A breathtakingly beautifully written meditation on the effect of place upon people; a memoir of how growing up in a particular place and landscape shaped him as a writer and a person. Conjuring the immediate particulars of the piece of Australia of which he is a part, even an extension, Winton makes some deep (and wide (and urgent)) observations about the relationship between humans and nature.
>> In The New Zealand Herald.
Two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother's sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness. In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. Short-listed for the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize.
"This deeply moving book about death and its grief-stricken consolations – love and art – appears to be no more than a scattering of text, dialogue and poetry that lifts and settles on the page, the frailest sort of thing. Yet as we read on, we become aware that the way it has been put together is robust indeed. The book is much more than the sum of its parts. Porter’s story is a profound meditation on the difficulty of writing about love and loss. This book that looks and reads like a collection of poetry is very much a novel; a complex poetic grouping of ideas and images that is as easy to read as a children’s story. Grief is the Thing with Feathers shows us another way of thinking about the novel and its capabilities, taking us through a dark and emotionally fraught subject, one airy page after another, as though transported by wings." - Kirsty Gunn, Guardian
>> BTW: Porter was Eleanor Catton's editor for The Luminaries.
When a woman visits Morocco and has her backpack and passport stolen, the police 'return' her another bag and passport, and so begins a tale of slipping identities and strange possibilities. What is the secret in her past that makes her so willing to be someone else?
"This had me thinking, laughing out loud and completely enthralled for days. If you like the writing of Jennifer Egan, Rachel Kushner and Shelia Heti you will want to read this." - Stella
"So here I am walking again an old path made new by the very fact that I am upon it once more, accompanied by familiar hordes: the fecund majority of the dead, the myriad of the living in all of their many forms, defunct, mutant, revenant or otherwise, traversing memory's infinite field." In the evocative, profoundly resonant prose that makes him one of our most distinctive writers, Martin Edmond recalls his experiences of growing up in rural New Zealand in the 1950s and 60s.
"Reading David Gates is far from an uncomplicated experience; his writing is dark, bitter, hilarious, truthful and complex, full of emotional turmoil and damaged characters, deeply flawed people doing pretty unspeakable things to themselves and others, and yet the self-aware flickers of humour, the knowing nods to the frailty of human existence, make him utterly compulsive." - Independent
Between 2011 and 2014, P.J. Harvey and Seamus Murphy set out on a series of journeys together to Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Washington DC. Harvey collected words and Murphy collected pictures, and the conversation between poetry and image make this beautifully produced book (Harvey's first poetry collection) a unique portrait of the prickly edges of our times.
>> Oh, and she sings.
Another breathtakingly wonderful dual-narrative story told in text and pictures, from the author who brought us The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck. The journey begins on a ship at sea in 1766, with a boy named Billy Marvel. After surviving a shipwreck, he finds work in a London theatre. There, his family flourishes for generations as brilliant actors until 1900, when young Leontes Marvel is banished from the stage. Nearly a century later, Joseph Jervis runs away from school and seeks refuge with an uncle in London. Albert Nightingale's strange, beautiful house, with its mysterious portraits and ghostly presences, captivates Joseph and leads him on a search for clues about the house, his family, and the past.
"'It sounds dreadful,' I said to him one day. 'But actually the war is the best thing that ever happened to me.'" Helena's mother always said she was a born poetess. It was not a compliment. Now an old woman, Helena looks back on her life and tries to capture the past, filling notebook after notebook with memories of her respectable, rigid upbringing, her unyielding mother, her loyal father, her golden-haired brother. She remembers how, at their uncle's country house in the summer of 1914, their stately bourgeois life of good manners, white linen and afternoon tea collapsed into ruins. And how, with war, came a kind of liberation amidst the mud and rubble - and the appearance of a young English photographer who transformed her existence.
"Beautifully unorthodox." - Independent
"Almost too beautiful a writer. The footprint of Proust is visible on every page." - Financial Times
"Mortier is sensitive to every nuance, both of circumstance and language. To read his work is to be immersed in immediate experience - the immediate experience of another." - Thomas
A very sharp and amusing 'compendium of utopian negation' by an endearingly nihilistic philosopher who rose to prominence in the Twittersphere.
"I hate Twitter. I think it should be prohibited - but Jarosinki's Nein is the only exception, the only reason that justifies it!"- Slavoj Zizek
>> "Hate yourself like nobody’s looking. They’re not.”
>> The Twitterfeed.
Tannie Maria used to write a recipe column for the Klein Karoo Gazette. Then Head Office decided they wanted an advice column instead, so now she gives advice - in the form of recipes (because, as she says, she may not know much about love, but food - that's her life). Everything goes well until she receives a letter from Martine, whose husband beats her, and Tannie Maria feels a pang of recognition and dread. This may be a problem that cooking can't solve...
"If you want a vivid, amusing and immensely enjoyable read about detection (and cooking) in an intriguing part of southern Africa, then this is the book for you. A triumph." - Alexander McCall Smith
“I want to affect people like a clap of thunder, to inflame their minds not by speechifying but with the breadth of my vision, the strength of my conviction, and the power of my expression,” said Rosa Luxemburg, quoted by Jacqueline Rose in this book, which examines the response of various women to the iniquities of modern life. Inspiring, incisive and a blueprint of a new template for feminism.
"A surfeit of elegance and intelligence." - Ali Smith
Ordinary lives take unexpected turns: a son's love for his father is tested when he suddenly discovers its fragility; a woman in an abusive relationship seeks to better understand the choices she has made; a man with dreams of self-improvement is haunted by deceit; and a daughter watches on silently as her mother's search for meaning ends in madness.
"'Beautiful, faceted, haunting stories. Dorthe Nors is fantastic." - Junot Diaz
"Unsettling and poetic. Some pieces, like one about a four-pound tomato, are oddly beautiful; othersare brilliantly disturbing." - New York Times
The author of My Petite Kitchen confesses to being hopelessly in love with every aspect of food: where it comes from, how it's grown, its health benefits and how to make it taste amazing.
>> The blog!
Iris's father, Ernest, is at the end of his life and she hasn't even met him. Her best friend, Thurston, is somewhere on the other side of the world. Everything she thought she knew is up in flames. Now her mother has declared war and means to get her hands on Ernest's priceless art collection. But Ernest has other ideas. There are things he wants Iris to know after he's gone. And the truth has more than one way of coming to light.
Winner of the Guardian Prize for young adult fiction.
"The best book I have read this year." - Bob Docherty
Another book from rising Indonesian luminary Eka Kurniawan (have you read Beauty is a Wound yet?). Set in an unnamed town near the Indian Ocean, this book tells of two interlinked and tormented families, and of Margio, an ordinary half-city, half-rural youngster who also happens to be half-man, half-supernatural female white tiger (in many parts of Indonesia, magical tigers protect good villages and families).
The questions 'Why?' and 'How?' have got us a long way.
A fast-moving thriller, a story of fate, and unlikely love story for our time. Pio Morgan is waiting outside a pub on a cold winter night. There is a debt he must pay and no options left. What he does next drags a group of strangers into a web of confusion that over the course of a few days changes all their lives. The young Maori widow just trying to raise her children, the corporate executive hiding his mistake, the gang of criminals that will do what ever it takes to recover what they've lost - and the outsider sent to town to try and figure out who did what. Time is running out for all of them as events take an increasingly dark turn...
A set of stories examining the unsettling boundary between the wild and the civilised.
"Sharply written and imaginative. Cook is an accomplished writer with a darkly comic touch. As with the short fiction of Stephen King and Miranda July, many of the bizarre tales in Man V. Nature would make for excellent viewing. Brilliant, with echoes of Margaret Atwood." - Irish Times
Davis was attached to the ANZACs and given a Triumph motorcycle to carry pigeons and vital messages to the front line at a time when communications were limited and risky. A fascinating, fresh account.
'Dreadful murder at Opunake', said the Taranaki Herald, 'Shocking outrage', cried the Evening Post in Wellington when they learned in November 1880 that a young woman called Mary Dobie had been found lying under a flax bush near Opunake on the Taranaki coast with her throat cut so deeply her head was almost severed. It is a murder story, starting as a whodunit then becomes a whydunit. It takes the reader on a journey across the landscape of social and political tensions in the couple of years leading up to the invasion of Parihaka in 1881: Pakeha feared it was an act of political terrorism, Maori thought it would be the cue for the state to use force against them. Was it rape or robbery? Was the killer Maori or Pakeha?
"This vivid and fast-paced book is an enjoyable introduction for the general reader, from the beginnings of human civilization to the recent wholesale destruction of Iraq's archaeological heritage. Robertson's focus on pre-modern Iraq effortlessly blends political and military history with the history of ideas, and flows seamlessly into the present era and the terrible predicament in which the cradle of civilization now finds itself." - Publishers Weekly
"My name is Tess Turner - at least, that's what I've always been told. I have a voice but it isn't mine. It used to say things so I'd fit in, to please my parents, to please my teachers. It used to tell the universe I was something I wasn't. It lied. It never occurred to me that everyone else was lying too. But the words that really hurt weren't the lies: it was six hundred and seventeen words of truth that turned my world upside down. Words scare me, the lies and the truth, so I decided to stop using them. I am Pluto. Silent. Inaccessible. Billions of miles away from everything I thought I knew. "
From couture to costume jewellery, the pieces featured on the pages of British Vogue for almost a century have encapsulated the fashion zeitgeist of each new age for which they were created. A superb archive.
>> We also have The Gown.
Black cuttlefish risotto, grilled squid, fancy antipasti, delicious Venetian sweets and ice creams - here are 100 recipes that conjure up the real Venice. There are recipes for fish, chicken, antipasti, ravioli, gnocchi, risotto, soups, snacks, polenta and desserts. There are also recipes for Venetian drinks, including the internationally renowned bellini, the perfect blend of white peach juice with sparkling prosecco, synonymous with the sparkling city.
Nick hates it when people call him a genius. Sure, he's going to Cambridge University aged 15, but he says that's just because he works hard. And, secretly, he only works hard to get some kind of attention from his workaholic father. Not that his strategy is working.
An accessible and versatile cookbook from the iconic Soho vegetarian restaurant.
In the late 80s, Katherine Carlyle is created using IVF. Stored as a frozen embryo for eight years, she is then implanted in her mother and given life. By the age of nineteen Katherine has lost her mother to cancer, and feels her father to be an increasingly distant figure. Instead of going to college, she decides to disappear, telling no one where she has gone. What begins as an attempt to punish her father for his absence gradually becomes a testing-ground of his love for her, a coming-to-terms with the death of her mother, and finally the mise-en-scene for a courageous leap from false empowerment to true empowerment.
"The story you have asked me to tell begins not with the ignominious ugliness of Lloyd's death but on a long-ago day in April when the sun seared my blistered face and I was nine years old and my father and mother sold me to a strange man. I say my father and my mother, but really it was just my mother." Memory, the narrator of The Book of Memory, is an albino woman languishing in Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison in Harare, Zimbabwe, where she has been convicted of murder. As part of her appeal her lawyer insists that she write down what happened as she remembers it. The death penalty is a mandatory sentence for murder, and Memory is, both literally and metaphorically, writing for her life.
Breaks down into a step-by-step format the experimental techniques that photographers use to subvert or expand conventional camera technology.
When Alice toppled down the rabbit-hole 150 years ago, she found a Wonderland as rife with inconsistent rules and abrasive egos as the world she left behind. But what of that world? How did 1860s Oxford react to Alice's disappearance? Can she be brought back to life? What happens when her best friend Ada goes down the rabbit hole after her? Macguire's novel delves into underworlds, undergrounds, underpinnings and understandings old and new...
"A brilliant and nicely off-kilter reading of the children’s classic, retrofitted for grown-ups—and a lot of fun." - Kirkus Reviews
The medieval miracle play adapted by Duffy. Then, as now, only death can give us perspective on life.
Crossing the road, we look both ways. Riding a bicycle at night, we use lights. So why is our attitude towards online security so relaxed?
When she was sixty-four, the author learned she was a Lebensborn child: part of Hitler's 'Spring of Life' programme, which encouraged Nazi soldiers to have children with Scandinavian women in order to create an Aryan race.
From his call in the 1960s for the establishment of tussock-grassland reserves in the South Island high country to his involvement in the 2011-13 campaign to save the Denniston Plateau from mining, Mark has been a passionate and effective advocate for the preservation of areas of ecological importance. In this book he describes the challenges and achievements, the frustrations and successes that have made up his remarkable life, now in its ninth decade.
Discover Richard Burton's farewell note to Elizabeth Taylor, Helen Keller's letter to The New York Symphony Orchestra about 'hearing' their concert through her fingers, the final missives from a doomed Japan Airlines flight in 1985, David Bowie's response to his first piece of fan mail from America and even Albus Dumbledore writing to a reader applying for the position of Defence Against the Dark Arts Professor at Hogwarts. Including letters from: Jane Austen, Richard Burton, Helen Keller, Alan Turing, Albus Dumbledore, Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry James, Sylvia Plath, John Lennon, Gerald Durrell, Janis Joplin, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Janis Joplin, Hunter S. Thompson, C. G. Jung, Katherine Mansfield, Marge Simpson, David Bowie, Dorothy Parker, Buckminster Fuller, Beatrix Potter, Che Guevara, Evelyn Waugh, Charlotte Bronte and many more.
Sometimes, with a little electricity, or luck, or even magic, an imaginary friend might appear when you need one. An imaginary friend like Fred... Fred floated like a feather in the wind until a lonely little boy wished for him and found a friendship like no other.
More than everything you ever wanted to know about tacos! Explore one of Mexico's most popular culinary traditions through 100 recipes accompanied by interviews, street and food photography, illustrations, graphics, and maps that bring the full story behind each taco to life.
Forget trying to learn the language of birds, a smattering of Latin will give you insight into your feathered friends' habits, ancestry and lore. Beautifully illustrated.
From the Renaissance to Art Deco.
In this psychological thriller by the Edgar-nominated author of Joe Victim, a famous crime writer struggles to differentiate between his own reality and the frightening plot lines he’s created for the page.Jerry Grey is known to most of the world by his crime writing pseudonym, Henry Cutter—a name that has been keeping readers at the edge of their seats for more than a decade. Recently diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s at the age of forty-nine, Jerry’s crime writing days are coming to an end. His twelve books tell stories of brutal murders committed by bad men, of a world out of balance, of victims finding the darkest forms of justice. As his dementia begins to break down the wall between his life and the lives of the characters he has created, Jerry confesses his worst secret: The stories are real.
Pete Townshend was once asked how he prepared himself for The Who's violent live performances. His answer? 'Pretend you're in a war.' For a band as prone to furious infighting as it was notorious for acts of 'auto-destructive art' this could have served as a motto.
"A definitive tome for both Who fans and newcomers alike." - Q Magazine
>> Is this war?
Nelson Pine Industries was established in 1984, as a manufacturing facility to add value to the Nelson region’s renewable resource of Pinus radiata plantation forests. Production of Medium Density Fibreboard (MDF) started in 1986, with a second line commissioned in 1991. The third line, commissioned in 1997, made Nelson Pine Industries one of the largest single site producers of Medium Density Fibreboard in the world.
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