Another insightful novel by this fine writer, an exploration of life and possibility on the urban frontier in post-collapse Detroit. What happens when financial colonials start buying up whole neighbourhoods to build a new America? How do the native Detroiters respond?
Who is Eva Thorvald? To her single father, a chef, she's a pint-sized recipe tester and the love of his life. To the chilli chowdown contestants of Cook County, Illinois, she's a fire-eating demon. To the fashionable foodie goddess of supper clubs, she's a wanton threat. She's an enigma, a secret ingredient that no one can put their finger on. Eva will surprise everyone.
"Delicious!" - Kirkus
A little girl picks wild flowers on her walk, Who will she give each one to? This is a charming book!
It's been a tough day. She's been dumped. Twice. She's accidentally killed a goose. And now she's suddenly responsible for her best friend's deaf-mute son. But when a shared lottery ticket turns the oddly matched pair into the richest people in Iceland, she and the boy find themselves on a road trip across the country. With cucumber hotels, dead sheep, and any number of her exes on their tail, Butterflies in November is a blackly comic and uniquely moving tale of motherhood, friendship and the power of words.
"Evocative and humorous." - Observer
"Playfully self-conscious, reflecting on the relationships between reading and experience." - Guardian
1998, Wellington. A series of catastrophic earthquakes has left the city destroyed. Returning to the ruin from London, a New Zealand writer explores the devastation, compelled to find out for himself what has become of the city he left years ago. As he drifts through the desolate streets, home now to the shell-shocked and dispossessed, he finds among the survivors a woman and a child. And although they are haunted, hostile and broken, the strangers feel eerily familiar to him: as if they promise the answers to the mysteries he once swore to leave behind.
A compelling new novel from the author of Wulf. Is Clayton New Zealand's answer to Barnes and Sebald?
The Somali golden mole is so rare that a sighting has never been recorded. It was first described in 1964, but the sole evidence for its existence is a tiny fragment of jawbone found in an owl pellet. Intrigued by this elusive creature, and what it can tell us about extinction and survival ore generally, Richard Girling embarks on a hunt to find the animal and its discoverer - an Italian professor who he thinks might still be alive...
"The Hunt for the Golden Mole is a wonderful book. It is an understated but passionate advocacy for the biodiversity of the planet which combines lightly worn scholarship with a compelling argument. Overall it is a tour de force." - Jonathan Dimbleby
New Zealand's many distinctive landforms are packed into a small space. Geoff Chapple, author of Te Araroa: The New Zealand trail, set out on a year-long journey to find out why, and to seek out the shifting forces that shape them. For company, he chose to walk with geologists and the artisans who work the rock. The journey took him back through geology's global history and onward from end to end of New Zealand. How much do you know about the rock upon which you walk (or fall)?
young intellectuals J. and Elena abandon the parties, the drinking and the money of the city, and start a new life on a remote tropical coast. Among mango trees, hot sands and everlasting sunshine, they plan to live the Good Life, self-sufficient and close to nature. But with each day come small defeats and imperceptible dramas. Gradually paradise turns into hell, as brutal weather, mounting debts, the couple's brittle relationship, and the sea itself threaten to destroy them. Based on a true story, In the Beginning Was the Sea is a dramatic and searingly ironic account of the disastrous encounter of the imagined life with reality - a satire of hippyism, ecological fantasies, and of the very idea that man can control fate.
Short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2015.
"By turns beautiful, hubristic and tragic." - Independent
Once considered a respectable rare-map dealer, E. Forbes Smiley made millions and was highly esteemed for his knowledge - until he was arrested for slipping maps out of books in the Yale University library.
Never date your best friend. Always be original. Sometimes rules are meant to be broken. Best friends Dave and Julia were determined to never be cliche high school kids. They even wrote their own Never List of everything they vowed they'd never, ever do in high school. Dave has loved Julia for as long as he can remember. Julia is beautiful, wild and impetuous. When she suggests they do every Never on the list, Dave is happy to play along. It starts as a joke, but then a funny thing happens: Dave and Julia discover that by skipping the cliches, they've actually been missing out on high school - and maybe even on love.
For fans of John Green!
A novel of the collision between human freedoms and religious values, and the personal and ethical crises consequent to a PhD student's unwanted pregnancy. From the author of Men, Women and Children
It has been six months since Tess Muller stopped speaking. Her silence is baffling to her parents, her teachers and her younger sister Meg, but the more urgent mystery for both girls is where their mother, Evangeline, goes each day, pushing an empty pram and returning home wet, muddy and dishevelled.
Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity is an outstanding intellectual achievement in modern physics. Anything that involves gravity, the force that powers everything on the largest, hottest or densest of scales, can be explained by it. From the moment Einstein first proposed the theory in 1915, it was received with enthusiasm yet also with tremendous resistance, and for the following ninety years was the source of a series of feuds, vendettas, ideological battles and persecutions.
Water has shaped our planet and occurs throughout the universe. Jha is an excellent guide to the wonders we too easily consider banal.
>> Jha on the strangest chemical in the universe.
Everyone thinks they know what Jacob O'Leary can and can't do - and they're not shy about telling him either. But no one - not even Jacob - knows what he's truly capable of. And he's desperate for the chance to work it out for himself. When a shocking and mystifying crime sends his small country town reeling, and fingers start pointing at the newcomer, Jacob grabs the chance to get out in front of the pack and keep mob rule at bay. He's convinced that the police have accused the wrong man, and that the real villain is still out there.
"A deeply involving novel of the Romany Holocaust (Porajmos)." - Guardian
The psychiatric establishment in the Western world has unanimously branded addiction a brain disease. And the idea that an addict has an incurable illness, as opposed to a contemptible moral weakness, has served an historically important role in changing how addiction is understood, researched, and treated throughout the world. But as developmental neuroscientist and recovered addict Marc Lewis argues addiction is not in fact a disease. Addiction, whether to drugs, alcohol, gambling, food, sex, or cigarettes, is rather a developmental learning process resulting from the normal functioning of the human brain. Provocative; interesting.
Only weeks into their marriage a young couple embark on a six-month period of separation. Tom Cavendish goes to Japan to build lighthouses and his wife Ally, Doctor Moberley-Cavendish, stays and works at the Truro asylum. As Ally plunges into the institutional politics of mental health, Tom navigates the social and professional nuances of late 19th century Japan. Sarah Moss builds a novel in two parts from Falmouth to Tokyo, two maps of absence; from Manchester to Kyoto, two distinct but conjoined portraits of loneliness and determination. This is a continuation of her excellent Bodies of Light.
"Bartusiak's new book is thoroughly researched, beautifully written, and full of insights about the nature of the scientific enterprise. Aficionados of black holes will love this book." - Alan Lightman, author of The Accidental Universe
A novel based on the true story of Sir George Grey's disastrous and scandalous marriage. Trapped in an increasingly loveless union, Sir George and his wife, Eliza Lucy, each sought affection elsewhere. Lady Grey's indiscretion caused her to be cast off by her husband and vilified throughout colonial and domestic Victorian high society.
Tao is learning to be a dragonkeeper. With no one to teach him it is not easy. He must keep Kai safe but there is danger at every turn - they are pursued by a gang of murderous nomads, tricked by unseen spirits, attacked by a giant seven-headed snake and disoriented in the realms of the dead. Most terrifying of all is the ghost who can turn blood into ice. Tao knows he must prove he is truly worthy of the name Dragonkeeper. But the road west is never straight and nothing for Tao and Kai is what it seems.
"I have just finished this. It is interesting and fast-paced. I think you should read it." - Cosmo (12)
This is a wonderful series: start with this one.
The Asian century is in full swing, generating unprecedented economic and social power. New Asia Now features young writers from the countries at the centre of this transformation. This collection takes a journey through the region's diversity with a new generation of writers, who will shape the way we understand the complexities of culture, politics and modernisation. All born after 1970, they explore issues of identity and belonging in the world that is unfolding. Includes Murong Xuecan (China), Joshua Ip (Singapore), Annie Zaidi (India), Miguel Syjuco (Phillipines), Sheng Keyi (China), Maggie Tioljkan (Indonesia).
Over 100,000 men and women would embarked for overseas service and almost 60,000 of them became casualties.
When Daniel's brother Eli is killed at war, Daniel considers the history of unusual fatalities to determine what makes a death -- or a life -- matter. Some people die heroically, others accidentally. In an attempt to understand, Danny creates a Book of the Dead -- an old binder that he fills with details about dead people, how they died, and, most important, for what purpose. Time passes, and eventually Daniel is prompted to look up from his notebook of death and questions to make new friends and be swept into their imaginings.
The Coorong in the 1850s is a remote, beautiful and inhospitable coastal region in the new province of South Australia which has been opened to graziers willing to chance their luck. Among them are Stanton Finch and his family, including sixteen-year-old Hester Finch. Once wealthy political activists, the Finch family has fallen on hard times. Cut adrift from the polite society they were raised to be part of, Hester and her siblings make connections where they can: with the travellers passing along the nearby stock route - among them a young artist, Charles - and the Ngarrindjeri people they have dispossessed. Hester witnesses the destruction of their subtle culture and begins to wonder what civilization is.
Simon Watson lives alone on the Long Island Sound in his family home, a house perched on the edge of a cliff that is slowly crumbling into the sea. His parents are long dead, his mother having drowned in the water his house overlooks. His younger sister, Enola, works for a travelling carnival and seldom calls. On a day, Simon receives a mysterious book from an antiquarian bookseller; it has been sent to him because it is inscribed with the name Verona Bonn, Simon's grandmother. The book tells the story of two doomed lovers who were part of a travelling circus more than two hundred years ago. He is fascinated, yet as he reads Simon becomes increasingly unnerved. Why do so many women in his family drown on 24th July?
What would you do if you knew you only had 100 days left to live? For Lucio Battistini, it's a chance to spend the rest of his life the way he always should have - by making every moment count.
"Hashimi has written, first and foremost, a tender and beautiful family story. Her always engaging multigenerational tale is a portrait of Afghanistan in all of its perplexing, enigmatic glory, and a mirror into the still ongoing struggles of Afghan women." - Khaled Hosseini (author of And the Mountains Echoed and The Kite Runner
The pond is home to a tadpole and a minnow, two underwater friends. But when the tadpole grows into a frog and hops onto the land, a new world unfolds before his eyes. When he returns to the pond, he tells his friend fantastic tales of the things he's seen: birds and cows and mysterious things called people! Fish longs to be a frog so that he can see this wonderful world too, and decides that he will follow in his friend's footsteps, come what may...
We love Leo Lionni's gentle, quirky books!
From Boccaccio and Machiavelli through to Eco and Saviano, from the Stil Novo to the Divisionismo, across centuries of history and intellectual movements, these essays will give English readers, and lovers of the Bel Paese and its culture, the lay of the literary land of Italy.
"The very best beers I've ever tried in my life are home brews, for sure. There's nothing quite like it." - Stu McKinley, Yeastie Boys
New Zealand is a nation of proud and prolific beer drinkers. Here is the one-stop manual to brewing your own.
What has been the historical effect of the intense absence of heat?
>> A bit about the importance of refrigeration to New Zealand's economic history.
Will and Summer meet online and strike up a friendship based on coincidence. Summer isn't telling the whole truth about herself, but figures it doesn't matter if they never see each other in person. When the two finally meet Summer can no longer hide her secret - she is deaf. Can Summer and Will find a way to be friends in person even though they speak a completely different language?
John 'Nashville' Grant is an American military policeman in the R&R town of Vung Tau, tucked safely behind the front lines of the Vietnam War. Nashville knows how everything works: the army, the enemy, bars, secrets, men and women. He's keeping the peace by keeping his head down and making the most of it. His new partner is a tall man from a small town: Shorty, from Bendigo, Australia. Shorty knows nothing about anything, and he wishes people would stop mistaking that for stupidity.
"Dapin is funny, poignant, vibrantly witty." - Canberra Times
Traumatised by an accident which involves "something falling from the sky" and leaves him eight and a half million pounds richer but hopelessly estranged from the world around him, Remainder's protagonist spends his time and money obsessively reconstructing and re-enacting vaguely remembered scenes and situations from his past. Why this attempt to recreate authenticity through artifice? Remainder claimed McCarthy his own edge of the literary scene ten years ago. He has just been long-listed for the Man Booker for Satin Island.
"Full of interesting ideas about the relationship between memory and actuality, while relentlessly undermining both." - Thomas
Simon Goodman's grandparents came from German-Jewish banking dynasties and died in concentration camps. Originally he knew little about them - his father never spoke of their history or heritage. But when Goodman received his late father's old papers, a remarkable story began to emerge. From a Bohemian hamlet, the Gutmanns had risen to become one of Germany's most powerful banking families. They had also built a magnificent art collection. When Hitler took power in January 1933, the Gutmanns became prime targets, and eventually everything they had worked to build was taken from them: their art, their wealth, their standing, and their lives.
Beautiful, rustic and organic in form, naked cakes are always tiered, with filling and frosting between layers but never on the outside - thus 'naked'. It's what's inside that makes all the difference!
Richard Hadlee, Patricia Grace, Robert Jones, Hone Harawira, Fiona Pardington, Peter Gluckman, Michael Houstoun, Miles Warren, Alison Holst, Lloyd Geering, Tim Finn, Mai Chen.
A superbook.
The Golden Age... 1935-1956 is also available.
There is deadly danger in the spine of our nation! The mountain rescue is the most New Zealand of emergencies.
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