One winter evening, Elias, a young artist, watches a woman move into his apartment building. After closing her door, however, she is not seen again. A misdirected letter finally gives Elias the opportunity to make contact. But inside her dark apartment, Elisabeth refuses to respond to his knock. Her only company is the Woman in Green, an unbidden vision from her childhood dreams. Elias, meanwhile, is not to be deterred and draws his friend Otto, an elderly widower, into his attempts to entice Elisabeth into the world. As spring segues into summer, their lives become intertwined and their past stories are revealed. A beautifully written and sensitive novel.
The 1936 Berlin Olympics were an opportunity for Hitler to be propagandised as a man of peace. German wrestler Werner Seelenbinder hoped to win and then refuse the Nazi salute as a mark of resistance. Unfortunately he came fourth. Under constant watch by the Gestapo for his socialist beliefs, Seelenbinder was arrested, tortured, and eventually executed in 1944. James McNeish has written a fascinating, eccentric and personal book about this under-celebrated hero of the German resistance.
A child has small hands, small feet and small ears, but that does not mean they have small ideas. Another wonderful book from the author of A Lion in Paris.
Helen Oyeyemi's characters slip from the pages of their own stories, only to surface others. The reader is invited into a world of lost libraries and locked gardens, of marshlands where the drowned dead live and a city where all the clocks have stopped; students hone their skills at puppet school, the Homely Wench Society commits a guerrilla book-swap, and lovers exchange books and roses on St Jordi's Day.
>> A thoughtful interview with the author.
"This book is set during the Second World War and is based on the lives of Cleave’s grandparents. An absorbing read, it tells the story of Mary North who enlists immediately after war is declared, hoping to be a spy but instead assigned to a teaching job. When the children are sent to the countryside, there are some who are not wanted there and end up back in London, where Mary takes it upon herself to teach them and look out for them. She is backed by Education Ministry official Tom Shaw who supports her, and their relationship becomes closer, but when Tom's friend and flatmate Alistair enlists things get a bit complicated. Alistair is posted to Malta after leaving France and the book gives an insight into the deprivation suffered by the inhabitants and defenders of Malta under the Nazi blockade. This is a great read, and fans of Chris Cleave won't be disappointed. Highly recommended." - Peter
>> Watch the trailer!
"Without countervailing voices, naming and challenging power, political freedom withers and dies. Without countervailing voices, a better world can never materialise. Without countervailing voices, wells will still be dug and bridges will still be built, but only for the few. Food will still be grown, but it will not reach the mouths of the poor. New medicines will be developed, but they will be inaccessible to many of those in need." Typically incisive in his analysis, Monbiot also lays out practical steps to throw off the politics of fear.
For as long as anyone can remember, Britt-Marie has been an acquired taste. It's not that she's judgemental, or fussy, or difficult - she just expects things to be done in a certain way. A cutlery drawer should be arranged in the right order, for example (forks, knives, then spoons). We're not animals, are we? But behind the passive-aggressive, socially awkward, absurdly pedantic busybody is a woman who has more imagination, bigger dreams and a warmer heart than anyone around her realizes.From the author of A Man Called Ove and My Grandmother Sends her Regards and Apologises.
Did you ever want to waddle with a colony of penguins? Wriggle with an army of caterpillars? Or march with a troop of monkeys? Lane Smith takes us on a colourful adventure through the natural world, following a child as he weaves through the jungle, dives under the ocean and soars into the sky. Along the way he makes friends and causes mischief with a dazzling array of creatures both large and small - but can he find a tribe of his own? A lovely book.
Drawing on the author's personal experience of living and working as an architect in Syria, this book offers an eyewitness perspective on the country's bitter conflict through the lens of architecture, showing how the built environment offers a mirror to the community that inhabits it.
>> Her battle to heal Homs.
"Almanac, history, lament, proclamation. Poems that wear their green uniforms the way we did at school. Tuned to everything underneath them. Elegant as Chanel suits. Tough as." - Janet Charman
What does it mean to live happily ever after? At dinner parties and over coffee, Rabih and Kirsten's friends always ask them the same question: how did you meet? The answer comes easily - it's a happy story, one they both love to tell. But there is a second part to this story, the answer to a question their friends never ask: what happened next? Rabih and Kirsten find each other, fall in love, get married. Society tells us this is the end of the story. In fact, it is only the beginning.
Andrew Landford is driving home one night, along a dark country lane, when a barn owl flies into his windscreen. It is an accident, nothing more. However Andrew is in line to be the country's next prime minister. And he has recently been appointed to a parliamentary committee concerned with the Wildlife and Countryside Act. Barn Owls are protected species, and it is a crime to kill one. If Andrew acknowledges that he has killed the owl, he could be risking his political career... From the author of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.
"A delightful Gothic fantasy, witty and well-crafted, completed with panache. - The Guardian
Useful.
It is Little Fat Bug's birthday and he has invited all the little bugs in the blanket to his party. The little bugs have never met each other before and when Little Fat Bug opens the door to his guests, he is shocked to find that no one looks like him. Beautiful felted illustrations!
>> There are also Bugs in the Garden!
Based on the true story of Samia Omar, a girl who grows up in war-torn Somalia determined to be a world-class sprinter. She sleeps with a photo of Mo Farah by her bed, trains hard despite the violence and prejudice around her, and makes the national team. But with the war encroaching on their family, her sister is forced to make the treacherous journey to Europe by boat. Samia, scared for her life and for her dreams, decides to join her, which means putting her life in the hands of traffickers...
Throw away your preconceived ideas about salads and discover inventive, mouth-watering dishes that will change the way you cook. Invite your guests now, and then come and get a copy of the book!
"This book is a thing of complete beauty! Peter is a master of a very elusive art: combining great innovation with a massively delicious tummy-hug." - Yotam Ottolenghi
Venice is Italy's kingdom of salt and pearls, prosecco and mermaids, bigola and polenta. Tessa Kiros travels through the city, breathing in its atmosphere and letting its bejewelled past and dark alleyways fuel her imagination. Mingled among the recipes and beautiful photography are Tessa's diary jottings on Venice's life and food.
Dawn, mist clearing over the rice fields, a burning Vietnamese village, and a young war photographer gets the shot that might make his career. The image, of a staring soldier in the midst of mayhem, will become one of the great photographs of the war. But what he has seen in that village is more than he can bear, and he flees. Jonathan drifts on to Japan, to lose himself in the vastness of Tokyo, where there are different kinds of pictures to be taken: peacetime pictures of crowds and subways and cherry blossom. And pictures of a girl with whom he is no longer lost: innumerable pictures of Kumiko, on the streets and in the rain and in the heat of the summer. Yet even here in this alien city, his history will catch up with him: that photograph and his responsibility in taking it; his responsibility as a witness to war, and as a witness to other events buried far deeper in his past.
Poet Harvey Molloy lives in many worlds – the place he was born, the place he lives now, the lives of the Anglo-Saxons whose work he translates and the world of his wife’s Indian family. And then there are the other worlds that claim him – the beleagured planet he calls home, and the ones beyond Earth’s boundaries.
Leaving the country you grew up in is both heart-wrenching and liberating. Doney's poetry rtells of her move from New Zealand to Scotland, to find that tea leaves in a pot still make a cup of tea, but one that’s somehow different. Then she winds back to other more painful leave-takings that a pot of tea has no answer for.
Once, Canterbury poet Helen Jacobs delighted in walking the hills, but now she can only get as far as the local shops, and the nature she loves is pressed into the tiny garden she tends. It is here that she ponders the paradox of old age – a time of terrible losses and unexpected joys, and then finds herself moving one last time to a room with a view of the hills she loves.
Fourteen-year-old Charlie Law has lived in Little Town, on the border with Old Country, all his life. He knows the rules: no going out after dark; no drinking; no litter; no fighting. You don't want to get on the wrong side of the people who run Little Town. When he meets Pavel Duda, a refugee from Old Country, the rules start to get broken. Then the bombs come, and the soldiers from Old Country, and Little Town changes for ever. Sometimes, to keep the people you love safe, you have to do bad things. As Little Town's rules crumble, Charlie is sucked into a dangerous game. There's a gun, and a bad man, and his closest friend, and his dearest enemy. Charlie Law wants to keep everyone happy, even if it kills him. And maybe it will...
Like humans, cities are mortal. They are born, they thrive, and they eventually die. Aude de Tocqueville tells the compelling narrative of the rise and fall of such notable places as Pompeii, Teotihuacan, and Angkor. She also details the less well known, including Centralia, an abandoned Pennsylvania town consumed by unquenchable underground fire; Nova Citas de Kilamba in Angola, where housing, schools, and stores were built for 500,000 people that never came; and Epecuen, a tourist town in Argentina now swallowed up by water.
Fifteen-year-old Wulliam is dreading taking up his family's mantle of Riverkeep, tending the river and fishing corpses from its treacherous waters. But then everything changes. One night his father is possessed by a dark spirit, and Wull hears that a cure lurks deep within the great sea-beast known as the mormorach. He realizes he must go on an epic journey downriver to find it - or lose Pappa forever.
As a bored, moody teenager, Emma Beddington came across a copy of French ELLE in the library of her austere Yorkshire school. As she turned the pages, full of philosophy, sex and lipstick, she realized that her life had one purpose and one purpose only: she needed to be French. Instead of skulking in her bedroom listening to The Smiths or trudging to Betty's Tea Room to buy fondant fancies, she would be free and solitary, sitting outside the Cafe de Flore with a Scottie dog at her feet, a Moleskine on the table and a Gauloise trembling on her lower lip. And so she set about becoming French: she did a French exchange, albeit in Casablanca; she studied French history at university, and spent the holidays in France with her French boyfriend. Eventually, after a family tragedy, she found herself living in Paris, with the same French boyfriend and two half-French children. Her dream had come true, but how would reality match up?
Maurice Shadbolt's novels drew extensively on his experience of family life. These poems by his brother Peter use the same source material.
In May 1941 Lena Mukhina was an ordinary teenage girl, living in Leningrad, worrying about her homework and whether Vova - the boy she liked - liked her. Like a good Soviet schoolgirl, she was also diligently learning German, the language of Russia's Nazi ally. And she was keeping a diary, in which she recorded her hopes and dreams. Then, on 22 June 1941, Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and declared war on the Soviet Union. All too soon, Leningrad was besieged and life became a living hell. Lena and her family fought to stay alive; their city was starving and its citizens were dying in their hundreds of thousands.
How did the Arab Spring give way to a new age of discord?
Think 'Woodstock' and the mind turns to the seminal 1969 festival that crowned a seismic decade of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. But Woodstock itself was over 60 miles from the site to which the fabled half a million flocked. So why the misnomer? Quite simply, Woodstock was already a key location in the Sixties rock landscape, the tiny Catskills town where Bob Dylan had holed up after his 1966 motorcycle accident. In Small Town Talk, Hoskyns recreates Woodstock's community of brilliant dysfunctional musicians, opportunistic hippie capitalists and scheming dealers drawn to the area by Dylan and his sidekicks The Band.
>> The Band, Woodstock, Bethel, NY.
Six kiwi sci-fi novellae:
Lee Murray and Piper Mejia's odyssey through a dystopic future: MikaA.C. Buchanan's story of creatures and people displaced in time and space: Bree’s Dinosaur
Grant Stone's tale of jealous muses and musical prodigy: The LastA husband with a secret in I.K. Paterson-Harkness' Pocket WifeTim Jones' exploration of desperation and betrayal on New Zealand’s shores: LandfallGrief, ghosts, and atoms in Octavia Cade's The Ghost of Matter
Read won Masterchef NZ with his personable, accessible recipes and direct personal charm.
Making people laugh is what Summer does best. It’s how she fits in. And is it any wonder with a family like hers? Top of the list of crazies is Pop, her stingy grandfather, who whips up possum stews and turns chicken scraps into the worst school lunches ever. So why does Juanita suddenly want to be her friend? Juanita’s not her type, she has real sandwiches in her lunchbox, and does nice things like saving greyhounds and sticking up for people. And then Pop gets himself a dangerous girlfriend with a mysterious past. Summer has to do something. Apple works in the crystal shop and knows a thing or two about love potions – can she brew an un-love potion? Juanita’s keen to help. But what if she discovers all the other embarrassing stuff – what if she finds out … everything?
George and his best friend, Annie have been selected as junior astronauts - part of a programme that trains up young people for a trip to Mars in the future. This is everything they've ever wanted - they get to be a part of up-to-the minute space discoveries and meet a bunch of new friends who are as fascinated by the universe as they are. But when they arrive at space camp, George and Annie quickly learn that strange things are happening - on Earth as well as up in our skies. Mysterious space missions are happening in secret, and the astronaut training they're undertaking gets scarier and scarier... The fifth instalment in this fact-packed series!
U-862 was one of three U-boats based in the Far East chosen in Berlin for operations against merchant shipping off the Australian coast in 1944. After sinking the US ship Robert J. Walker south of Sydney on Christmas Day, 1944, U-862 headed for New Zealand waters and conducted a war patrol along the East Coast of the North Island. Looking for ships to sink, U-862's Commander Timm made a daring entry into Gisborne harbour at midnight on 15 January and the following night chased and fired a torpedo at a merchant ship in Hawkes Bay. These operations in New Zealand waters remained known only to a small number of Allied codebreakers until 1992.
Highlights the tremendous cost of bad writing in business and government - and offers practical solutions for change. By a New Zealand advocate for plain and effective English.
Explores pressing issues of compact vs dispersed urban development, infrastructure renewal, resilient transport patterns and healthy, affordable housing, sustainable living, and addresses questions about planning, development, governance and public engagement, in the context of social demographic and economic trends and environmental challenges.
A clear and appealing guide to turning a tree into a spoon.
On 12th April 1981 a revolutionary new spacecraft blasted off from Florida on her maiden flight. NASA's Space Shuttle Columbia was the most advanced flying machine ever built.
>> What lay ahead for Columbia.
>> Immortalised in a song.
Audrey can't leave the house. she can't even take off her dark glasses inside the house. Then her brother's friend Linus stumbles into her life. With his friendly, orange-slice smile and his funny notes, he starts to entice Audrey out again - well, Starbucks is a start. And with Linus at her side, Audrey feels like she can do the things she'd thought were too scary. Suddenly, finding her way back to the real world seems achievable.
Delectable creative inspiration from the renowned fabric artist.
Agnieszka loves her village, set deep in a peaceful valley. But the nearby enchanted forest casts a shadow over her home. Many have been lost to the Wood and none return unchanged. The villagers depend on an ageless wizard, the Dragon, to protect them from the forest's dark magic. However, his help comes at a terrible price. One young village woman must serve him for ten years, leaving all they value behind. Agnieszka fears her dearest friend Kasia will be picked at the next choosing, for she's everything Agnieszka is not - beautiful, graceful and brave. Yet when the Dragon comes, it's not Kasia he takes.
A very clear and helpful introduction to New Zealand's national sport.
>> She can play.
The most comprehensive photographic record of the sport and culture of surfing - in other words, the surfing book.
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