Recent Books

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.

The Mighty Red

By Louise Erdrich

January 8, 2025

In Argus, North Dakota, a collection of people revolve around a fraught wedding.

Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed Goth who can’t read her future but seems to resolve his.

Hugo, a gentle red-haired, home-schooled giant, is also in love with Kismet. He’s determined to steal her and is eager to be a home wrecker.

Kismet’s mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary’s family, and on her nightly runs, tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries for the future, her daughter’s and her own.

The Island of Missing Trees

By Elif Shafak

January 7, 2025

Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. The taverna It is 1974 on the island of Cyprus. Two teenagers, from opposite sides of a divided land, meet at a tavern in the city they both call home. The tavern is the only place that Kostas, who is Greek and Christian, and Defne, who is Turkish and Muslim, can meet, in secret, hidden beneath the blackened beams from which hang garlands of garlic, chilli peppers and wild herbs. This is where one can find the best food in town, the best music, the best wine. But there is something else to the place: it makes one forget, even if for just a few hours, the world outside and its immoderate sorrows.

In the centre of the tavern, growing through a cavity in the roof, is a fig tree. This tree will witness their hushed, happy meetings, their silent, surreptitious departures; and the tree will be there when the war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to rubble, when the teenagers vanish and break apart.

Decades later in north London, sixteen-year-old Ada Kazantzakis has never visited the island where her parents were born. Desperate for answers, she seeks to untangle years of secrets, separation and silence. The only connection she has to the land of her ancestors is a Ficus Carica growing in the back garden of their home.

The Kellerby Code

By Jonny Sweet

January 7, 2025

Edward is living in a world he can’t afford and to which he doesn’t belong.

To camouflage himself, he has catered to his friends’ fetching drycleaning, sorting flowers for premieres. It’s a noble effort, really – anything to keep his best pals Robert and Stanza happy. In return, his proximity to them might sponge the shame of his birth and violent past cleanly away.

The chink in his armour is his painfully unrequited love for Stanza. When he realises Stanza and Robert are an item, Edward is pushed too far. His little acts of kindness take a sinister turn.

Are there limits to what he will do for his friends?

Are there limits to what he will do to them?

Creation Lake

By Rachel Kushner

January 7, 2025

Sadie Smith – a thirty-four-year-old American undercover agent of ruthless tactics and bold opinions – is sent by her mysterious but powerful employers to a remote corner of France. Her mission: to infiltrate a commune of radical eco-activists influenced by the beliefs of an enigmatic elder, Bruno Lacombe, who has rejected civilisation, lives in a Neanderthal cave, and believes the path to enlightenment is a return to primitivism.

Sadie casts her cynical eye over this region of ancient farms and sleepy villages, and finds Bruno’s idealism laughable, but just as she is certain she’s the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story.

Beneath this taut, dazzling story about a woman caught in the crossfire between the past and
the future lies a profound treatise on human history. Creation Lake is Rachel Kushner’s finest novel yet – a work of high art, high comedy and irresistible pleasure.

Ordinary Human Failings

By Megan Nolan

January 7, 2025

It’s 1990 in London and, after the death of a young girl on an estate, the finger of suspicion is pointing at one reclusive Irish family: the Greens.

At their heart sits Carmel: beautiful, other-worldly, and once destined for a future beyond her circumstances until life – and love – got in her way. Now, as the scandal unfolds and the tabloids hunt their monster, she must confront the secrets and silences that have trapped her family for so many generations.

Orbital

By Samantha Harvey

December 9, 2024

Life on our planet as you’ve never seen it before

A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.

Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.

The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?