New books to hit the spot


TOUCHDOWN is a weekly selection of outstanding new titles: books either anticipated or surprising, just out of the carton! Follow the links for more information, to purchase these books or to have them put aside for you.

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5 February 2016


http://www.pageandblackmore.co.nz/products/984641?barcode=9780008160630&title=ThePortableVeblen
The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie        $34.99
 Meet Veblen: a passionate defender of the anti-consumerist views of her name-sake, the iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen. She's an experienced cheerer-upper (mainly of her narcissistic, hypochondriac, controlling mother), an amateur translator of Norwegian, and a firm believer in the distinct possibility that the plucky grey squirrel following her around can understand more than it lets on. Meet her fiance, Paul: the son of good hippies who were bad parents, a no-nonsense, high-flying neuroscientist with no time for squirrels. His recent work on a device to minimize battlefield trauma has led him dangerously close to the seductive Cloris Hutmacher, heiress to a pharmaceuticals empire, who is promising him fame and fortune through a shady-sounding deal with the Department of Defence. What could possibly go wrong?
"Man oh man, do I love this book! Audacious, imaginative, and totally wonderful: The whole books zips and zings." - Karen Joy Fowler
"The Portable Veblen is the squirreliest novel I ever read. I enjoyed it completely." -  Ursula K. Le Guin
>> What is going on in the grey squirrel's head? (this is better than colouring-in for inducing a calm state)

http://www.pageandblackmore.co.nz/products/998847-ABriefStopontheRoadfromAuschwitz-9781783781300
 A Brief Stop on the Road to Auschwitz by Goran Rosenberg     $27.99
On the 2nd of August 1947 a young man gets off a train in a small Swedish town. He has survived the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz, and the harrowing slave camps and transports during the final months of Nazi Germany. Now he has to learn to live with his memories. Goran Rosenberg returns to his own childhood in order to tell his father's story. It is also the story of the chasm that soon opens between the world of the child, suffused with the optimism, progress and collective oblivion of post-war Sweden, and the world of the father, haunted by the long shadows of the past.
http://www.pageandblackmore.co.nz/products/996104-StraitMenandothertales-9781927242988
 Strait Men, And other tales by Murray Edmond       $29.99
"These pieces are richly strange, often funny and poignant, full of memories and contradictions, magic and rationalism, romance and science. Reading them you climb over peaks and fault-lines, leap between realism and expressionism, negotiate mysterious deaths and strange obsessions, and travel from Aotearoa to its antipodes. Stories are disputed and rights are stolen; danger lurks at the edges, sometimes in comic guise. ‘Morning will determine whether scene from thriller or screwball comedy', reads one character’s journal entry: the same, Strait Men suggests, could be said of life.”  — Emily Perkins
http://www.pageandblackmore.co.nz/products/983675?barcode=9780241203019&title=TheHappyReader%3AIssue5
 The Happy Reader, Issue 5      $7.99
A lively literary companion. This issues includes the expansive reading habits of the musical sensation Grimes, and the secrets of Émile Zola's consumerist novel Au Bonheur des Dames.
http://www.pageandblackmore.co.nz/products/986859-Eleanor-9780008132927
Eleanor by Jason Gurley        $32.99
1962, Anchor Bend, Oregon. The sea calls to Eleanor. Like the turn of the waves it beckons her from the heart of the town she's always known, from her husband Hob and their young daughter, Agnes, to the unfathomable depths of the ocean. 1985. Agnes's daughter Eleanor is six years old. She shares her name with the grandmother she never knew and everything else with her identical twin, Esmerelda. But to Agnes, only Eleanor is a constant reminder of the past. 1993. After a dark event leaves her family in tatters, Eleanor, now fourteen, is left caring for her alcoholic mother, whose grief has torn her apart. But when Eleanor's reality begins to unravel, she starts to lose her grip on time itself, slipping from the present into strange other lands where she's in danger of losing herself altogether.
http://www.pageandblackmore.co.nz/products/915633-LeoAGhostStoryHB-9781452131566
Leo: A ghost story by Mac Barnett and Christian Robinson        $34.99
You would like being friends with Leo. He likes to draw, he makes delicious snacks, and most people can't even see him. Because Leo is also a ghost. When a new family moves into his home and Leo's efforts to welcome them are misunderstood, Leo decides it is time to leave and see the world. That is how he meets Jane. A lovely hardback. 

http://www.pageandblackmore.co.nz/products/1003411-Alice-9780425266793
 Alice by Christina Henry        $37.00
Beware the claws that catch... Alice has been in the mental hospital in Old Town for years. She doesn't remember why. All she can remember is a tea party long ago. Long ears and blood. Until one night she escapes, free to uncover the truth about what happened to her all those years ago. When Alice escapes, something escapes with her. And the truth she so desperately seeks is so much stranger than any madman's ranting. 
http://www.pageandblackmore.co.nz/products/992081-IrisandtheTiger-9781925240795
 Iris and the Tiger by Leanne Hall      $21.00
 Twelve-year-old Iris has been sent to Spain on a mission: to make sure her elderly and unusual aunt, Ursula, leaves her fortune - and her sprawling estate - to Iris’s scheming parents. But from the moment Iris arrives at Bosque de Nubes, she realises something isn’t quite right. There is an odd feeling around the house, where time moves slowly and Iris’s eyes play tricks on her. While outside, in the wild and untamed forest, a mysterious animal moves through the shadows. Just what is Aunt Ursula hiding? But when Iris discovers a painting named Iris and the Tiger, she sets out to uncover the animal’s real identity–putting her life in terrible danger.
http://www.pageandblackmore.co.nz/products/992161-BeFrankwithMe-9781782399179
 Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson       $32.99
Reclusive literary legend M. M. 'Mimi' Banning has been holed up in her Bel Air mansion for years. But after falling prey to a Bernie Madoff-style ponzi scheme, she's flat broke. Now Mimi must write a new book for the first time in decades, and to ensure the timely delivery of her manuscript, her New York publisher sends an assistant to monitor her progress. When Alice Whitley arrives at the Banning mansion, she's put to work right away-as a full-time companion to Frank, the writer's eccentric nine-year-old, a boy with the wit of Noel Coward, the wardrobe of a 1930s movie star, and very little in common with his fellow fourth-graders. Will Mimi ever finish the book?
http://www.pageandblackmore.co.nz/products/990685-AlbertosLostBirthday-9781447293019
 Alberto's Lost Birthday by Diana Rosie         $39.99
Alberto is an old man. But he doesn't know how old - he remembers nothing before his arrival at an orphanage during the Spanish civil war. He rarely thinks about his missing childhood, but when seven-year-old Tino discovers his grandfather has never had a birthday party, never blown out candles on a birthday cake, never received a single birthday present, he's determined things should change. And so the two set out to find Alberto's birthday.Their search for the old man's memories takes them deep into the heart of Spain - a country that has pledged to forget its painful past. Alberto realises that he has lost more than a birthday. He has lost a part of himself.
http://www.pageandblackmore.co.nz/products/985433-Exposure-9780091953959
Exposure by Helen Dunmore       $37.00
London, November, 1960: the Cold War is at its height. Spy fever fills the newspapers, and the political establishment knows how and where to bury its secrets. When a highly sensitive file goes missing, Simon Callington is accused of passing information to the Soviets, and arrested. His wife, Lily, suspects that his imprisonment is part of a cover-up, and that more powerful men than Simon will do anything to prevent their own downfall. She knows that she too is in danger, and must fight to protect her children. But what she does not realise is that Simon has hidden vital truths about his past, and may be found guilty of another crime that carries with it an even greater penalty.
"A marvellous piece of seamless storytelling." - Penelope Lively
http://www.pageandblackmore.co.nz/products/975016-SeeingSeeds-9781604694925
Seeing Seeds: A journey into the world of seedheads, seeds and fruit by Teri Dunn Chase, photography by Robert Llewellan       $69.99
There is more to seeds than the plants they will someday become. This stunning book will help you see seeds in a new way. 

http://www.pageandblackmore.co.nz/products/992146-NapoleonsRoads-Shortstorycollection-9780702253911
 Napoleon's Roads by David Brooks     $26.00
'What are the crimes of love, anyway, but fragments of passion broken from their moorings, evidence of a kind of shipwreck? (But what kind of ship? Where was it? What was its name?) Or crows, a flock of them, high in the air, fighting against a wind that no-one can see.' These stories by the Australian prose stylist capture images of streetscapes and heartscapes, and grapple with concepts of time and memory, tenderness, morality, creativity and solitude.

http://www.pageandblackmore.co.nz/products/956883-BreamGivesMeHiccups-AndOtherStories-9781611855609
Bream Gives Me Hiccups, And other stories by Jesse Eisenberg      $32.99
"Eisenberg's first collection of short fiction suggests that, when not being cast as ruthless megalomaniacs, he is an acutely anxious, deeply insecure New York homebody and a potential successor to Woody Allen’s troubled crown. As a satirist, he rarely fails to hit the target, and his barbs are frequently tempered by a genuine sense of compassion." - Guardian
>> And he can act.  
http://www.pageandblackmore.co.nz/products/985386-ThePenguinLessons-9780718181635
 The Penguin Lessons by Tom Michell        $29.99
Set against Argentina's turbulent years following the collapse of the corrupt Peronist regime, this is the heart-warming story of Juan Salvador the penguin, rescued by Tom from an oil slick in Uruguay just days before a new term. When the bird refuses to leave Tom's side, the young teacher has no choice but to smuggle it across the border, through customs, and back to school.
http://www.pageandblackmore.co.nz/products/990576-OntheBone-9781472213808
 On the Bone by Barbara Nadel       $34.99
 Inspector Ikmen is the Morse of IstanbulA young man drops dead in a fashionable Istanbul street. The autopsy proves it was a natural death - a heart attack - but what is in Emre Alphan's stomach is not. His last meal was of human flesh. Ikmen must trace Alphan's final movements, and discover who the victim was. Food itself has become contentious, with traces of pork discovered in tinned beans, accusations flying about whether this was a deliberately provocative act in a Muslim country, and suspicions about what is really being served up. Ikmen soon finds himself in the world of the now beleaguered secular elite, people who feel their Western way of life is under threat of extinction, some of whom are joining a very dark new cult...
http://www.pageandblackmore.co.nz/products/992144-ComfortZone-9781925321029
 Comfort Zone by Lindsay Tanner        $37.00
After reluctantly breaking up a fight between the children, Aussie cabbie Jack finds himself transfixed by the mother of one of them - a beautiful young Somali woman - and feeling compelled to help her. What follows is a bewildering, hair-raising descent into a world of drug-dealing, ASIO harassment, criminal thuggery, and Somali payback. If Jack is to rise to the challenge, redemption might involve him leaving his comfort zone, and his racism, behind.
http://www.pageandblackmore.co.nz/products/984649-DrivingtheKing-9780060529628
 Driving the King by Ravi Howard     $32.99
 A novel that explores race and class in 1950s America, through the experiences of Nat King Cole and his driver, Nat Weary.
http://www.pageandblackmore.co.nz/products/981700-Unemployable-30YearsofHardcoreSkateandStreet-9780500500637
 Unemployable: 30 years of hardcore street and skate by Jason Boulter      $99.99
 This is the story of a bunch of misfits who chose to create a world to exist in, rather than conform to one in which they didn’t fit. "Clearly, we were unemployable. To the outside that meant we were losers with juvenile hobbies and no future. To us, it meant not following a conventional life path. We wanted a grown-up life that would match our teen lives: optimistic, innovative and fun. turns out when you band people together with that 'fuck convention' mentality, it’s a powerful, creative and inspiring force." – Matt Hill. Led by Australia’s Hill brothers, the group went on to become industry pioneers, forming the skate, street and surf company, Globe International.