A stunningly beautiful survey of one hundred of the most stunningly beautiful picture books ever produced. The books distill time and place as well as giving insight into the changing nature of children's consciousness. Irresistible.
"It is almost impossible to leaf through Salisbury's book without becoming acquisitive. It is a book to make the eye greedy, to make collectors of us all." - Guardian
A lonely, unhappy man who works at a book pulping factory (and who reads aloud in the train each morning from pages he has rescued) finds a diary on a USB stick and then finds himself falling in love with the woman who wrote it. A book about literature's ability to enrich even the most monotonous life.
"The humanity of the characters! The re-enchantment of everyday life! The power of words and literature! Tenderness and humour! The Reader on the 6.27 is a must." - L'Express
To be the 10-year-old son of a drugged-up late-1980s rock guitarist and a mother scarcely worthy of the title is Theo's fate, and no amount of Christmases in July can make up for the relentlessly disturbed, invaded and grotesquely sexualised setting that it's his lot to inhabit.
"Taylor's novel is a sustained howl of confusion and alienation. The blurring of inside and outside speaks of Theo's literal lack of boundaries, and when the big star himself turns up with a large, hedonistic entourage, the taking down of his flimsy inner walls is brutally completed." - The Guardian
What is a Treevipus? A fantastic creature with the head of a trunkfish, the body of a weevil and the tail of a platypus, of course! In this very amusing book, a host of creatures take on new names, new descriptions and hilarious new identities when their heads, bodies and legs are swapped around as the pages are flipped.
Unloved sons turn their aggression on the outside world. Unloved daughters destroy the people they love, and then themselves. In this daring portrayal of Magda Goebbels - wife of Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels - Meike Ziervogel unveils an historical tale of abusive mother and daughter relationships that reaches a terrifying conclusion in the last days of Nazi Germany.
"A gripping read, a subtle portrait of a woman history made monstrous, here reinvented with intelligence and story-telling flair." - Lisa Appignanesi
The Turnip Princess, And other newly discovered fairy tales by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth $26.00Thirty boxes of manuscripts were recently discovered in a German municipal archive. There were revealed to comprise one of the world's most outstanding collections of fairy tales, collected by Schönwerth in Bavaria in the 1850s. Dark, violent, surprising and psychologically satisfying, these tales are now available for you to read.
"Schönwerth's tales have a compositional fierceness and energy rarely seen in stories gathered by the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault." - The New Yorker
>> Read about this amazing discovery, and read a tale!
AS in her Booker Prize-winning The Gathering, an Irish family is forced by circumstance to confront loss and conflict, and to change.
"A slow-burning, powerfully erupting novel." - The Independent
Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Cole and Linda Porter, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos - all are summer guests of Gerald and Sara Murphy at Villa America, their coastal oasis of artistic genius, debauched parties, impeccable style and flamboyant imagination. But before long a stranger enters into their relationship and their marriage must accommodate an intensity that neither had foreseen.
"A tragic and compelling novel." - The Guardian
An excoriating and tender memoir of growing up in East Germany.
"Tender, acute and utterly absorbing." - Anna Funder
"A wry and unheroic witness. An unofficial history of a country that no longer exists." - Julian Barnes
"Beautiful and supremely touching." - Sunday Telegraph
"Compelling. Leo is terrific at elucidating the slow, incremental steps by which people come to lie to themselves. Guile, guilt and disappointment drip from these pages and Red Love is all the more affecting for it." - New Statesman
A compelling novel following the intersecting lives of eighteen characters: gang members, firefighters, nurses, law enforcement officers and graffiti artists,whose lives are changed forever by the six days of chaos that were the 1992 Los Angeles Riots.
"Pitch-perfect. Superlative." - David Mitchell
When neurologist Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a teacher wrote in his report: 'Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far'. It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. In his characteristically involving style, Sacks, tells of his journey from motorcycle-obsessed youth to his career explaining the workings of the brain to a wide audience in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and a raft of others.
Follow Teddy Todd - would-be poet, RAF bomber pilot, husband, father (and, incidentally, brother of the multi-lived Ursula of Life After Life) - as he navigates the perils and progress of the 20th century. For all Teddy endures in battle, his greatest challenge will be to face living in a future he never expected to have.
Why did Sir Joseph Somes, Chairman of the New Zealand Company, writing to the Colonial Secretary Lord Stanley in 1843 describe the Treaty of Waitangi as "a praiseworthy device for pacifying and amusing naked savages for the meantime"? Why did Lieutenant Charles Wilkes commanding a United States Navy flotilla at anchor in the Bay of Islands in February 1840 say of the Treaty in his diary: "The New Zealand Land Company has been the secret spring of this transaction" and then go on to describe them as very questionable company promoters who had successfully bamboozled the public out of their money by way of an investment in land the Company did not own? What was Captain William Hobson doing in New Zealand at all in February 1840 trying to convince the local Maori to sign a Treaty confirming British sovereignty over New Zealand when for the previous forty years successive British governments had implacably rejected any attempt to make New Zealand a British colony?
This beautifully written, deeply moving account of her husband Tom Lubbock's illness and death from a brain tumour, has just won Coutts the 2015 Wellcome Book Prize.
“Painful to read, but beautifully expressed. Coutts recalls things with such vivid detail that you almost feel you’re reliving this experience with her in real time.” - Bill Bryson, Wellcome Prize judge
"Marvellous, painful, immersive." - The Telegraph
Spanning the 1950s to the 1980s, Early Warning continues to follow the Langdon family through the merciless sweep of American history. The sequel to Some Luck by the 'American Tolstoy'.
"Smiley has started to look like the best living American novelist." - Observer
Nikki has been thirteen forever. She drives a stolen car up the Carolina hills to her father's trailer with a backpack full of pills. She is determined to make her way into his life. Drug deals, pimp wars, chicken shit, ecstasy. Soon Nikki learns what's required of her to survive - and to prevail - in this world.
"Stunningly bleak." - Eimear McBride
"Murakami’s book is a mystery, a philosophical conversation and a layered landscape of music, dreams, melancholy and understated humour. Being less complex than IQ84, but more mature than Norwegian Wood, it has elements of many of Murakami’s books, and yet it has its very own texture." - Stella
Now in paperback (no excuses!).
Irreverent, self-obsessed, compellingly readable - Geoff Dyer's essays and reviews comprise a map of the culture of his times.
>> On punctuality.
"My mother, a house that is slowly collapsing, a bridge dancing to a tremor." It started when she could no longer remember the word for 'book'. Then her mind, her language and her identity began to slip away. This is Mortier's moving, exquisitely observed memoir of his mother's descent into dementia, as a once-flamboyant woman who loved life and pleasure becomes a shuffling, ghostlike figure wandering through the house. Piecing together the fragments of her lost life, and his own childhood, Mortier asks: what do we become when we lose the repertoire of habits and words that make us who we are?
Usefully links the progression of style elements with the development of the city, and contains biographies of over 300 architects practising in that century.
What if you realized the book you were reading was all about you? When an intriguing novel appears on Catherine's bedside table, she curls up in bed and begins to read. But as she turns the pages she is sickened to realize the story will reveal her darkest secret. A secret she thought no one else knew.
"Sensationally good psychological suspense - exactly what a great thriller should be." - Lee Child
"With the earthquake came the storm..."
A gothic road novel! The youngest son of an English Earl travels to Virginia on a slave ship, where he encounters Flora, the daughter of an outlaw, and Shelo, a medicine man who appears to have a sinister plan involving him....
At the start of World War II, ten-year-old Franziska Mangold is torn from her family when she boards the kindertransport in Berlin, the train that secretly took nearly 10,000 children out of Nazi territory to safety in England. Taken in by strangers, Frances (as she is now called) courageously pieces together a new life for herself. But what will happen to her when she is finally reunited with her family, now that she's a stranger herself after seven years of war?
Li Feng grew up in Mao's communist China with her mother's motto burning in her ears - success demands two things: unconditional sacrifice and absolute mental focus. Finally breaking free of her mother's overbearing clutches and fleeing to Sydney as an adult, Li struggled to make sense of her own lost childhood by piecing together her family's history - four generations of women's lives - through a period of unprecedented social and political upheaval.
Naomi Jacobs went to sleep one night in 2008 as a 32-year-old mother, and woke up the next morning believing she was a fifteen-year-old school girl. She did not recognise the house she woke up in, though it was hers, nor her ten-year-old son, Leo. As far as she was concerned, she was in 1992. This was disconcerting. With the help of her personal diaries and those close to her, Naomi set about piecing together as much as she could of her missing years. What she discovered shocked her.
In November 2011, Mona Eltahawy came to worldwide attention when she was assaulted by police during the Egyptian Revolution. She responded by writing a groundbreaking piece in Foreign Policy entitled 'Why Do They Hate Us'; 'They' being Muslim men, 'Us' being women. It sparked huge controversy. In Headscarves and Hymens, Eltahawy takes her argument further. She explains that since the Arab Spring began, women in the Arab world have had two revolutions to undertake: one fought with men against oppressive regimes, and another fought against an entire political and economic system that treats women as second-class citizens.
>> Here she is on Radio New Zealand National.
Lavish, lavish, lavish! A history of the style, and of the shop upon which it was focused, from 1875 to the present. The book even has liberty-patterned page edges! This book has to be prised from the hands of everyone who has opened it.
The Nobel laureate's new novel exposes the damage adults wreak on children, and how this echoes through the generations.
Justine, Michael and Hannah have escaped to the Scottish highlands in an attempt to remake their broken lives. Tangled together in threads of guilt and love, with Scotland rushing towards a referendum and the community around them fracturing, each must question where they truly belong.
"Engrossing, entertaining and thoroughly readable. It is a page-turner, but Karen also demonstrates her acute eye for detail and for profound observation in just a phrase or a sentence." - James Robertson
What could be down the hole in the ground? There are many possibilities..... This book is good for your imagination!
Although mother and daughter, these two brilliant women never knew one another - Wollstonecraft died of an infection in 1797 at the age of thirty-eight, a week after giving birth. Nevertheless their lives were so closely intertwined, their choices, dreams and tragedies so eerily similar, it seems impossible to consider one without the other.
How should you prepare a rabbit casserole? What time of year is best for oysters? And how do you bake the perfect chocolate souffe? Ambrose Heath was one of the most successful food and drink writers of his day. This fascinating book was first published in 1932.
A full history of Central Districts cricket, from 1950/51 to 2011/12. The Central Districts catchment area stretches from Hawke's Bay to Taranaki in the north to Nelson and Marlborough in the south.
A GST loophole means that on-line companies overseas have an unfair advantage over local businesses. This is not only a loss of tax revenue: the buying habits it encourages results in a massive permanent loss of capital that could otherwise circulate in the local economy.
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