Stan and Charmaine are a married couple trying to stay afloat in the midst of economic and social collapse. Living in their car, surviving on tips from Charmaine's job at a dive bar, they're increasingly vulnerable to roving gangs, and in a rather desperate state. So when they see an advertisement for the Positron Project in the town of Consilience - a 'social experiment' offering stable jobs and a home of their own - they sign up immediately. All they have to do in return for this suburban paradise is give up their freedom every second month, swapping their home for a prison cell. At first, all is well. But slowly, unknown to the other, Stan and Charmaine develop a passionate obsession with their counterparts, the couple that occupy their home when they are in prison.
Margaret Atwood writes novels that consistently strike at the heart of, by extrapolating from, problems of contemporary life without ever ceasing to be integral fictions in their own right.
How do you yield to something more powerful than yourself and remain upright? Finnegan's enjoyable book not only brings initiates you into a deep experience of surfing but also shows how the surfer's art is a microcosm for a wider life sensitively and intentionally lived.
"There are too many breathtaking, original things in Barbarian Days to do more than mention here - observations about surfing that have simply never been made before, or certainly never so well." - New York Times
"I'd press this book upon on a nonsurfer, in part because nothing I've read so accurately describes the feeling of being stoked or the despair of being held under. But also because while it is a book about a writer's life and, even more generally, a quester's life, more carefully observed and precisely rendered than any I've read in a long time." - Los Angeles Times
James Hector: Explorer, scientist, leader by Simon Nathan $45.00
James Hector was the dominant personality in the small nineteenth-century scientific community in New Zealand. As the first scientist employed by the government, he was the founder of the Geological Survey (now GNS Science), Colonial Museum (now Te Papa), New Zealand Institute (now Royal Society of New Zealand) and the Colonial Botanic Garden (now Wellington Botanic Garden), as well as being a trusted government advisor. Whenever a tricky technical problem arose, the first question was often, ‘What does Dr Hector think?’
A potter who has been working with porcelain for more than forty years, de Waal, author of the wonderful The Hare With the Amber Eyes, describes how he set out on five journeys to places where porcelain was dreamed about, refined, collected and coveted-and that would help him understand the clay's mysterious allure. From his studio in London, he starts by travelling to three "white hills" - sites in China, Germany and England that are key to porcelain's creation. But his search eventually takes him around the globe and reveals more than a history of cups and figurines; rather, he is forced to confront some of the darkest moments of twentieth-century history. Part memoir, part history, part detective story, The White Road chronicles a global obsession with alchemy, art, wealth, craft, and purity.
Barney Kettle knew he would be a very famous film director one day, he just didn't know when that day would arrive. He was already an actual director but so far only his schoolmates and the residents of the High Street had viewed them. Global fame was a little way off. It would come, though. Barney was certain about that. So begins the manuscript written from the hospital bed of an unnamed man. He has written it over many months as he recovers from serious injuries sustained in a city-wide catastrophe. He has written so he can remember the street where he lived, home to a cavalcade of interesting people, singular shops, and curious stories.He has written so he can remember the summer before he was injured, the last days of a vanished world. Above all, he has written so he can remember the inimitable Barney Kettle, filmmaker, part-time dictator, questing brain, theatrical friend; a boy who loved to invent stories but found a real one under his nose; a boy who explored his neighbourhood with camera in hand and stumbled on a mystery that changed everything.
Family homes, baches and apartments demonstrating ingenious ways to reduce space and cut costs within a design-enriched environment.
You have to see this! (Warning: you will want it.) Shaun Tan has moved into the third dimension and has created wonderful sculptures inspired by fairy tales from Grimm.
Was Maori slavery like the experience of Africans in the Americas? Were British missionaries or colonial administrators responsible for ending the practice? What was the nature of freedom and unfreedom in Maori society and how did that intersect with British colonists and the anti-slavery movement? This book is the first history of Maori war captives. Drawing on Maori oral sources as well the records of colonists, Petrie analyses freedom and unfreedom in traditional Maori society; the role of economics and mana in shaping captivity; and how the arrival of colonists, trade and war transformed Maori society and the place of captives.
"If the body is a foreign country, then to practise medicine is to explore new territory". Francis takes us on a very personable and informative guided tour of our own body, from cranium to metatarsus and gives us fresh understanding of our physical selves.
"Wonderful, subtle, unpretentious." - John Berger
A wonderful survey of the latest, quirkiest, neatest, smallest and most innovative Japanese domestic architecture.
First-rate portraits and stories of dogs in all walks of work, from rounding up sheep to sniffing for drugs at our borders. Very nicely done.
Bringing together brewing traditions from all over the world and combining these with Kiwi ingredients, ingenuity and creativity, New Zealand has a beer culture unlike any other.
>> Jules van Cruysen will be talking over the froth and giving away a glass of a special Yeastie Boys' I AM beer with the first 20 copies: Monday, 28 September: 5pm, Free House (Collingwood Street).
The fourth in the wonderful 'Explore and Discover' series, introducing children to the wildlife that surrounds them.
>> Also in hardcover: $29.99.
"I never met anyone whose interest in racing matched my own. Both on and off the course, so to speak, I've enjoyed the company of many a racing acquaintance. I've read books, or parts of books, by persons who might have come close to being true racing friends of mine if ever we had met. For most of my long life, however, my enjoyment of racing has been a solitary thing: something I could never wholly explain to anyone else." Murnane's typically precise and unusual account of his lifelong obsession with horse racing gives unparalleled insight into the workings of his precise and unusual mind. "Murnane writes the best sentences in English of any living writer of fiction and I am awarding him the Nobel Prize for Literature. Read my reviews of some of his novels here." - Thomas
>> 8 questions.
Take a tour of Toronto, look around Lisbon or hot-foot it to Helsinki with this global adventure in a book! 30 cities from around the world are brought to life with illustrations by Martin Haake, which show key landmarks, famous people, buildings and cultural icons. A search-and-find game on every page helps young readers to explore the cities and spot the details that makes each place unique.
Parekowhai's unique practice is characterised by a refined aesthetic and an engagement with the creation and role of culture in the contemporary world. Primarily sculptural, his works often play with scale and space, using humour to comment on the intersections between national narratives, colonial histories and popular culture. Parekowhai is known for bringing together an array of references, sometimes in a single object, with in-jokes and snippets of personal biography sitting side-by-side with art historical playfulness and big-picture cultural critique.
"They say that tourist ships to Antarctica, even more than ordinary human conveyances, are loaded down with aching hearts. Deceived wives and widowers, men who've never been loved and don't know why, Russian crew forced to leave their children behind for years at a time. And then there are the married couples: how calm the old ones, how eager the new! - but isn't a couple the greatest mystery of all?"
Otahuna was built by Sir Heaton Rhodes in 1895 as a wedding present for his wife, using New Zealand timbers. A private park was developed, with rare plant varieties and formal landscaping, as well as kitchen gardens and fields of daffodils. In 2006, Hall Cannon and Miles Refo bought Otahuna and set about breathing new life into it. After an extensive refurbishment, they opened it as a private luxury lodge, bringing a spirit of hospitality and bonhomie back to one of the country's grandest country houses - and its garden. Recipes by Simon Farrell-Green.
Two women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in a broken-down property in the middle of a desert. Strangers to each other, they have no idea where they are or how they came to be there with eight other girls, forced to wear strange uniforms, their heads shaved, guarded by two inept yet vicious armed jailers and a 'nurse'. A starkly imaginative exploration of contemporary misogyny and corporate control, Wood's novel has been compared with William Golding's Lord of the Flies and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (neither of which she had read).
"A brave, brilliant book. I would defy anyone to read it and not come out a changed person." - Malcolm Knox
The river is a place of history and secrets. For Ren and Sonny, two unlikely friends, it's a place of freedom and adventure. For a group of storytelling vagrants, it's a refuge. And for the isolated daughter of a cult reverend, it's an escape. Each time they visit, another secret slips into its ancient waters. But change and trouble are coming - to the river and to the lives of those who love it. Who will have the courage to fight and survive and what will be the cost?
A boy and a girl are falling in love but there's a lot they don't know about who they are and where they come from. Winterson retells and remakes Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale and sets it in modern New Bohemia - all done with her usual considerable elan. The exercise shows how Shakespearean mechanisms continue to underlie our social interactions (and, indeed, our antisocial misinteractions).
This book simultaneously confirms, through historically significant wildlife paintings, and subverts, through contemporary art and photography, viewers' preconceptions of the place of animals in culture. The juxtaposition of contemporary taxidermy with iconic paintings is particularly resonant. Includes work by Richard Ansdell, David Brooks, George Browne, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Petah Coyne, Raymond Ching, Kate Clark, Wim Delvoye, Mark Dion, Elmgreen & Dragset, Carle e Fernandez, Richard Friese, Francois Furet, Nicholas Galanin, George Bouverie Goddard, Damien Hirst, William Hollywood, Idiots (Afke Golsteijn and Floris Bakker), Alfred Kowalski, Robert Kuhn , Wilhelm Kuhnert, Bruno Liljefors, Polly Morgan, John Newsom, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Walter Robinson, George Rotig, Carl Rungius, Yinka Shonibare MBE, David Shrigley, Snaebjornsdottir/Wilson, Amy Stein, Archibald Thorburn, Mary Tsiongas, Joseph Wolf, Brigitte Zieger, and Andrew Zuckerman.
"What's surprising about Spinster is how, in its charmingly digressive style, the book sets forth a clear vision not just for single women, but for all women: to disregard the reigning views of how women should live, to know their own hearts and to carve out a little space for their dreams, preferably a space with 11-foot ceilings." - New York Times
Lockwood & Co. might be the smallest (some might say shambollic) Psychic Detection Agency in London. But its three agents - Lucy, Lockwood and George - are exceptional Talents. And they get results. When an outbreak of ghostly phenomena grows to terrifying levels in Chelsea, Scotland Yard is left baffled. Even more baffling is that Lockwood & Co appear to have been excluded from the huge team of Agents investigating the Chelsea Outbreak. Surely this is the perfect chance for them to show once and for all that they're actually the best in town? Well, that's if they can put aside their personal differences for long enough to march into action with their rapiers, salt and iron... If you've been chilled, warmed and intrigued by The Screaming Staircase and The Whispering Skull, you will, like us, be fighting over who gets to read this first in your family. If you haven't read the first two yet, you are very lucky indeed - great reading pleasure awaits!
"Stroud is a genius." - Rick Riordan
" The old cliché, 'I couldn't put it down', totally resonated for me. I was too terrified to put it down!" - Jan (of The Screaming Staircase)
New Zealand's most dangerous, infamous, remote and remarkable roads, from spectacular coastal highways to frightening alpine passes, back-country bullies to treasured pathway. These are the roads that dictate the terms of everyday life in New Zealand. Wild Roads features 60 of our wildest routes - sometimes a pleasure to drive, other times unpredictable, exposed and treacherous.
After the Newington Emerald is stolen at the height of a conjured storm, eighteen-year-old Lady Truthful Newington goes to London to search for the magical heirloom of her house. But as no well-bred young lady can hunt the metropolis for a stolen jewel, she has to disguise herself as a man, and is soon caught up in a dangerous adventure where she must risk her life, her reputation - and her heart...
Features creative responses to conflict, such as a waiata written about an inter-tribal skirmish, short stories on the World Wars, extracts from plays and novels set in such campaigns as Chunuk Bair and Vietnam, and works by various poets, including James K. Baxter, Eileen Duggan, Denis Glover, Allen Curnow and Robert Sullivan. There are also vivid accounts by journalists reporting home as well as by soldiers recalling their experiences in the trenches, the desert or in the air. Rounding out this fascinating collection are thoughtful retrospective commentaries on the impact of wars from precolonial times up to Afghanistan.
Tour the country's cafes and try their most popular dishes. Includes Morrison Street, the Boat Shed, TOAD Hall and the Wholemeal Trading Company.
A fascinating insight into the worlds behind the winning WoW designs. Lavishly illustrated.
>> A good companion to WearableArt.
"On the last day of 1985, I went home to live in Bunyah, the farming valley I had left some twenty-nine years earlier. My wife and our younger children followed two days later ...at last I was going home, to care for my father in his old age and to live in the place from which I'd always felt displaced. What I didn't know was that I was heading home in order to go mad." A frank and insightful account of Murray's struggle with depression.
Jack's Grandpa wears his slippers to the supermarket, serves up Spam a la Custard for dinner, and often doesn't remember Jack's name - but he can still take to the skies in a speeding Spitfire and save the day.
Follows the Indonesian Army's Battalion 745 as it withdrew from East Timor after the 1999 independence vote, leaving a trail of devastation in its wake.
The lives of Anne, Charlotte and Emily as distilled in artefacts from Haworth. Branwell's laudanum glass does not feature.
New from the author of The Boy in Striped Pyjamas - another sensitive novel about children finding strength in themselves when the adult world is showing its worst. When Pierrot becomes an orphan, he must leave his home in Paris for a new life with his Aunt Beatrix, a servant in a wealthy household at the top of the German mountains. But this is no ordinary time, for it is 1935 and the Second World War is fast approaching; and this is no ordinary house, for this is the Berghof, the home of Adolf Hitler. Quickly, Pierrot is taken under Hitler's wing, and is thrown into an increasingly dangerous new world: a world of terror, secrets and betrayal, from which he may never be able to escape.
"Disturbingly vivid, utterly readable and appealing to audiences of all ages." - The Bookbag
Barney and his mother, their home destroyed by bombing, are travelling to the country when their train is forced to shelter in a tunnel from attacking German planes. There, in the darkness, a stranger on the train begins to tell them a story. A story about Billy Byron, the most decorated soldier of WW1, who once had the chance to end the war before it even began, and how he tried to fix his mistake.
'Silence was a deeply established tradition. Men used it as a form of self-protection; it saved those who had experienced the horrors of war from the emotional trauma of experiencing it all over again in the telling. And it saved women and children, back home, from the terrible knowledge of what they had seen and walked away from. One result of this was that the men who had actually lived through Gallipoli and the trenches did not write about it."
When young Augustus falls asleep in history class, Professor Tempo decides to teach him a lesson and show him that history isn't boring at all! She hands him a magic diary, all he needs to do is write the time and place to travel there. Together they head out on a whistle-stop tour of history through the ages to meet some of the world's finest explorers, inventors, leaders, writers, composers and painters.
The actions of Hitler, Stalin and Thatcher had epic, resounding consequences, but there are other ways to shape the course of history: those like Samuel de Champlain, the dreamers, explorers or adventurers who stand out in history for who they were as much as for what they did; or observers like Michel de Montaigne, who kept the notes and diaries that bring the past to life for us. History's People is about the important and complex relationship between biography and history, individuals and their times, and the transformative moments that have shaped the world.
Morven Hills Station once extended to 400,000 acres and has perhaps the largest shearing shed in the country (34 stalls).
Twelve-year-old Theophilus Grey is a linkboy in eighteenth-century London, guiding people home through the dark, dangerous alleys by the light of his torch. But in secret, he's also a spy gathering information for his master, the mysterious Garnet Hooke. When thieves and rogues start dropping without a scratch, rumours spread of a dangerous faery demon on the loose...
"A fast-paced, highly original story of somewhat super-powered teens. I couldn't put it down." - Garth Nix
Almost all of us want to make a difference. So we volunteer, donate to charity, recycle or try to cut down our carbon emissions. But rarely do we know how much of a difference we're really making. In a remarkable re-examination of the evidence, Doing Good Better reveals why buying sweatshop-produced goods benefits the poor; why cosmetic surgeons can do more good than charity workers; and why giving to a relief fund is generally not the best way to help after a natural disaster.
The director's cut of his life.
>> "I'm taking this bloody car to Invercargill."
>> Hear Murphy speak at our Readers & Writers festival.
