Recent Books

The Mires

By Tina Makereti

March 24, 2025

Three women give birth in different countries and different decades. In the near future, they become neighbours in a coastal town in Aotearoa New Zealand. Single parent Keri has her hands full with four-year-old tearaway Walty and teen Wairere, a strange and gifted child, who always picks up on things that aren’t hers to worry about. They live next door to Janet, a white woman with an opinion about everything, and new arrival Sera, whose family are refugees from ecological devastation in Europe.

When Janet’s son Conor arrives home without warning, sporting a fresh buzzcut and a new tattoo, the quiet tension between the neighbours grows, but no one suspects just how extreme Conor has become. No one except Wairere, who can feel the danger in their midst, and the swamp beneath their street, watching and waiting.

Nesting

By Roisin O'Donnell

March 13, 2025

On a bright spring afternoon in Dublin, Ciara Fay makes a split-second decision that will change everything. Grabbing an armful of clothes from the washing line, Ciara straps her two young daughters into her car and drives away. Head spinning, all she knows for certain is that home is no longer safe.

This was meant to be an escape. But with dwindling savings, no job, and her family across the sea, Ciara finds herself adrift, facing a broken housing system and the voice of her own demons. As summer passes and winter closes in, she must navigate raising her children in a hotel room, searching for a new home and dealing with her husband Ryan’s relentless campaign to get her to come back. Because leaving is one thing, but staying away is another.

Cutting For Stone

By Abraham Verghese

March 13, 2025

‘My brother, Shiva, and I came into the world in the late afternoon of the twentieth of September in the year of grace 1954. We took our first breaths in the thick air of Addis Ababa, capital city of Ethiopia.

Bound by birth, we were driven apart by bitter betrayal. No surgeon can heal the wound that would that divides two brothers. Where silk and steel fail, story must succeed’

Twist

By Colum McCann

March 13, 2025

Anthony Fennell, a journalist, is in pursuit of a story buried at the bottom of the sea: the network of tiny fibre-optic tubes that carry the world’s information across the ocean floor – and what happens when they break.

So he has travelled to Cape Town to board the George Lecointe, a cable repair vessel captained by Chief of Mission John Conway. Conway is a talented engineer and fearless freediver – and Fennell is quickly captivated by this mysterious, unnerving man and his beautiful partner, Zanele.

As the boat embarks along the west coast of Africa, Fennell learns the rhythms of life at sea, and finds his place among the band of drifters who make up the crew. But as the mission falters, tensions simmer – and Conway is thrown into crisis. A terrible, violent tragedy is unfolding in the life he has left behind on land; and, trapped out at sea, it seems as if the vast expanse of the ocean is closing in.

Then Conway disappears; and Fennell must set out to find him.

Nemesis

By Gregg Hurwitz

March 13, 2025

NO GREATER FRIEND
Evan Smoak is the guy you want on your side. A former government black ops assassin, he’ll be there for you in your darkest hour – and he’ll rain hell and thunder on those who caused your pain.

NO WORSE ENEMY
A lone wolf operator, Evan can’t afford to lose any of the few people he likes and trusts. But when Tommy Stojack, Evan’s loyal, long-time gunsmith and armourer, betrays him, it’s war.

Because a good assassin keeps his friends close, but his weapons closer . . .

Three Days in June

By Anne Tyler

March 13, 2025

It’s the day before her daughter’s wedding and things are not going well for Gail Baines. First thing, she loses her job – or quits, depending who you ask. Then her ex-husband Max turns up at her door expecting to stay for the festivities. He doesn’t even have a suit. Instead, he’s brought memories, a shared sense of humour – and a cat looking for a new home.

Just as Gail is wondering what’s next, their daughter Debbie discovers her groom has been keeping a secret…

As the big day dawns, the exes just can’t agree on what’s best for Debbie. Gail is seriously worried, while Max seems more concerned with whether to opt for the salmon or prime rib at the reception, if they make it that far.

The day after the wedding, Gail and Max prepare to go their separate ways again. But all the questions about the future of the happy couple have stirred up the past for Gail. Because ‘happy’ takes many forms, and sometimes the younger generation has much to teach the older about secrets, acceptance and taking the rough with the smooth.

Amma

By Saraid de Silva

February 4, 2025

Singapore, 1951
When Josephina is a girl, her parents lock her in a room with the father of the boy to whom she’s betrothed. What happens next will determine the lives of generations to come.

New Zealand, 1984
Josephina and her family leave Sri Lanka for New Zealand. But their new home is not what they expected, and for the children, Sithara and Suri, a sudden and shocking event changes everything.

London, 2018
Arriving on her uncle Suri’s doorstep, jetlagged and heartbroken, Annie has no idea what to expect – all she knows is that Suri was cast out of the family before she was born.

Moving between cities and generations, Amma follows three women on very different paths, against a backdrop of shifting cultures. As circumstance and misunderstanding force them apart, it will take the most profound love to knit them back together before it’s too late.

Poorhara

By Michelle Rahurahu

February 4, 2025

ERIN can hear the whaanau whispering, and they won’t tell her why. She’s ditched school to help her aunty clean houses—even though she has a full-time job looking after all the moko. But no one cares, and soon she will be picked clean, like the bones in her maamaa’s bedroom.

STAR is home for the first time in years, and he’s worn the same clothes for days. Everything feels unfamiliar: the karakia, his nephews, the house that he grew up in. He’s too scared to tell his family that he’s bombing back at uni. And the past is an affliction, a gently rising tide.

It is 178 years after colonisation. Together, the cousins escape. Free-wheeling across the countryside in a car without a warrant, they cast their net widely. Their family mythologies, heartaches and rifts will surface, and amidst them the glint of possibility: a return to the whenua where it all began.

The Third Realm

By Karl Ove Knausgaard

February 4, 2025

For several days, a bright new star in the sky above Norway has blazed over the restless lives of those below. Tove, an artist, is consumed by intense creativity as she spirals towards psychosis. Line falls in love with a musician named Valdemar and is lured to a secret death metal gig in a remote forest. Geir, a policeman, is investigating a ritual murder but chances upon something more horrifying even than the bodies in the trees – the last bodies he sees, because, as undertaker Syvert is the first to realise, people have stopped dying since the star appeared.

What is haunting the world – and why?

Tell Me Everything

By Elizabeth Strout

February 4, 2025

It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer, Lucy Barton, who lives nearby in a house next to the sea. Together, Lucy and Bob talk about their lives, their hopes and regrets, and what might have been.

Lucy, meanwhile, befriends one of Crosby’s longest inhabitants, Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known – “unrecorded lives,” Olive calls them – reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.