The New Sorrows of Young W. by Ulrich Plenzdorf       $28.00
Edgar W, teenage dropout, unrequited lover, unrecognized genius - and dead - tells the story of his brief, spectacular life. It is the story of how he rebels against the petty rules of communist East Germany to live in an abandoned summer house, with just a tape recorder and a battered copy of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther for company.
"A story of epic force and human intensity." - Die Welt

Madness in Civilization: A cultural history of insanity by Andrew Scull        $65.00 
A stupendously ambitious and fascinatingly successful survey of the ways in which madness has been seen, and the 'mad' treated (in both the ameliorative and non-ameliorative (and often abusive) senses). Scull's scope is as long and broad as history itself - is madness the excluded face of civilisation? 
>> Scull on madness and meaning. 

 Happy are the Happy by Yasmina Reza        $26.00
1 novel. 18 people. 18 lives. Infinite combinations: families and friends, colleagues and patients, lovers and mourners. But sometimes a crowd is the loneliest place to be...
"Excels in exploring the roots of unhappiness. Reza skilfully peels away the veneer of life to reveal the secrets seething within." - Guardian

 Thrown by Kerry Howley      $38.00
In this darkly funny work of literary reportage, narrated by an excitable, semi-fictionalized graduate student named Kit, a bookish young woman insinuates herself into the lives of two cage fighters - one a young prodigy, the other an aging journeyman. Kerry Howley follows these men for three years through the bloody world of mixed martial arts as they starve themselves, break bones, fail their families and form new ones in the quest to rise from remote Midwestern fairgrounds to packed Vegas arenas.
"Compulsively readable." - New York Times
"The most fascinating book I've read this year. The precision of Howley's prose reminds me of Joan Didion or David Foster Wallace." - Time

 The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (mostly) true story of the first computer by Sydney Padua          $39.99
Meet two of Victorian London's greatest geniuses: Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron; mathematician, gambler, and proto-programmer, whose writings contained the first ever appearance of general computing theory, a hundred years before an actual computer was built. And Charles Babbage, eccentric inventor of the Difference Engine, an enormous clockwork calculating machine that would have been the first computer, if he had ever finished it. But what if things had been different? What is they did build the Difference Engine? A very amusing graphic novel.  

Walking Away by Simon Armitage         $36.99
Not content with walking the Pennine Way as a modern day troubadour, an experience recounted in his bestseller and prize-wining Walking Home, the restless poet has followed up that journey with a walk of the same distance but through the very opposite terrain and direction far from home. In Walking Away Simon Armitage swaps the moorland uplands of the north for the coastal fringes of Britain's south west, once again giving readings every night, but this time through Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, taking poetry into distant communities and tourist hot-spots, busking his way from start to finish.

War of the Encyclopaedists by Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite        $37.00
"As bizarre, hilarious and devastating as the past decade. Simultaneously a coming-of-age story, a war story, and a story of the disaffected millennial generation for whom the war hardly happened at all." - Phil Klay, author of Redeployment 

 The New Spymasters: Inside espionage from the Cold War to Global Terror by Stephen Grey         $55.00
The spying game is changing, but the need for walking, talking sources who gather secret information has never been more acute.

 Go Set a Watchman (Audio book) by Harper Lee, read by Reese Witherspoon       $50.00
The CD of the publishing phenomenon of the year. 
Read it yourself. 
>> Here's Chapter One.

 Waimarama Sanctuary Mosses by Bill & Nancy Malcolm and Jim Shevrock         $32.00
Nelson's Waimarama Sanctuary is a replica of an ancient New Zealand landscape. The wealth of species is even richer than it appears - mosses grow nearly everywhere: on soil, rock, bark and leaves, and even in water. Very well observed and illustrated.

Even the Dead by Benjamin Black        $38.00
Every web has a spider sitting at the centre of it. Pathologist Quirke is back working in the city morgue, watching over Dublin's dead. When a body is found in a burnt-out car, Quirke is called in to verify the apparent suicide of an up-and-coming civil servant. But Quirke can't shake a suspicion of foul play.The only witness has vanished, every trace of her wiped away. Piecing together her disappearance, Quirke finds himself drawn into the shadowy world of Dublin's elite - secret societies and high church politics, corrupt politicians and men with money to lose. John Banville writes as Benjamin Black.

 Actors Anonymous by James Franco      $23.00
Inspired by Alcoholics Anonymous's 12 Steps and 12 Traditions, Actors Anonymous mixes memoir and invention in an examination of celebrity, acting and the making of fiction. Actor/director Franco turns his 'James Franco' persona inside out while providing a fascinating meditation on his art, along with tales of excess. "Hollywood has always been a private club," he writes. "I open the gates. I say welcome. I say, Look inside."

 Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates       $38.00
A father tells his sone what it means to be black in America. 
 "A beautiful, lyrical call for consciousness in the face of racial discrimination in America. Between the World and Me is an exhortation against blindness. Coates wants to push us to see the delusions we’ve been feeding ourselves and insist we struggle through the Dream, that false narrative of America’s history, by reckoning with its ugliness." - Guardian

 The Whispering Storm by Michael Moorcock        $35.00
London just after the war, a city desperately trying to get back on its feet. A young boy, Michael Moorcock, is about to discover a world of magic and wonder. Between his first tentative approaches to adulthood - a job on Fleet Street, the first stirrings of his interest in writing - and a chance encounter with a mysterious Carmelite Friar, we see a version of Moorcock's life that is simultaneously a biography and a story. Mixing elements of his real life with his adventures in a parallel London peopled with highwaywomen, musketeers and magicians, this is Moorcock's first full novel in ten years.

 Havel: A life by Michael Zantovsky      $28.00
The definitive biography of the playwright who, after years of political dissidency, became President of the Czech Republic is now in paperback. 

 The Spy's Son: The true story of the highest-ranking CIA officer ever convicted of espionage and the son he trained to spy for Russia by Bryan Denson        $37.00
Fascinating - the story of Jim and Nathan Nicholson.

 Baghdad: City of peace, city of blood by Justin Marozzi        $29.99
 Over thirteen centuries, Baghdad has enjoyed both cultural and commercial pre-eminence, boasting artistic and intellectual sophistication and an economy once the envy of the world. It was here, in the time of the Caliphs, that the Thousand and One Nights were set. Yet it has also been a city of great hardships, beset by epidemics, famines, floods, and numerous foreign invasions which have brought terrible bloodshed. This is the first history of the city in English for almost 80 years.

 Common People: The history of an English family by Alison Light       $29.99
 Beginning with her grandparents, Alison Light moves between the present and the past, in a series of journeys over two centuries, across Britain and beyond. Common People is a family history but also a new kind of public history, following the lives of the migrants who travelled the country looking for work. Shortlisted for the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize. 
 "This book is a substantial achievement: its combination of scholarship and intelligence is, you may well think, the best monument you could have to all those she has rescued from time's oblivion." - Financial Times 
 "A remarkable achievement. Common People should become a classic." - Margaret Drabble

 A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab          $19.99
Most people only know one London - but what if there were several? Kell is one of the last Travelers - magicians with a rare ability to travel between parallel Londons. There's Grey London, dirty and crowded and without magic, home to the mad king George III. There's Red London, where life and magic are revered. Then, White London, ruled by whoever has murdered their way to the throne. And, once upon a time, there was Black London...

 The Crossing: My journey to the shattered heart of Syria by Samar Yazbek        $39.99
Insight into the impact of civil war on the people of Syria. 
Winner of the PEN Pinter Prize.
>> here.

The Fly Trap by Fredrik Sjoberg       $26.00
Now in paperback!
"Swedish entomologist Sjoberg has a close affinity with the island on which he lives, most specifically its hoverflies, about which he is an expert. Island life, specialisation, and happiness are all themes of this book. In essence it is an exploration of the art of mastery, containing observations of nature that reflect the writer’s inner self. This is a book with strong imagery and ideas that I mentally keep returning to." - Sarah

 Out Came the Sun: Overcoming the legacy of mental illness, addiction and suicide in my family by Mariel Hemingway        $45.00
By the granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway (who epitomised the family characteristics Mariel has struggled to overcome).

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee          $49.99
Appearing fifty-five years after To Kill a Kockingbird, this companion book sees Scout returning to Maycomb as an adult and confronting Atticus's resistance to racial integration.
"A harder, more ruthless novel that Mockingbird, it will evoke much discussion." - Stella
>> We would like to offer our customers a chance to buy both a copy of the new book (a lovely hardback) and a copy of the lovely new hardback edition of the first book (replicating the wrapper design of the first edition) for $75 (a $10 saving for a very special pair of books). Just let us know.

Lost and Gone Away by Lynn Jenner        $35.00
Between 2010 and 2014 Lynn Jenner made several related emotional and intellectual investigations. Lost and Gone Away is the record of these: a hybrid text of nonfiction, prose poems and poetry. The book traverses the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake; samples and sifts through the lost and recovered detritus of the ancient world; radiates its attention out from that epicentre of loss, the Point Last Seen, from which all searches begin; and quietly, devastatingly, explores how one might think and write about the Holocaust, from far away.

The Predictions by Bianca Zander         $29.99
A novel of one woman's attempt to outrun the destiny that is predicted for her, moving from a remote New Zealand commune in the waning days of 1970s free-love experimentation to the heady music scene of 1980s London. Can she define her own happiness, even if it takes her in unanticipated directions?
"In every sense, Bianca Zander is a fantastic writer." - Curtis Sittenfield    
"I really enjoyed this fascinating portrayal of commune living in New Zealand in the 70's and 80's and how the best of intentions don't always have the desired outcome. It's a story of relationships, parenting and ideologies. It also explores how a prediction can shape how a life is lived. It's a great read, the characters are brilliantly portrayed and the themes fascinating." - Sarah

Rising Ground: A search for the spirit of place by Philip Marsden        $25.00
When Philip Marsden moved to a remote, creekside farmhouse in Cornwall, the intensity of his response took him aback. It led him to wonder why we react so strongly to certain places, and set him off on a journey on foot westwards to Land's End through one of the most myth-rich regions of Europe. From the Neolithic ritual landscape of Bodmin Moor to the Arthurian traditions at Tintagel, from the mysterious china-clay region to the granite tors and tombs of the far south-west, Marsden assembles a chronology of attitude to place.
"A superb work which should be read everywhere, describing in beautiful prose the opulence of our natural and human fabric." - Independent

I'm Jack by Mark Blacklock          $33.00
In this provocative novel Blacklock portrays the true and complex history of John Humble, a.k.a. Wearside Jack, the Ripper Hoaxer, a timewaster and criminal, sympathetic and revolting, the man hidden by a wall of words, a fiction-spinner worthy of textual analysis, who leads the reader into an allusive, elusive labyrinth of interpretations, simultaneously hoodwinking and revealing.
"Intelligent and disturbing." - Guardian

Alena by Rachel Pastan           $29.99
In constant conversation with du Murier's Rebecca, this novel tells of an aspiring young curator is offered a plumb position at the Nauk, Cape Cod's most cutting-edge art gallery. The wealthy, enigmatic founder who offered her the job fails to mention that Alena, the previous curator, died two years ago. Quickly, she finds herself in over her head. The Nauk echoes with phantoms of the past - a past obsessively preserved by the museum's staff - and the newcomer's every move mires  and entangles her more deeply.
"Luminous and sure-footed. The triumph of Pastan's story is that it manages to be more than a companion piece to du Maurier's. Alena proves itself an intriguing and substantial novel on its own merits, while still offering the kind of gothic plunge we remember and crave from our younger years." - The Washington Post

The Antipodeans by Greg McGee         $38.00
Beginning with the return to Venice of an old and sick man determined to confront his past, and accompanied by his daughter who is escaping hers, The Antipodeans spans three generations of a New Zealand family and their interaction with three families of Northern Italy. This strong novel marks the return to literary prominence of the author of Foreskin's Lament.
>> The author talks about his book.
>> "Give a brief history of your eyesight." (interview)

Discovering New Zealand Trees by Sandra Morris         $18.00
An attractive new reference for children, introducing 20 native trees.

The Art of Flying by Antonio Altaribba and Kim              $49.99
A deeply touching synthesis of individual and collective memories. A deeply personal graphic novel, Altarriba's account of what led his father to commit suicide at the age of ninety is a detective novel of sorts, one that traces his father's life from an impoverished childhood in Aragon, to service with Franco's army in the Civil war, escape to join the anarchist FAI, exile in France when the Republicans are defeated, to return to Spain in 1949 and the stultifying existence to which Republican sympathisers were consigned under Francoism.
"Tremendously sad, subtly drawn." - Guardian

The Last Act of Love by Cathy Rentzenbrink            $35.00
In the summer of 1990 - two weeks before his GCSE results, which turned out to be the best in his school - Cathy Rentzenbrink's brother Matty was knocked down by a car on the way home from a night out, suffering serious head injuries. He was left in a permanent vegetative state. For the next eight years, Cathy and her parents took care of Matty - they built an extension onto the village pub where they lived and worked; they talked to him, fed him, bathed him, held him. Most of all, they loved him. But there came a point at which it seemed the best thing they could do for Matty - and for themselves - was let him go. With unflinching honesty and raw emotional power, Cathy describes the unimaginable pain of losing her brother and the decision that changed her family's lives forever. As she delves into the past and reclaims memories that have lain buried for many years, Cathy reconnects with the bright, funny, adoring brother she lost and is finally able to see the end of his life as it really was - a last act of love. A remarkable book.

The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck         $23.00
The story of the twentieth century is traced through the various possible lives (and deaths) of one woman.
Winner of the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
We also have a couple of copies left of the beautiful hardback edition.
"Erpenbeck's writing is astoundingly evocative and nuanced, balancing vast emotional weights on delicate, precisely placed observations. Such good writing, distilling the incomprehensibly large in the affectingly small, is a pleasure to read." - Thomas

The Crow Eaters by Bapsi Sidhwa         $25.00
A vibrant portrait of a Parsi family taking its place in colonial India on the brink of the 20th Century, from one of Pakistan's best-loved novelists.

Love Game: A history of tennis, from Victorian pastime to global phenomenon by Elizabeth Wilson             $25.00
"Excellent. Wilson makes a passionate, partisan case that tennis should be treated differently from all other sports. In fact tennis shouldn't be treated like a sport at all, but should instead be seen as a kind of burlesque gymnastic seduction, a business of passion and, above all, of love." - Guardian
"Hers is a sporting history unlike any I've read - one that, in its sophistication and thoughtfulness, shows up the hollowness of most other accounts." - William Skidelsky, Observer

Living in the Sound of the Wind: Personal quest for W.H. Hudson, naturalist and writer from the River Plate by Jason Wilson          $45.00
W. H. Hudson was brought up on the pampas, where he learnt from gauchos about frontier life. After moving to London in 1874, Hudson lived in extreme poverty. Like his friend Joseph Conrad, Hudson was an exile, adapting to England. He never returned to Argentina. Wilson unravels Hudson's English dream, his natural history rambles, and his work to protect birds. He remains both a complex witness to his homeland before mass immigration and to his England of the mind, before the urban sprawl.

The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison           $25.00
Illness, violence, sentimentality, hurt, confession. What are the deep unfaceable motors of our culture? How do we look sidelong at the tings we most fear? How do we always fail to confront out vulnerabilities: pain, bodies, limitations, failure to connect and to commit?
" It’s hard to imagine a stronger, more thoughtful voice." - The New York Times

Speak by Louise Hall                 $38.00
When machines learn to speak, who decides what it means to be human? She cannot run. She cannot walk. She cannot even blink. As her batteries run down for the final time, all she can do is speak. Will you listen? Speak is the story of artificial intelligence and of those who loved it, hated it and created it. From Alan Turing's conviction in the 1950s to a Silicon Valley Wunderkind imprisoned in 2040 for creating illegally lifelike dolls, from a pilgrim girl writing her diary to a traumatised young girl exchanging messages with a software program, all these lives have shaped and changed a single artificial intelligence - MARY3. 
"The rarest of finds: a novel that doesn't remind me of any other book I've ever read. A complex, nuanced, and beautifully written meditation on language, immortality, the nature of memory, the ethical problems of artificial intelligence, and what it means to be human." - Emily St. John Mandel
"Speak reads like a hybrid of David Mitchell and Margaret Atwood. Louisa Hall has written a brilliant novel." - Philipp Meyer

Encircling by Carl Frode Tiller            $25.00
David Hugsar has lost his memory so his psychiatrist places an advertisement in a newspaper inviting friends and relatives to share their memories of him. The resulting letters, reminiscences, and scenes offer an encircling narrative that reveals more about the intersecting young lives in a small Norwegian backwater than about David himself, the enigma at the heart of the novel. Adolescent sexuality, boredom, filial guilt, violence and love; the frustrations of life in a small-town rock band; drugs and cigarettes all find their place in these chronicles of Norwegian provincial life, exploring masculinity in crisis.

The Last English Poachers by Bob and Brian Tovey               $39.99
Just two hours' drive west of London, a secret way of life that has been operating for centuries is clinging to a fragile existence. This is the world of the last English poachers - men who have lived off the land, taking game and wildlife from the big country estates, risking the wrath of gamekeepers in order to feed their families and make a modest livelihood. Poachers have lived cheek by jowl with landowners throughout the history of the British class system. Their customs, hunting skills and knowledge of animals is comparable to that of indigenous communities in pre-industrial societies, yet the poacher has been vilified, ridiculed and, in olden times, even put to death. Bob and BrianTovey are poachers of the old stripe: a father and son of 75 and 50 years old respectively, who are continuing their ancestors' traditions, reluctant to surrender the old ways of sourcing food from nature.

Between Gods by Alison Pick         $38.00
Alison Pick was born in the 1970s and raised in a loving, supportive family, but as a teenager she made a discovery that changed her understanding of who she was for ever. She learned that her Pick grandparents, who had escaped from Czechoslovakia during WWII, were Jewish, and that most of this side of the family had died in concentration camps.
"A beautifully woven story of family, partnership, love and reconciliation, not just with one's past but with oneself." - A.M. Homes

My Year Off: Rediscovering life after a stroke by Robert McCrum        $25.00
When he was 42 and editor-in-chief of Faber & Faber, Robert McCrum woke up paralysed on his left side. He spent months as an invalid lying on his back and over a year recovering his function. In this book he describes the transforming effects of being shunted the short sudden distance to disability, the reassessment of his life that resulted from time in the ‘antechamber of death’, and the deepening of his relationships with those who cared for and about him. He found the disjunction of the mental and physical aspects of existence profoundly disconcerting, time thereafter flowed differently, and the natural compulsion to look for meaning in life’s occurrences found itself frustrated at a deep level. What carried on had a different texture from what came before.

The Letters of Ivor Punch by Colin MacIntyre            $38.00
Imagine an island, a place separated from the mainland by choppy seas. A place of myths and faith, where a Headless Horseman is said to stalk the woods but where the kirk is always full. Imagine a community which held its own against Darwin but which can't hold on to its own. Prepare to meet a pioneering female travel writer, two fatherless boys, and a man who, quite simply, fell from the sky. And, at the centre of it all, the figure who links the past to the present - the irrepressible, unforgettable former Sergeant Punch.
>> Colin MacIntyre has been voted Scotland's Top Creative Talent.

Motherland by Jo McMillan           $38.00
"I hadn't expected the Berlin Wall to be clean and white and smooth. It looked more like the edge of the swimming baths than the edge of the Cold War. On the grass of No-man's Land, fat rabbits ate and strolled about as if they'd never been hunted and nothing could disturb them. This was their land and they ruled it, and there were three parts to Berlin: East, West and Rabbit." What is it like to grow up on the losing side of history?

Through the Woods by Emily Carroll         $28.00
"It came from the woods. Most strange things do." Five mysterious, spine-tingling stories follow journeys into (and out of?) the eerie abyss. These chilling tales spring from the macabre imagination of acclaimed and award-winning comic creator Emily Carroll. Take a walk in the woods and see what awaits you there...

The Seven Good Years by Etgar Keret          $35.00
The seven years between the birth of Keret's son, Lev, during a terrorist attck on Tel Aviv, and the death of his father were good years, but still full of reasons to worry. The Seven Good Years is a tender and entertaining tale of a father bringing up his son in a country beset by wars and alarms.
"Funny, dark and poignant." - Jonathan Safran Foer
"One of the most important writers alive." - Clive James

Nature's God: The heretical origins of the American Republic by Matthew Stewart         $35.00
Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine: these radicals who founded America set their sights on a revolution of the mind. Derided as "infidels" and "atheists" in their own time, they wanted to liberate us not just from one king but from the tyranny of supernatural religion. The ideas that inspired them were neither British nor Christian but largely ancient, pagan, and continental: the fecund universe of the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, the potent (but nontranscendent) natural divinity of Spinoza.

This Thing of Darkness by Harry Bingham       $38.00
A marine engineer who tumbles off a cliff path on a windy night. A burglary where everything taken was returned by the thief. The suicide of a man in love with life. An accident, a mystery, an unexplained tragedy. And nothing at all to connect them. Until, that is, Detective Constable Fiona Griffiths, searching for something - anything - to take her mind off the tedious job of evidence-cataloguing she's been assigned to, starts to wonder if all three incidents are not quite what they seem.
"The most startling protagonist in modern crime fiction." - Sunday Times

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson          $38.00
Our voyage from Earth began generations ago. Now, we approach our destination. A new home. Aurora.
"This apparently simple tale unpacks into a mellow, complex meditation on human stubbornness (for good and ill); on the environmental disaster that is happening all around us; on hope, love and the mystery of consciousness itself. Aurora is a magnificent piece of writing, certainly Robinson’s best novel since his mighty 'Mars trilogy', perhaps his best ever." - Guardian

The Pointless Leopard (What good are kids anyway?) by Colas Gutman and Delphine Perret          $17.00
 In the country, there's nothing to do, except: admire. It's the same as being bored, but with your eyes wide open. The story of grumpy city-child Leonard, forced to go for country walks with his greenery-loving mum and dad, is a reminder of what use we may be to the world. What do we know? What can we do? And is any of it of real value?

The Quality of Silence by Rosamund Lupton         $37.99
 On 24th November Yasmin and her deaf daughter Ruby arrive in Alaska. Within hours they are driving alone across a frozen wilderness where nothing grows, where no one lives, where tears freeze - and night will last for another fifty-four days. They are looking for Ruby's father. Travelling deeper into a silent land. They still cannot find him. And someone is watching them in the dark...
"This stylish thriller will send shivers down your spine." - Guardian

The Big Tiny: A built-it-myself memoir by Dee Williams        $29.99
A health scare precipitated the author to re-examine her life and to get rid of everything in it she didn't really want. She downsized her expectations and upsized her contentment, she built her own small house, gluing her hair to it in the process, and found a new and better way to live.
"Williams creates a portrait of humanity through her own compelling experience. That she has written about home and life with such humour and vulnerability, and in her own unique vernacular, makes her story all the more universal." - Jay Shafer