Rachel Bush's poetry is remarkable for the amount of meaning, feeling and wry humour it pivots on the ordinary details of life, and by the verbal lightness of touch brought to even the heaviest of subjects. Sadly, Rachel died last month. This, her last collection, contains some of her very best work.
>> We will be having an event in the shop to celebrate Thought Horses on Thursday 28 April at 5:30. There will be readings from the book. Please come along.
>> There is a very nice interview with Rachel here.
"The thinness of contemporary life. I can almost poke my finger through it." Jeffrey Lockhart's father, Ross, is a billionaire in his sixties, with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to a life of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say "an uncertain farewell" to her as she surrenders her body. "We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner?" Thoughtful (as always); exquisitely written (as always).
"America's greatest living writer." - Observer
Dr Eitan Green is a good man. He saves lives. Then, speeding along a deserted moonlit road in his SUV after an exhausting hospital shift, he hits someone. Seeing that the man, an African migrant, is beyond help, he flees the scene. It is a decision that changes everything. Because the dead man's wife knows what happened. And when she knocks at Eitan's door the next day, tall and beautiful, holding his wallet, he discovers that her price is not money. It is something else entirely, something that will shatter Eitan's safe existence and take him into a world of secrets and lies he could never have anticipated.
Urban Fauna Lab is a collective, formed in 2011 in Moscow by the artists Alexey Buldakov and Anastasia Potemkina. The group is a multidisciplinary platform conceived to explore parasitic and symbiotic relationships in the urban environment and their associated adaptations. This book focuses on the role of urban animals and plants in human culture and on the economic, architectural, and political implications of the cohabitation of humans and animals in the city. Thoughtful.
On the eve of Angolan independence, Ludo bricks herself into her apartment, where she will remain for the next thirty years. She lives off vegetables and pigeons, burns her furniture and books to stay alive and keeps herself busy by writing her story on the walls of her home. The outside world slowly seeps into Ludo's life through snippets on the radio, voices from next door, glimpses of a man fleeing his pursuers and a note attached to a bird's foot. Until one day she meets Sabalu, a young boy from the street who climbs up to her terrace.
Short-listed for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize.
"The light detachment and readability of Louis de Bernieres at his best, but combined with the sharp insights of JM Coetzee. Agualusa's writing is a delight throughout." - Scotsman
Stinking, drunk, brutal and bloodthirsty, Henry Drax is a harpooner on the Volunteer, a Yorkshire whaling ship bound for the hunting waters of the Arctic Circle. Also aboard for the first time is Patrick Sumner, an ex-army surgeon with a shattered reputation, no money and no better option than to embark as ship's medic on this violent, filthy, ill-fated voyage. In India during the Siege of Delhi, Sumner thought he had experienced the depths to which a man can stoop and imagined he'd find respite on the Volunteer, but now, trapped in the wooden belly of the ship with Drax, he encounters pure evil and is forced to act. As the true purposes of the expedition become clear, the confrontation between the two men plays out in the freezing darkness of an Arctic winter.
An exquisite new picture book with a classic feel (and philosophical depth!). Have you ever sped past in such a hurry that everything you passed was soft and blurry? And did you ever squeeze your eyes so tight that you saw lots of dots of coloured light? This book is a wonderful introduction to the world of the senses.
In these short, capricious and irreverent portraits of twenty-six great writers, from Joyce to Nabokov, Sterne to Wilde, Marias throws unexpected, and very human, light on authors too often enshrined in the halo of artistic sainthood. Revealing that Conrad actually hated sailing and Emily Bronte was so tough she was known as 'The Major', among many other stories of eccentricity, drunkenness and even murder, this joyful book uses unusual angles and peculiar details to illuminate writers' lives in a new way. Interesting.
When a young elephant is orphaned by poachers, it is only a matter of time before he begins terrorising the countryside, earning his malevolent name from the humans he kills and then tenderly buries with leaves. Manu, the studious son of a rice farmer, loses his cousin to the Gravedigger and is drawn into the alluring world of ivory hunting. Emma is working on a documentary set in a Kerala wildlife park with her best friend. Her work leads her to witness the porous boundary between conservation and corruption and she finds herself caught up in her own betrayal.
Short-listed for the 2016 Dylan Thomas Prize.
"One of the most unusual and affecting books. A compulsively readable, devastating novel." - Jonathan Safran Foer
Absolutely, definitively alone', a young Jewish student in Romania tries to make sense of a world that has decided he doesn't belong. Spending his days walking the streets and his nights drinking and gambling, meeting revolutionaries, zealots, lovers and libertines, he adjusts his eyes to the darkness that falls over Europe, and threatens to destroy him. Mihail Sebastian's 1934 masterpiece, now translated into English for the first time, was written amid the anti-Semitism which would, by the end of the decade, force him out of his career and turn his friends and colleagues against him.
"One of the foremost chronicles of the rise of nazism in Europe." - Guardian
>> Interesting article about Sebastian and the book.
The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney $24.99
Based on the author's blog about working-class life in a Galway council estate, The Glorious Heresies features drug dealers, dysfunctional families and a Cork woman who accidentally brains someone with a religious icon.
"A punchy, edgy, sexy, fizzing feast of a novel." - Joseph O'Connor
"The most talented writer at work today in Ireland." - Irish Times
Short-listed for the 2016 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.
Harold is unlike any other fox. He hates eating chicken, for one thing. He much prefers reading detective novels. But can he solve the mystery and save his feathered friends when he is wrongly accused of being the ringleader in a chicken-smuggling crime ring? A fun and lovely picture book.
>> Here he is, barging round.
There's more to being a bird than flying. Tere the Tui and Taitu the Takahe are two very different sorts of birds: one loves to flit and twirl about in the sky, while the other prefers to rustle around in the undergrowth. This is a story of friendship, courage and discovering that sometimes it's our differences which make us special.
Over 30,000 New Zealanders have died in wars since 1840. They have been remembered in the more than a thousand memorials put up in public places throughout New Zealand.
The ultimate book on punk, its progenitors, the Sex Pistols, and their time: the late 1970s. Full of anedcote, insight, and exclusive interviews, it tells the sensational story of the meteoric rise and rapid decline of the band and the cultural moment they came to define.
>> Still fresh.
Since the rise of the internet and personal computers, we have seen an exponential increase in the number of visual images around us. From YouTube to Instagram, video games to installation art, this dramatic visual transformation is liberating, confusing and worrying all at once. Mirzoeff draws on art history, theory and everyday experience to provide an engaging, approachable introduction to how visual materials shape our lives.
If you have any interest in either cycling or design, you will want this book. If you haven't, you will probably want it for someone who has. From his collection of cycling jerseys and his extensive library of cycling publications and brochures of the 1950s and 1960s, to the inspiration he has found in his cycling heroes (Coppi, Anquetil, Bartali) and his collaborations with bike-makers (Mercian and Pinarello) and race organizers, this is a personal and highly visual journey that connects Smith's love of cycling with his love of design.
From the pathological killer who gunned down the innocents at Virginia Tech to the average citizen who suspects the government is monitoring phone calls, the signs of suspiciousness and paranoia are all around us. How reasonable are our suspicions, and how can we tell?
Bernhard Gunther is a private eye, specializing in missing persons. And in Hitler's Berlin, he's never short of work. Winter 1936. A man and his wife shot dead in their bed. The woman's father, a millionaire industrialist, wants justice - and the priceless diamonds that disappeared along with his daughter's life. As Bernie follows the trail into the very heart of Nazi Germany, he's forced to confront a horrifying conspiracy. A trail that ends in Dachau.
"Fast-paced, laconic, unpredictable, and witty." - Evening Standard
Harding argues that the polonium murder of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 marked the beginning of a decline is Russia's dealing with the West.
Jacquet argues that modern-day shaming is a non-violent form of resistance that can be used to bring about large-scale change.
To the people suffering on the war-torn mainland, Bliss Island seems like an idyllic place. And it is: except for the fact that the island is a set, and the islanders' lives are a performance. They're the stars of a hit TV show, Blissful Days. Characters are adored by mainland viewers, yet in constant danger of being cut if their ratings dip too low. And no one really knows what happens to cut Characters. Nettie Starling knows she's been given the chance of a lifetime when a producer offers suggestions to help her improve her mediocre ratings - especially when those suggestions involve making a move on the boy she's been in love with for years. But she'll soon have to decide how far she's willing to go to keep the cameras fixed on her. . . especially when she learns what could happen to her if she doesn't.
From the creator of the Game of Thrones Dothraki language comes a creative guide to language construction. Peterson begins with a brief history of constructed languages, from Tolkien's creations to Klingon to the global community of language construction. Then, using examples from a variety of languages including his own creations, Peterson provides linguistic tools for inventing and evolving one's own lexicon. Useful.
Includes 22 New Zealand pizzerie, including Nelson's Stefano's: "Never mind the mythical sunshine of Nelson; it's worth making a trip there for Stefano's alone."
The New Zealand farm boy who leapt to international prominence in the 1960s by racing on his motorcycle.
Vince is an normal boy with an unusual dislike for animals. Well, you'd feel the same if your father was always working at a zoo and your mother had run off with a lion tamer. Then, on his eighth birthday, Vince discovers he has "the gift". He can talk to animals! You think this is amazing? Perhaps you should meet the spoiled and demanding zoo animals that Vince encounters.
Woolly has run off with his friends Collie the sheepdog and Mooey the cow. Can you find them?
Published by a group of Nelson College students.
If you don't know Grace Jones, this book is not for you.
>> Pull up to the bumper, baby.
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