"In this series of interrogatory vignettes, Joanna Walsh looks so sharply at everyday situations and ideas that she finds chasms in what seemed like smooth and continuous situations, vertiginous spaces that open to reveal the authentic - often awkward and lonely - experiences that had been pressing at the surface of the banal from below." - Thomas
>> Interview by a man in a cap who would really like the author to be Irish
What is pretentiousness? Why do we despise it? And more controversially, why is it vital to a thriving culture?
"Pretentiousness: Why it matters is more than a smartly counterintuitive encomium: it’s a lucid and impassioned defence of thinking, creating and, ultimately, living in a world increasingly dominated by the massed forces of social and intellectual conservatism. I totally loved the book."— Tom McCarthy, author of Satin Island
>> Dan Fox on pretentiousness.
It is easy to forget that food is seasonal. In-season fruits and vegetables, grown and picked where they will be eaten, taste a million times sweeter and juicier. This book is both a celebration of real ingredients and a guide to eating the best, the healthiest and the tastiest food - just as nature intended. Beautifully presented.
Vivid details of childhood memory, surreal juxtapositions of life in the contemporary West, wry observations of a temporary expatriate, the deeply lodged pain of historical and personal loss.
"What a fine reminder this collection is, of how language is what memory is played on, and gives the moment its flair, its resonance, its abiding form. I admire As the Verb Tenses for how the past and the present so vividly ring in lines of such clarity and precision and deft witty assessing. As wine buffs like to put it, I was held by its immediate impact, as much as by its maturity and depth." - Vincent OSullivan
3,2,1... Draw! by Serge Bloch $23.00
Create a family of forks, build a car from a matchbox and decide who – or what! – is lurking in an asparagus forest with this activity book that invites creators young and old to reimagine more than fifty everyday items all around us and bring them to life with the stroke of a pen.
>> Silly is good!
Noonan and Antona collaborate to capture the thoughts and feelings of 26 women from this remote, little-known Catlins region of New Zealand - an area is as mysterious today as it ever was.
>> At the edge of the world...
Young Londoners Becky, Harry and Leon are leaving town in a fourth-hand Ford Cortina with a suitcase full of money. They are running from jealous boyfriends, dead-end jobs, violent maniacs and disgruntled drug dealers, in the hope of escaping the restless tedium of life in south-east London - the place they have always called home. As the story moves back in time, to before they had to leave, we see them torn between confidence and self-loathing, between loneliness and desire, between desperate ambition and the terrifying prospect of getting nothing done.
"Powerful and merciful." - Ali Smith
>> Tempest came to prominence as a poet and rapper.
Traditionally, the Middle Eastern diet consisted largely of vegetables, fruits, herbs, spices, pulses, grains and legumes. Hage simplifies this fast becoming popular cuisine with easily achievable recipes, many with vegan and gluten-free options. Drawing inspiration from ancient and prized Phoenician ingredients, from grassy olive oil to fresh figs and rich dates, this book offers an array of delicious breakfasts and drinks, mezze and salads, vegetables and pulses, grains and desserts. Yum.
"The elderly, the frail are our society. They are our parents and grandparents, our carers and neighbours, and they are every one of us in the not-too-distant future. They are not a growing cost to be managed or a burden to be shifted or a horror to be hidden away, but people whose needs require us to change." Hitchcock looks at end-of-life decisions and over-treatment, frailty and dementia, and argues against the creeping tendency to see the elderly as a 'burden' - difficult, hopeless, expensive and homogenous.
When Amy Liptrot returns to Orkney after more than a decade away, she is drawn back to the Outrun on the sheep farm where she grew up. Approaching the land that was once home, memories of her childhood merge with the recent events that have set her on this journey. Amy was shaped by the cycle of the seasons, birth and death on the farm, and her father's mental illness, which were as much a part of her childhood as the wild, carefree existence on Orkney. But as she grew up, she longed to leave this remote life. She moved to London and found herself in a hedonistic cycle. Unable to control her drinking, alcohol gradually took over. Now thirty, she finds herself washed up back home on Orkney, standing unstable at the cliff edge, trying to come to terms with what happened to her in London. Spending early mornings swimming in the bracingly cold sea, the days tracking Orkney's wildlife - puffins nesting on sea stacks, arctic terns swooping close enough to feel their wings - and nights searching the sky for the Merry Dancers, Amy slowly makes the journey towards recovery from addiction.
The eagerly anticipated sequel to the prize-winning Into the River, tracing Devon's experiences after his expulsion from school and into a world where loyalty and freedom are tested and love and security seem like commodities.
Over 570 spectacular colour photographs the traditional, handcrafted, indigenous textiles of the whole continent, outlining the vast array of techniques used as well as the different types of loom, materials and dyes.
"This is the story of Janie and Micah, best friends since forever, as long as no one knows. Micah’s world is disrupted and his secret friendship unearthed when Janie Vivian disappears. Janie Vivian is a girl living on the edge, artistic, temperamental, fiercely unforgiving and passionately interesting. How could Micah not be friends with her no matter what? And be head-over-heels in love with her – though she doesn’t know. While we get inside the head of Janie in this novel, it is the story of Micah that I found the more interesting – he’s an outsider, uncertain, the more complex of the two characters. He’s fiercely loyal yet, despite everything that happens, able to forgive and accept Janie for who she is and finally for what she has done, wrong or right. Zhang tells this tale well, building to an unstoppable crescendo where Micah will have to see and accept the truth about Janie Vivian." - Stella
An unflinching account of a nation on the brink of disintegration.
Can I Build Another Me? follows a child's hilarious, wildly inventive train of thought as he decides to make a clone of himself - and starts to ponder what makes him Him. Is it the scar on his knee or his sticky palms? Is it his love of acorns or the way he winks? The more he thinks about it, the more complicated it becomes.
Who, or what, is the Green Man, and why is this medieval image so present in our precarious modern times? An encounter with the Green Man at an ancient Herefordshire church in the wake of catastrophic weather leads Nina Lyon into an exploration of how the foliate heads of Norman stonemasons have evolved into today's cult symbols. The Green Man's association with the pantheistic beliefs of Celtic Christianity and with contemporary neo-paganism, with the shamanic traditions of the Anglo-Saxons and as a figurehead for ecological movements sees various paths crossing into a picture that reveals the hidden meanings of twenty-first-century Britain.
Using written fragments of Iris Wilkinson (aka Robin Hyde), his parents, and their parents, while examining the public and private rituals of institutions ranging from the military to the medical, and of communities, families and individuals, the poet stumbles again and again across irreparable fractures in identity and material, time and space, in a world driven by its incompleteness and constructability towards hope and forgiveness.
Born in the 'agrarian ghetto' of Dickens - on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles - the narrator of The Sellout is raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, and spends his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. Led to believe his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes, he is shocked to discover, when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, that there never was a memoir. All that's left is a bill for a drive-through funeral. Fuelled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from embarrassment.
"Powered by a wicked wit, with characters who speak a pop-philosopher patois, this is a funny and daring novel that subverts harmful cultural assumptions. The most lacerating American satire in years." - Guardian
Leonid, a hard-luck lorry driver who lives with his raving, war-veteran father in Moscow and ferries less-than-legit shipments of goods all over Russia for his Mafiya bosses, has a single dream: to leave behind the country of his birth, for which he feels nothing but disdain, and immigrate to the United States. It is the mid-1990s, and Russia has only just been "liberated", though precisely what that concept denotes in the post-Soviet world depends on whom you ask - and on who benefits most. However, Leonid knows in his heart of hearts that In America, his happiness will be guaranteed. During a haul to the Caucasus with a cargo of illicit vodka intended for parched soldiers on the front line of the war on Chechnya, Leonid and his sidekick Spasska take a wrong turn and wind up in the centre of Grozny, at the height of one of the cruellest bombardments of the twentieth century. What follows will shock Leonid into a confrontation with the reality that has always played out just beyond his averted gaze, and even his well-honed cynicism and survival instincts will be tested.
Treats the Victorian and Otago gold rushes, particularly, as a single phenomenon.
Desire Cordier - mild-mannered former librarian, put-upon husband, lover of boules - is losing his mind. Or is he? Happily tucked away in the Winterlight Home for the Elderly, Desire is looking forward to a quiet retirement with the other forgetful residents, safe in the knowledge that no one knows he's faking his memory loss. And as if there weren't reasons enough to opt out of the modern world, it would be worth it just to see Rosa Rozendaal again - the love of Desire's youth, the one who got away. But dementia isn't all fun and games. There's a former war criminal hiding out in the home; once-beautiful Rosa might be too far gone to return Desire's ardour; and our hero soon begins to suspect he might not be the only one in Winterlight who's acting a part...
A vodka-soaked tragicomedy of bribes, backhanders and a certain ex-president of Russia going catastrophically awry. Former Russian president, Vladimir P, is going senile, marooned in a world of memories from his years in power. To get him out of the way, he has been exiled to his luxury dacha, where he is served by a coterie of bickering house staff. Only Sheremetev, the guileless nurse charged with Vladimir's round-the-clock care, is unaware that everyone else is busily using every means at their disposal to skim money from their employer's inexhaustible riches.
Inspiration of poets, treasure-trove to scientists and symbol of everything from unrequited love, rebirth, eternal life and misfortune.
>> Hmm...
Well? Someone sneezed and all the Bs got blown out of the book!
Gloria is tired of her ordinary life. She barely recognizes the free-spirited girl she used to be in the unadventurous teenager she has become. So when a mysterious boy bent on breaking the rules strolls into her classroom, Gloria is ready to fall under his spell. Uman is funny, confident and smart. He does whatever he likes and doesn't care what anyone thinks of him. The only people for him are the mad ones, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn. He is everything Gloria wishes to be. He can whisk her away from the life she loathes and show her a more daring, more exciting one, in which the only limits are the boundaries of her own boldness. But Uman in not all he seems and by the time she learns the truth about him, she is a long way from home and everyone wants to know, Where's Gloria?
It took several million bullets and roughly half an hour to destroy General Sir Douglas Haig's grand plans for the first day of the Somme, 1 July 1916. By day's end 19,240 British soldiers were dead, crumpled khaki bundles scattered across pasture studded with the scarlet of poppies and smouldering shell holes. A further 35,493 were wounded.
The Omega resistance has been brutally attacked, its members dead or in hiding. The Alpha Council's plan for permanently containing the Omegas has begun. But all is not entirely lost: the Council's seer, The Confessor, is dead, killed by her twin's sacrifice. Cass is left haunted by visions of the past, while her brother Zach's cruelty and obsession pushes her to the edge, and threatens to destroy everything she hopes for. As the country moves closer to all-out civil war, Cass will learn that to change the future she will need to uncover the past. But nothing can prepare her for what she discovers: a deeply buried secret that raises the stakes higher than ever before. The sequel to the excellent The Fire Sermon.
"Set in a vividly realised world of elite Alphas and their 'weaker' Omega twins, it holds a mirror up to our obsession with perfection." - Guardian
Captain Tom Barnes is leading British troops in a war zone. Two boys are growing up there, sharing a prized bicycle and flying kites, before finding themselves separated once the soldiers appear in their countryside. On all sides of this conflict, people are about to be caught up in the violence, from the man who trains one boy to fight the infidel invaders to Barnes's family waiting for him to return home. We see them not as they see themselves, but as all the objects surrounding them do: shoes and boots, a helmet, a trove of dollars, a drone, that bike, weaponry, a bag of fertilizer, a medal, a beer glass, a snowflake, dog tags, an exploding IED and the medical implements that are subsequently employed.
Eduardo Quintana is a broken man. The tragedy that cost him the lives of his family is a wound he daily tears open afresh. The once-renowned painter wallows in grief, subsisting on alcohol and drugs, eking out a living with whatever painting commissions he can get. But when he is approached by a mysterious woman who wants him to paint a portrait of the man who killer her son, he soon becomes entangled in a web of deceit in which no one, and nothing, is as they seem. With each brushstroke, Eduardo opens doors that were meant to have stayed shut - doors that, once opened, can never be closed.
Using both words and artwork to shed light on the darker corners of American empire, Crabapple has become one of the most original and galvanizing voices on the cultural stage.
>> She talks, too!
Another interesting case study from the author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. Early in the morning of Monday 8 July 1895, thirteen-year-old Robert Coombes and his twelve-year-old brother Nattie set out from their small, yellow-brick terraced house in East London to watch a cricket match at Lord's. Their father had gone to sea the previous Friday, the boys told their neighbours, and their mother was visiting her family in Liverpool. Over the next ten days Robert and Nattie spent extravagantly, pawning their parents' valuables to fund trips to the theatre and the seaside. But as the sun beat down on the Coombes house, a strange smell began to emanate from the building. When the police were finally called to investigate, the discovery they made sent the press into a frenzy of horror and alarm, and Robert and Nattie were swept up in a criminal trial that echoed the outrageous plots of the 'penny dreadful' novels that Robert loved to read.
Beginning around 1830, three dominant art traditions - war canoes, decorated storehouses and chiefly houses - declined and were replaced by whare karakia (churches), whare whakairo (decorated meeting houses) and wharekai (dining halls).
Can you fall in love when you're falling apart? For fans of John Green.
A new edition of one of the most stunningly interesting science fiction novels ever written. A psychologist, Kelvin, is sent to a station on the ocean-covered planet Solaris to determine whether to terminate the mission because of lack of progress and a high rate of insanity. The station is beset by strange occurrences and appearances, including, eventually, the presence of Kelvin’s dead wife. As the scientists futilely attempt to observe the planet, the sentient planet is seemingly probing their psyches, giving form to their fears and desires. Ultimately, no communication is possible: all interaction with the Other is nothing but reflection, all observation reveals nothing but the observer.
"Containing passages of weird beauty and compelling philosophical speculation, this science fiction novel makes provocative points about the insularity of our (largely illusionary) realities and the impossibility of experiencing anything beyond ourselves." - Thomas
>> Andrei Tarkovsky's wonderful 1972 film can be seen here (but the book is even better).
Join a yellow dot on an adventure of colour and movement, surprise and imagination.
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