Written (by a P&B staff member) against the grain of contemporary New Zealand fiction, this book of short stories challenges preconceptions about reading, writing and the construction of character. How are readers affected by what is not related, by what is withheld, by what has been potentised by exclusion or by the impossibility of inclusion?
>> Some photographs from the launch on Tuesday (#4 has links to the playlist (apparently books these days need a playlist)). Thank you to everyone who came.
From the late eighteenth century, Māori travellers spread out from New Zealand across the globe. They travelled for a variety of reasons – curiosity, adventure, commerce, political missions or duress – and were part of an international movement of Māori of surprisingly large scale. Most travellers eventually returned home, bringing something of their own ‘new world’ experiences with them. These remarkable experiences of voyaging and discovery, presented across a series of vignettes, also form part of the wider history of Māori and Pākehā encounter.
"After more than twenty thousand days in this world I'm back to basics. My body is dated equipment and I ride it as though I've borrowed it for the day, taking its senses on a test flight."
A freewheeling philosophical poem interrogating what it is to be aware of one's place in the world.
>> Did you hear Roger Horrocks on the radio?
>> Radio review by the ever-perceptive Greg O'Brien.
This striking, design-led reference book features Andy Tuohy's portraits of 52 key modern artists, rendered in each artist's own characteristic style - including Aleksandr Rodchenko in trademark green and red, Andy Warhol as a classic repeated print, and Marc Quinn as a frozen blood head in a box. With text by art historian Christopher Masters.
Friends since high school, Marriott and Pawsey reconnected after 30 years and, shortly afterwards, began writing to each other about their respective lives, publishing Common Ground and Common Table together. After their last book, Common Lives, each of them, unpredictably and somewhat radically, changed their lifestyle. Janice became a grandmother and shifted from Wellington to Auckland to be closer to her family, and Virginia and her husband sold the family farm and built a new house on a smaller property closer to town. How did their lives change so dramatically, and how has this affected them both personally and philosophically? Most importantly, what about their gardens and kitchens?
"The declamatory return; a homeland as a “wearying enigma”. This all makes sense to me. The New Zealand that’s home to me may be a place of sheep and rugby and number-eight wire, whatever that is, but it’s also none of those things. Am I still a New Zealander?"
The world is changing faster than we ever thought it would and our attempts to grasp the present leave us holding onto the past. Meanwhile the future is pressing at us, hard. The internet has not only changed the way our brains work, it is changing the structure of the planet. In the style of Marshall McLuhan's hugely influential The Medium is the Massage, this little book uses image and typography to poke a needle in the eye of global digital storm.
Mendelsund is responsible for some of the most memorable contemporary book cover designs. In this book he shows the full range of his portfolio and gives insight into his design process. The inclusion of cover designs that didn't make it is particularly interesting.
>> You can see some of his work here (but the book is much more interesting).
Faith's father has been found dead under mysterious circumstances, and as she is searching through his belongings for clues she discovers a strange tree. The tree only grows healthy and bears fruit if you whisper a lie to it. The fruit of the tree, when eaten, will deliver a hidden truth to the person who consumes it. The bigger the lie, the more people who believe it, the bigger the truth that is uncovered. The girl realizes that she is good at lying and that the tree might hold the key to her father's murder, so she begins to spread untruths far and wide across her small island community. But as the tree bears more and more fruit, she discovers something terrifying - that her lies were closer to the truth than she could ever have imagined.
"The Lie Tree is brilliant: dark, thrilling, utterly original. Everyone should read Frances Hardinge. Everyone. Right now." - Patrick Ness
New York, 1895. It's late on a warm city night when Sylvan Threadgill, a young night soiler who cleans out the privies behind the tenement houses, pulls a terrible secret out from the filthy hollows: an abandoned newborn baby. His discovery unleashes an incredible chain of events. The Night Circus meets Water for Elephants meets The Crimson Petal and the White!
"This quite literally marvellous novel takes you on a hallucinatory ride through old New York, until the four threads of its protagonists' lives tangle and tighten like a noose. Irresistible." - Emma Donoghue (Room)
"A triumph." - Jessie Burton (The Miniaturist)
"The 'bold and sassy' fictional Lillian reflects on life through her random memories about her childhood, teenage years, college days, touring days, her parents, lovers and death. The book is a very relatable, personable, funny, interesting and real account of a 1930-vintage woman's life. Each chapter is standalone, and they are in random chronological order, a disconnection that I think suits this rather random but eminently readable book." - Lynn
In the (near) future, even Lalla's parents' high-security home can't protect them from the global crisis. When London burns, 500 'chosen' escape aboard a ship. Lalla is one of them, but where are they going? What secret is her father hiding? What is the price of salvation?
"Honeywell’s debut is ambitious and well written and provides endless possibilities for debate." - The Guardian
"This is an amazing novel about the life and death of Alan Turing. It starts with his suicide and with the young DC Leonard Corell investigating his death. As Leonard starts to delve he becomes confounded by the official secrecy over Turing's war record. When he realises that Alan Turing was no ordinary man and was a brilliant mathematician, he begins to see a possible way out of his humdrum ordinary life. A great read that builds slowly and comes to an amazing ending. I haven't yet read the Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges, but now of course I must, even if it is just to compare fiction with fact. As an aside, the author of this novel, David Lagercrantz, has been chosen to carry on and finish the Steig Larsson ‘Millennium’ novels." - Peter
Featuring 75 of the world's most legendary designers, this book presents the story of fashion through the fascinating personal lives and innovative collections that have shaped the field over the past century.
Essays! Poetry! Fiction! Drama! Art! Criticism!
>> Ten things to like about #229.
A riotous, rambling and incomplete history of classical music, complete with leg measurements.
The friendship between a secular American journalist and a madrasa-trained sheik, and their study and discussion of the Quran provides a welcome antidote to contemporary prejudice and the wars being fought in their names.
For a couple of decades before World War II, a group of immigrant painters and sculptors, including Amedeo Modigliani, Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine and Jules Pascin dominated the new art scene of Montparnasse in Paris. Art critics gave them the name "the School of Paris" to set them apart from the French-born (and 'less talented') young artists of the period.
Four childhood friends from rural Wisconsin attempt to recapture their childhood closeness.
"There are books that perform the literary equivalent of grabbing you by the throat and shouting at you to listen, and there are books, such as Nickolas Butler’s Shotgun Lovesongs, that creep up on you slowly, winding their way into your mind until their story is that you hear. An unashamedly sentimental hymn to those who lives we too easily overlook, a beautifully written, big-hearted celebration of the enduring power of different kinds of love." - The Independent
On a world where science and magic are hard to tell apart, a stranger arrives in a remote town with news of political turmoil to come. And a young woman learns that she must free herself from the role she has accepted. Robson's sci-fi is exciting and philosophically questing.
Set in a stunning but scarred Canadian landscape, The Mountain Can Wait is a story of fathers and sons and the heartache they cause each other, in the tradition of Annie Proulx.
"Written with painfully nuanced care that displays affection for nature and the laconic, working-class characters, the result is not a cheerful read but genuinely moving." - Kirkus
When Genesis goes on a blind internet date, she just wants to get over her ex-boyfriend Naz. She just wants someone to like her again. But when Genesis wakes up the morning after the date, she can't remember a thing. She doesn't know where she is, or how she got there. And she can hardly move because she is strapped into some kind of body armour. Before she has time to figure it out, she receives an order through an earpiece stuck in her ear. And then a voice sounds in her head: 'You have been chosen for an assignment. The vest you're wearing is packed with high explosives. And with one mobile call we can detonate it.' Eek.
Reynaud travelled throughout France to assemble the regional variations of his favourite cased foods.
Describes the original avifauna of North Canterbury as revealed by the fossil evidence in the Pyramid Valley site and other sites in the area, gives the history of the Pyramid Valley site and its environment, and relates the past environment and avifauna to the present landscape.
Tracing the prehistory of the Holocaust, from the 1800s to the Nazis' assumption of power in 1933, Aly claims that German anti-Semitism did not originate with racist ideology or religious animosity, as is often supposed. Instead, he asserts that it was rooted in a more basic emotion: material envy. Resenting the success of the urban, well-educated Jewish minority in the rapidly modernizing world, Germans embraced compensatory theories of Jewish racial inferiority.
Some men can never outrun their ghosts. Enchei thought he'd found a home at last - a life of quiet obscurity far removed from the horror of his military days. After a decade in the Imperial City his mistakes have been few, but one has now returned to haunt him. As Narin's pregnant lover comes to term, life has never been so perilous. There couldn't be a worse time for a nightmare to be unleashed on the Imperial City, but luck's rarely been on Narin's side.
"A hugely assured modern fantasy novel." SFX Magazine
Can the special strengths introverts have be harnessed to achieve the kinds of success valued by extroverts?
The story of one man's survival of the genocide and terror that eviscerated Cambodia in the 1970s tells the stories of millions.
Journalist Melina Knight longs to know why her grandmother, Mariam, so rarely speaks about her family and childhood. When Mariam dies suddenly, she inherits her grandmother's journal and handwritten letters stashed in a wooden spice box, cryptic treasures written in Armenian, Mariam's mother tongue. On a spring break in Cyprus, Melina meets Ara, a young Armenian man, who agrees to act as translator. Melina unearths a family secret that changes her life and lays the ghosts of her grandmother's turbulent past to rest.
Among millions of Holocaust victims sent to Auschwitz II-Birkenau in 1944, Priska, Rachel, and Anka each passed through its infamous gates with a secret. They were newly pregnant. What was the fate of these three and the children they carried?
How is the internet reshaping the economy? Is it undermining capitalism or making it more durable?
We have a special selection of books on craft and crafting available for a limited time only. Come in and have a look!
(Or browse on-line)
