forces us to reckon with uncomfortable truths about power and privilege in Aotearoa.

MARY AND PETER BIGGS AWARD FOR POETRY

Funkhaus by Hinemoana Baker (Victoria University Press)

The language of Funkhaus pumps and flows as if the collection were a great red heart. Hinemoana Baker’s poems reference Sylvia Plath, Wi Parata, aunties, and P.J. Harvey. Vacuum cleaners, dogs, and polaroids also appear in imaginative ways. The book’s shifts in subject matter, migratory metaphors and language encompass satirical political poetry, tender love lyrics and memorable street tunes. Like the emanations from the radio station of the title, these poetry messages travel; from Lake Geneva to Waitangi, Berlin to Ihumātao, Funkhaus transmits an unstaunchable array of emotions in rhythmic form.

Magnolia 木蘭 by Nina Mingya Powles (Seraph Press)

Magnolia 木蘭 grows and blooms through mother-daughter conversations across generations, cultures and languages. Seeking to understand her place in the world, a young writer journeys from New Zealand to China, England to Malaysia, from film to contemporary art, and from English to Mandarin, Hakka and Māori. Subtly but insistently exploding prejudices and expectations, Nina Mingya Powles presents a poetic mosaic that more than lives up to the brilliant elegance, or mingya 明雅, promised by her Chinese name.

National Anthem by Mohamed Hassan (Dead Bird Books) 

Mohamed Hassan shapes the emotional outpouring of performance and the fast footwork of slam into perfectly timed poems of political commentary, personal awareness and metaphorical virtuosity. Refusing the easy refrains of nationalism, National Anthem syncopates family history, displacement and personal trauma with a devastating commentary on racism’s most ugly manifestations. It mixes compromise and commitment, Egypt and Aotearoa, English and Arabic, laughter and anger, skepticism and love to sound out a new beat for poetry in this country and beyond.

The Savage Coloniser Book by Tusiata Avia (Victoria University Press)

Tusiata Avia turns her vociferous intellect and satirical vehemence to recording recent events and finds a base space for poetry in which to pick up the pieces and keep on moving. While furiously rejecting the destructive legacies of colonialism, her poems acknowledge that contradictions live at the centre of contemporary commitments. From garrulously hilarious observations to expressions of profound grief, the collection activates her insights, reforming our consciousness of what constitutes poetry as she goes.

BOOKSELLERS AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION

An Exquisite Legacy: The life and art of New Zealand naturalist G.V. Hudson by George Gibbs (Potton & Burton)

George Hudson’s grandson has produced a glorious tribute to his grandfather, not only one of New Zealand’s greatest naturalists but also an artist of dazzling skill. In reproducing so many of these paintings for the first time, the author is scientifically and artistically scrupulous, with detailed captions and superb production values. Crucially, this is also an enlightening and lovingly written biography — we are drawn inside the world of an insect-mad fellow who became a significant figure in our natural history landscape.

Hiakai: Modern Māori cuisine by Monique Fiso (Godwit, Penguin Random House)

Hiakai is no ordinary cookbook but rather one which, unusually, lets us see our natural environment with fresh eyes. Coming from award-winning chef Monique Fiso, it is the result of years of labour and research into Māori cuisine and all it represents. Passionately written, well edited, beautifully illustrated and presented, Hiakai weaves tikanga, history, cultivation, foraging and hunting into an influential classic of the kitchen, and also of cultural history; in these recipes Fiso shows the range of indigenous ingredients with sophisticated flair.

Marti Friedlander: Portraits of the Artists by Leonard Bell (Auckland University Press)

This elegantly produced collection of photographs, the bulk of which have never been published before, is exquisitely designed and edited — and the image reproduction is exceptional. The accompanying text breathes life into these individuals and, thanks to the layout, Marti Friedlander’s uncanny ability to capture the spirit of her subjects shines through. With images of over 110 artists, photographed over several decades, this important volume is a wonderful cultural account of mid-to-late twentieth century creative life in New Zealand.

Nature—Stilled by Jane Ussher (Te Papa Press)

This sumptuously beautiful book presents a wondrous selection of specimens from Te Papa’s natural history collection. Brilliantly photographed and produced, it highlights not just the breadth of these collections but also the knowledge and passion of those who care for them. Jane Ussher is one of Aotearoa’s most accomplished photographers and she has clearly approached this project with great respect and enthusiasm for the exhibits which represent our vanishing natural world, and have never been more worthy of our attention.

GENERAL NON-FICTION AWARD

Specimen: Personal essays by Madison Hamill (Victoria University Press)

This compulsively readable collection charts the inner life of someone who often feels at odds with those around her. Madison Hamill traces her sense of difference in fresh, razor-sharp prose, via encounters ranging from a bullying primary school teacher, whom she quietly bests, to the clients at an under-funded drug clinic in Cape Town, for whom she can do nothing. It is as memorable for her unblinking view of herself as it is for her compassionate awareness of others’ struggles.

Te Hāhi Mihinare: The Māori Anglican Church by Hirini Kaa (Bridget Williams Books)

This is both a history of an institution and a corrective for ‘fatal impact’ narratives in which Māori are presented as the passive victims of colonisation; Hirini Kaa shows how iwi adapted the new religion to make it their own. His emblematic example is the haka ‘Te Pārekereke’, which celebrates the arrival of Christianity and the gift of seedling kumara — both of which promise a new start. Performing the haka acknowledges the renegotiation of mātauranga through Christianity, and embraces both continuity and change.

The Dark is Light Enough: Ralph Hotere, A biographical portrait by Vincent O'Sullivan (Penguin Random House)

In this exemplary instance of the biographer’s art, Vincent O’Sullivan transcends what in other hands may have proved an insurmountable obstacle — writing about an artist without illustrations of the work — by producing a life story that ‘feeds back’ into the imagery, deepening and enriching all subsequent encounters. He has given us a sensitive, meticulously researched portrait of one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most important modern artists.

This Pākehā Life: An unsettled memoir by Alison Jones (Bridget Williams Books)

The question at the heart of educationalist Alison Jones’s multi-stranded memoir is what it means, for her, to be Pākehā: a non-Māori New Zealander who belongs nowhere else. It is a coming-of-age story, a family story, and a story of place. It also charts a personal journey at a time of intellectual foment, when making a difference meant protesting. Above all, it’s about friendship, and about learning how to listen in order to work collaboratively towards positive change.

Use the VOLUME OCKHAMETER to vote for your favourite book in each category and to go in the draw for a copy of each of the eventual winners.