Recent Books

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?

There are Rivers in the Sky

By Elif Shafak

December 2, 2024

In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives.

In 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur’s only chance of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a leading publisher, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, and one book in particular catches his interest: Nineveh and Its Remains.

In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a ten-year-old Yazidi girl, is diagnosed with a rare disorder that will soon cause her to go deaf. Before that happens, her grandmother is determined to baptize her in a sacred Iraqi temple. But with the rising presence of ISIS and the destruction of the family’s ancestral lands along the Tigris, Narin is running out of time.

In 2018 London, the newly divorced Zaleekah, a hydrologist, moves into a houseboat on the Thames to escape her husband. Orphaned and raised by her wealthy uncle, Zaleekah had made the decision to take her own life in one month, until a curious book about her homeland changes everything.

Wandering Star

By Tommy Orange

December 2, 2024

Following its unforgettable characters through almost two centuries of history, from the horrors of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1865 to the aftermath of a mass shooting in the early 21st century, Wandering Stars is an indelible novel of America’s war on its own people.

It is also the tender, shattering story of many generations of a Native American family, struggling to find ways through displacement, addiction and pain, towards home and hope.

Readers of Orange’s classic debut There There will know some of these characters and will be eager to learn what happened to Orvil Red Feather after the Oakland Powwow. New readers will discover a wondrous novel of poetry, music, rage and love, from one of the most astonishing voices of his generation.

Nextus

By Yuval Noah Harari

December 2, 2024

From renowned historian and #1 Sunday Times bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari comes the story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world

For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI – a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. If we are so wise, why are we so self-destructive?

NEXUS considers how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age through the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence.

Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. NEXUS explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and of rediscovering our shared humanity.

Fire

By John Boyne

December 2, 2024

On the face of it, Freya lives a gilded existence, dancing solely to her own tune. She has all the trappings of wealth and privilege, a responsible job as a surgeon specialising in skin grafts, a beautiful flat in a sought-after development, and a flash car. But it wasn’t always like this. Hers is a life founded on darkness.

Did what happened to Freya as a child one fateful summer influence the adult she would become – or was she always destined to be that person? Was she born with cruelty in her heart or did something force it into being?

In Fire, John Boyne takes the reader on a chilling, uncomfortable but utterly compelling psychological journey to the epicentre of the human condition, asking the age-old question: nurture – or nature?

The Bookshop Detectives: Dead Girl Gone

By Gareth & Louise Ward

December 2, 2024

When a mystery parcel arrives at Sherlock Tomes bookshop in small-town Havelock North, New Zealand, husband-and-wife owners Garth and Eloise (and their petrified pooch, Stevie) are drawn into the baffling case of a decades-old missing schoolgirl.

Intrigued by the puzzling, bookish clues the two ex-cops are soon tangled in a web of crime, drugs, and floral decapitations, while endeavouring to pull off the international celebrity book launch of the century.

With their beloved shop on the chopping block and the sinister suspect who forced them to run away from Blighty reemerging from the shadows, have Garth and Eloise Sherlock finally met their Moriarty?

For once, the cover copy is no exaggeration- Diary of a Bookseller really does meet Thursday Murder Club meets Bookseller at the End of the World in this witty debut novel, full of literary clues, comedic insights and the kinds of Kiwis you only ever meet in bookshops.

We Solve Murders

By Richard Osman

November 5, 2024

Steve Wheeler is enjoying retired life. He does the odd bit of investigation work, but he prefers his familiar habits and routines: the pub quiz, his favourite bench, his cat waiting for him when he comes home. His days of adventure are over: adrenaline is daughter-in-law Amy’s business now.

Amy Wheeler thinks adrenaline is good for the soul. As a private security officer, she doesn’t stay still long enough for habits or routines. She’s currently on a remote island keeping world-famous author Rosie D’Antonio alive. Which was meant to be an easy job . . .

Then a dead body, a bag of money and a killer with their sights on Amy have her sending an SOS to the only person she trusts. A breakneck race around the world begins, but can Amy and Steve stay one step ahead of a deadly enemy?

Pretty Ugly

By Kirsty Gunn

November 5, 2024

Pretty Ugly by Kirsty Gunn is the inaugural title in a new series of short story collections from Landfall Tauraka and Otago University Press, celebrating the art of short fiction in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Contradictions, misunderstandings, oppositions, enigmas, provocations, challenges – these messy troubles are the stuff of life. In Pretty Ugly, Gunn reminds us of her unparalleled acumen in handling ambiguity and complication, which are essential grist to the storyteller’s mill. These 13 stories, set in New Zealand and in the UK, are a testament to Gunn’s unrivalled ability to look directly into the troubled human heart and draw out what dwells there. Gunn’s is a steady, unflinching gaze.

In this collection, Gunn practises ‘reading and writing ugly’ to pursue the deeper (and frequently uncomfortable) truths that lie under the surface, at the core of both human imagination and human rationality. Each story is an exquisite, thorn-sharp bouquet.

Three Wild Dogs & the Truth

By Markus Zusak

November 5, 2024

There’s a madman dog beside me, and the hounds of memory ahead of us. It’s love and beasts and wild mistakes, and regret, but never to change things… What happens when the Zusaks open their family home to three big, wild, pound-hardened dogs – Reuben, a wolf at your door with a hacksaw; Archer, blond, beautiful, deadly; and the rancorously smiling Frosty, who walks like a rolling thunderstorm?

The answer can only be chaos: there are street fights, park fights, public shamings, property trashing, bodily injuries, stomach pumping, purest comedy, shocking tragedy, and carnage that needs to be seen to be believed … not to mention the odd police visit at some ungodly hour of the morning. There is a reckoning of shortcomings and failure, a strengthening of will, but most important of all, an explosion of love – and the joy and recognition of family.

From one of the world’s great storytellers comes a tender, motley and exquisitely written memoir about the human need for both connection and disorder; but it’s also a love letter to the animals who bring hilarity and beauty – but also the visceral truth of the natural world – straight to our doors and into our lives, and change us forever.

James

By Percival Everett

November 4, 2024

A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view.

When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

While many narrative set pieces of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.