M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village cafe where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, and across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations, we travel to Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico; to a meeting of an Arctic explorer's society in Berlin; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York's Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud and Mishima. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer's craft and on artistic creation.
>> 'Horses' from Horses.
"In an often overlooked alley in London, there’s a small metal door. On the other side of the door is Slade House, a grand home with a beautiful garden, but all is not what it seems: here time doesn’t quite work in the normal way and the occupants are somewhat illusionary. The book opens in 1979 with an unusual boy, Nathan, and his mother visiting Slade House, thus entering the reader into the mysterious house and its inhabitants. Slade House only becomes visible on rare occasions, and the story spans several of the dark episodes. David Mitchell shows his mastery of language and storytelling, drawing the reader into an intriguing tale. A great read." - Sarah
A nurse sleeps at the bedside of his dying patients; a wife deceives her husband by never telling him he has cancer; a bedridden man has to be hidden from his demented and amorous eighty-year-old wife. Accompanying a palliative care team, Moreira Marques travels to Tras-os-Montes, a forgotten corner of northern Portugal, a rural area abandoned by the young. She visits villages where rural ways of life are disappearing. She listens to families facing death and gives us their stories in their words as well as through her own observations and thoughts.
"This beautiful, sparely written, sensitive but unflinching book helps us to rethink the way we think about dying and death." - Thomas
"Moreira Marques' great achievement is to situate dying so squarely within life itself. She liberates death and dying back into the messy business of living." - Anne Karpf
>> An excerpt.
In the 1920s and 30s, Joseph Roth travelled extensively in Europe, leading a peripatetic life living in hotels and writing about the towns through which he passed. Incisive, nostalgic, curious and sharply observed - and collected together here for the first time - his pieces paint a picture of a continent racked by change yet clinging to tradition. Joseph Roth is one of the great overlooked writers of his time.
"Simon is a good rabbit, but he's a big naughty. He changes his mind a lot. I like the funny faces Simon makes. He likes spaghetti! I like spaghetti too, but I like sausages best." - Bryony (3 and a half(ish))
Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) is the great lost scientist: more things are named after him than anyone else. There are towns, rivers, mountain ranges, the ocean current that runs along the South American coast, there's a penguin, a giant squid - even the Mare Humboldtianum on the moon. His colourful adventures read like something out of a Boy's Own story: Humboldt explored deep into the rainforest, climbed the world's highest volcanoes and inspired princes and presidents, scientists and poets alike. Napoleon was jealous of him; Simon Bolivar's revolution was fuelled by his ideas; Darwin set sail on the Beagle because of Humboldt; and Jules Verne's Captain Nemo owned all his many books. He simply was, as one contemporary put it, 'the greatest man since the Deluge'. This is a really excellent biography.
The ever-sharp Braunias takes details from the courtroom and the media and uses them to prise open stories that reveal the deep chasms that subsist not only in individual lives but in New Zealand society as a whole. Acute and compelling.
Every Thursday for three years, Signora Giulia takes the train to Milan to visit her daughter. But one Thursday she simply disappears. And the case is left in your hands. You're a born detective, but you have so many unanswered questions - how can a young, beautiful high society woman just vanish into thin air? Why does her husband - a prominent criminal lawyer and much older man - know nothing about it? And who was she really visiting during those trips to Milan? For Detective Sciancalepre, the mystery is darker and more tangled than he imagined.
Grab this now and you won't need to book your tickets. A guide to 40 locations that are rife with disaster, chaos, paranormal activity, and death, including the Strait of Messina, home of the mythical sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis; the coal town of Jharia, where the ground burns constantly with fire; Kasanka National Park in Zambia, where 8 million migrating bats darken the skies; the Nevada Triangle in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where hundreds of aircraft have disappeared; and Aokigahara Forest near Mount Fuji in Japan, the world's second most popular suicide location following the Golden Gate Bridge. This book has compellingly ominous maps.
It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong.
"An absurdist tour de force that might have been written by Kafka or Genet." - New York Times
The city: a place of hopes and dreams, destruction and conflict, vision and order. The first city atlas, the Civitates Orbis Terrarum, was published by Braun and Hogenburg in 1572 for the armchair traveller interested in a world that was opening up around him. Since then our fascination with foreign cities has not abated. This sumptuous volume looks at the development of the mapping and representation of the city revealing how we organize the urban space.
This deeply browsable book surveys and explains hundreds of exemplary photographs taken in New Zealand, from early portraits of Maori in the nineteenth century to contemporary art photography. The selection is particularly interesting in that it covers all types of photography: portraiture, landscape, science, documentary photography, and art, and contemplates the changing ways it has been collected and thought of.
"An absolutely absorbing, absolutely authentic compendium of 700 traditional recipes from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands. These are recipes you’ll really want to use, and you’ll also learn a lot about the core values of Scandinavia (which are, after all, entirely to do with food!). The most comprehensive book of its kind in English." - Thomas
An absorbing collection of the great critic and theorist's personal manuscripts, images and documents, all illustrated, transcribed and translated. This book leads the reader right to the heart of Benjamin's intellectual world. Benjamin's microscopic analysis of the items in this archive is particularly interesting.
"Fascinating. Benjamin just gets more and more interesting." - Thomas
From insidious murder weapons to blaze-igniting crinolines, clothing has been the cause of death, disease and madness throughout history, by accident and design. Clothing is designed to protect, shield and comfort us, yet lurking amongst seemingly innocuous garments we find hats laced with mercury, frocks laden with arsenic and literally 'drop-dead gorgeous' gowns.
Because of New Zealand's axis, instead of going west we go south. Hogg's oldest friend is terminally ill, and they go together on a road trip back to the Southland where they came from and where they first met. This a journey back to a heartland and far into memory.
Out of earth, rocks, leaves, ice, snow, rain, sunlight and shadow Goldsworthy makes artworks that exist briefly before they are altered and erased by natural processes. They are documented in his photographs, and their larger meanings are bound up with the conditions, forces and processes that they embody: materiality, temporality, growth, vitality, permanence, decay, chance, labour and memory.
Katherine and Matthew are destined to be born again and again. Each time their presence changes history for the better, and each time, they fall hopelessly in love, only to be tragically separated. How many times can you lose the person you love? For Matthew and Katherine it is again and again, over and over, century after century. But why do they keep coming back? How many times must they die to save the world? What else must they achieve before they can be left to live and love in peace? Maybe the next together will be different.
A young boy stumbles across a Punch and Judy show at the pier and enters a world of extraordinary magic. With disturbing mysteries and half-truths uncontrollably unravelling, this boy is forced to deal with his family's secrets of violence, betrayal and guilt in this dark fable of childhood and growing up.
Artemis has the name of a goddess, but she has trouble living up to it. Instead she usually just runs away. She’s running now … away from the married man she’s been seeing, and the Greek community in New Zealand who think they know what’s best, and into the arms of family in the Peloponnese that she’s never met. It’s 2007. She carries her mother’s ashes and an iPod with recordings, which bit by bit tell the shocking story of what happened to Artemis’ grandmother during the Greek Civil War, over half a century earlier.
Imagine controlling a machine with your mind. Imagine a communication line direct from your mind to someone else's. Imagine controlling a prosthetic limb with a thought, or 'seeing' through a camera located miles away. Once the stuff of science fiction, such remarkable feats are now within the grasp of neuroscience.
For five decades Le Carré has been the world’s most admired writer of espionage novels. Although we have known that a career in MI5 and MI6 in the ‘50s and ‘60s has informed his writing, what makes this author tick has remained a mystery. In this excellent biography, Sisman reveals Le Carré’s bleak childhood and remarkable life.
One moment, Kady Grant and Ezra Mason have nothing bigger to worry about than each other. Specifically, avoiding each other in the wake of their messy break-up. In the next second, their entire world falls apart...The year is 2575 and one of the mega-corporations that control much of deep space has just fired the opening salvo in an intergalactic war, destroying Kady and Ezra's planet. Forced to flee on a small fleet of crippled rescue ships alongside thousands of other refugees, the fear of enemy warships chasing them down is at first all-consuming but soon becomes the least of their worries. A deadly plague is ravaging the refugees on the ships; the fleet's AI, which should be protecting them, may actually be an enemy; and High Command is refusing to acknowledge that there may be a serious problem. As Kady plunges into a tangled web of data in search of the truth, she realises that Ezra is possibly the only person who can help her save the refugees before it's too late...
What was life really like in that golden age of popular culture? This endlessly browsable book is packed full of fine examples of objects - from design classics to unique items - that intimate the lives of those who used them.
Elsie Lavender and Homer Hickam (the father of the author) were high school classmates in the West Virginia coalfields, graduating just as the Great Depression began. When Homer asked for her hand, Elsie instead headed to Orlando where she sparked with a dancing actor named Buddy Ebsen. But when Buddy headed for New York, Elsie's dreams of a life with him were crushed and eventually she found herself back in the coalfields, married to Homer. Unfulfilled as a miner's wife, Elsie was reminded of her carefree days with Buddy every day because of his unusual wedding gift: an alligator named Albert she raised in the only bathroom in the house. When Albert scared Homer by grabbing his pants, he gave Elsie an ultimatum: "Me or that alligator!" After giving it some thought, Elsie concluded there was only one thing to do: Carry Albert home. If you liked The Hundred Year Old Man or Etta and Otto and Russell and James, you'll like this.
Alex Honnold is 28 years old, and perhaps the world's best 'free solo' climber. When Alex performs one of his long free solos, the severity of which no one else has yet dared to attempt, he does away altogether with ropes, with a partner to catch his fall, with support of any kind (neither bolts, pitons, nuts or cams). There is a purity to Alex's climbs that is easy to comprehend, but impossible to fathom.
35 homes from the United States, Scandinavia, Japan and elsewhere, all thoughtfully inhabited.
>> Also see The Mindful Home, $34.99
"I am just finishing The Letter for the King with my 12-year-old, and it really is the most wonderful book, exciting and thoughtful and well-written. It concerns a youth given a hazardous task who sets out to fulfill it and learns what life has to offer.We might just go straight on with this sequel" - Thomas
A monumental survey of the wide range of churches built in New Zealand over the past 200 years, with full architectural consideration and photographs by Jane Ussher.
Twelve-year-old Grubb lives a hand-to-mouth existence in Victorian England, working as a chimney sweep under a cruel master. After an incident at an inn, he hides in the trunk of one of its guests, the enigmatic Alistair Grim, and is whisked away to his Odditorium, a wonderful flying house full of incredible mechanical features powered by an enigmatic substance called animus. Now apprenticed to Grim, Grubb begins to settle into his new life and find a new family in the eccentric crew of the Odditorium, when suddenly his new world comes under attack by the evil Prince Nightshade and he is propelled into a perilous quest.
Unseen University are proud to present the most comprehensive map and guide to the Disc yet produced. In this noble endeavour, drawing upon the hard won knowledge of many great and, inevitably, late explorers, one may locate on a detailed plan of our world such fabled realms as the Condiment Isles, trace the course of the River Kneck as it deposits silt and border disputes in equal abundance on the lands either side, and contemplate the vast deserts of Klatch and Howondaland - a salutary lesson in the perils of allowing one's goats to graze unchecked.
Dina is a family doctor living in the melting-pot city of Haifa, Israel. Born in Australia in a Jewish enclave of Melbourne to Holocaust survivors, Dina left behind a childhood marred by misery and the tragedies of the past to build a new life for herself in the Promised Land. After starting a family of her own, she finds her life falling apart beneath the demands of her eccentric patients, a marriage starting to fray, the ever-present threat of terrorist attack and the ghost of her mother, haunting her with memories that Dina would prefer to leave on the other side of the world.
"Compelling, moving and memorable." - Graeme Simsion
Lou Reed, who died in 2013, was best known to the general public as the grumpy New Yorker in black who sang 'Walk on the Wild Side'. To his dedicated admirers, however, he was one of the most innovative and intelligent American song writers of modern times, a natural outsider who lived a tumultuous and tortured life.
>> What is your favourite Lou Reed (or Velvet Underground) song?
How did a country that had liberated itself from seventy years of communism end up, just twenty years later, as one of the biggest threats to the West and above all to its own people?
In the first of an extraordinary three-volume account of the war on land, in the air and at sea, James Holland reveals not only the truth behind the familiar legends of the Second World War but he also unveils those lesser known events which were to have the greatest significance.
A selection of the country’s most
civilised and relaxing 1-2 hour cycle rides, often to destinations such as
cafés, beaches, swimming holes, playgrounds and tourist attractions. Suitable
for everyone and for every type of bicycle; perfect for leisurely outings with
family or friends.
"City on Fire is an amazing virtual reality machine, whisking us back to New York City in the 1970s, that gritty, graffitied era when the city tottered on the brink of bankruptcy, when the Bronx was burning and Central Park was a shabby hunting ground for muggers, and the Son of Sam was roaming the streets. Hallberg has somehow managed to evoke all this — and the cacophonous soundtrack that played in those years — with bravura swagger and style and heart. He captures the city’s dangerous, magnetic allure. And he also captures what it’s like to be young in New York, propelled by the dizzying adrenaline-rush of possibility and frightened, too, by the fragility of urgent ambitions. It’s a novel of head-snapping ambition and heart-stopping power — a novel that attests to its young author’s boundless and unflagging talents." - New York Times
How Dutch sailors discovered Australia and how an English pirate almost beat Captain Cook.
A autobiography from the journalist and social and political campaigner who became one of the most prominent leaders of the feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
>> 1971.
>> "If you poured water on a great poem, you would get a novel."
John Gload is a seventy-seven-year-old murderer. He has been killing for over half a century before he is caught for the first time. Valentine Millimaki is the young man in the Copper County sheriff's department who draws the overnight shift after Gload's arrest. He is tasked with getting the killer to confess to a string of unsolved murders. Gload and Millimaki sit across from each other in the dark, swapping stories and secrets. As sheriff and criminal talk through the bars night after night, Millimaki's safety is threatened within his own department. Then a brazen act of violence leads to a manhunt and a revelation that ensures Gload's past and Millimaki's future are for ever entwined.
"Dark and imaginative.' - The New York Times
On the eve of Princess Sophia's wedding, the Scandinavian kingdom of Skyggehavn prepares to fete the occasion with a sumptuous display of riches. Yet beneath the veneer of celebration, a shiver of darkness creeps through the palace halls. A mysterious illness plagues the royal family, threatening the lives of the throne's heirs, and a courtier's wolfish hunger for the king's favours sets a devious plot in motion. Here in the palace of Skyggehavn, things are seldom as they seem - and when a single errant prick of a needle sets off a series of events that will alter the course of history, the fates of budding young seamstress Ava Bingen and crafty servant Midi Sorte become irrevocably intertwined. As they navigate a tangled web of palace intrigue, power-lust and deception, Ava and Midi must carve out their own survival any way they can, weathering desperate desires and crushing consequences on a journey to ultimate redemption.
"Britain's wittiest philosopher." - Raymond Tallis
Literary Paper Dolls by Kyle Hilton $27.99
Lots of fun (and quite a few snide comments (i.e. even more fun)). Transform Kafka into a giant insect! Revisage the Bronte sisters as their male pseudonyms! See what is left uncensored for George Orwell! (Note: Ernest Hemingway is not a doll but a 'Action Figure for Men').
Saturday 31st is New Zealand Bookshop Day!
We will be celebrating all day, and invite you, our wonderful customers, to join us! Come whenever you like and stay for as long as you like (just as always). To see our events schedule and all-day activities click at right or here.
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