The Disinvent Movement by Susanna Gendall

$30.00 NZD

$36.01 (16% off)

Category: Fiction Contemporary

Every week we would disinvent something. This week it would be plastic. Next week it would be the aeroplane. I stood outside the supermarket and handed out flyers, which people kindly refused as they left carrying large packs of bottled water.' The short history of the Disinvent Movement is told by its creator as she looks back on her life in New Zealand, France, Switzerland and other countries. Intertwined with the movement are her efforts to find a way 'inside' - an entry point to the system in which so many others seem to be living happily. But once you're in, what if you want to escape? How do you disinvent the all-encompassing structure of a violent marriage? The Disinvent Movement is a brilliantly original and poignant first novel, both elliptical and direct, about how we dismantle and remake our stories - and re-cast the people who occupy the most important roles in our lives - in hopes of finding sanctuary. ...Show more

The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr.

$37.99 NZD

Category: Fiction Contemporary

In this blinding debut, Robert Jones Jr. blends the lyricism of Toni Morrison with the vivid prose of Zora Neale Hurston to characterise the forceful, enduring bond of love, and what happens when brutality threatens the purest form of serenity. The Halifax plantation is known as Empty by the slaves who work it under the pitiless gaze of its overseers and its owner, Massa Paul. Two young enslaved men, Samuel and Isaiah dwell among the animals they keep in the barn, helping out in the fields when their day is done. But the barn is their haven, a space of radiance and love - away from the blistering sun and the cruelty of the toubabs - where they can be alone together. But, Amos - a fellow slave - has begun to direct suspicion towards the two men and their refusal to bend. Their flickering glances, unspoken words and wilful intention, revealing a truth that threatens to rock the stability of the plantation. And preaching the words of Massa Paul's gospel, he betrays them. The culminating pages of The Prophets summon a choral voice of those who have suffered in silence, with blistering humanity, as the day of reckoning arrives at the Halifax plantation. Love, in all its permutations, is the discovery at the heart of Robert Jones Jr's breathtaking debut, The Prophets.   ...Show more

Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult

$37.00 NZD

Category: Fiction Contemporary

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Spark of Light returns with a thought-provoking and otherworldly new novel about the fates that we choose for ourselves and what happens when we have the chance to choose again. Dawn Edelstein knows everything there is to know about dying. She specialises i n helping her clients make peace with the end of their lives. But as she's flying home from her latest case, she is forced to confront her own mortality for the first time. Instead of seeing her brilliant quantum physicist husband and their beloved daughter flash before her eyes in what she assumes are her last moments, only one face is shockingly clear: Wyatt Armstrong. Safely on the ground, Dawn now faces a desperate decision. Should she return to Boston, her family and the life she knows, or journey back to an Egyptian archaeological site she left over a decade earlier, reconnect with Wyatt, and finally finish her abandoned magnum opus, The Book of Two Ways? As the story unfolds, Dawn must confront the questions she's never truly answered: What does a life well-lived look like? When we depart this earth, what do we leave behind of ourselves? And who would you be if you hadn't turned out to be the person you are right now?   ...Show more

The Interpreter from Java by Alfred Birney

$35.00 NZD

Category: Fiction Contemporary

'What a great novel, its language and storytelling so light but also raw and lyrical. A tremendous writer. Read this book' ADRIAAN VAN DIS. Alan Nolan discovers his father's memoirs and learns the truth about the violent man he despised. In this unsparing family history, Alan distils his father's life i n the Dutch East Indies into one furious utterance. He reads about his work as an interpreter during the war with Japan, his life as an assassin, and his decision to murder Indonesians in the service of the Dutch without any conscience. How he fled to the Netherlands to escape being executed as a traitor and met Alan's mother soon after. As he reads his father's story Alan begins to understand how war transformed his father into the monster he knew. Birney exposes a crucial chapter in Dutch and European history that was deliberately concealed behind the ideological facade of postwar optimism. Readers of this superb novel will find that it reverberates long afterwards in their memory. ...Show more

The Silence of Snow by Eileen Merriman

$36.00 NZD

Category: Fiction Contemporary | Reading Level: very good

A compelling love story about facing one's demons, self-medication and finding the strength to carry on, even when it seems that all is lost. Almost qualified as an anaesthetic consultant, Rory McBride is adrift. Since a routine anaesthetic went horribly wrong, he has been plagued by sleeplessness, flas hbacks, and escalating panic attacks. Jodi Waterstone has only just started work as a first-year doctor at the same hospital in Nelson, and the night shifts, impossible workload and endless hours on duty make learning the multiple new procedures difficult. Both are trying to keep in control of their lives, but Rory starts to self-prescribe sleeping pills and sedatives to help him get through the nights . . . and the days, especially when having to administer anaesthetics to children in theatre. Before long, the sedatives aren't enough and he begins to inject propofol, a potent anaesthetic agent. Can Jodi save him from himself? ...Show more

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

$37.99 NZD

Category: Fiction Contemporary | Reading Level: Adult

Booker Prize Winner 2020. It is 1981. Glasgow is dying and good families must grift to survive. Agnes Bain has always expected more from life. She dreams of greater things: a house with its own front door and a life bought and paid for outright (like her perfect, but false, teeth). But Agnes is abando ned by her philandering husband, and soon she and her three children find themselves trapped in a decimated mining town. As she descends deeper into drink, the children try their best to save her, yet one by one they must abandon her to save themselves. It is her son Shuggie who holds out hope the longest. Shuggie is different. Fastidious and fussy, he shares his mother's sense of snobbish propriety. The miners' children pick on him and adults condemn him as no' right. But Shuggie believes that if he tries his hardest, he can be normal like the other boys and help his mother escape this hopeless place. Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain lays bare the ruthlessness of poverty, the limits of love, and the hollowness of pride. A counterpart to the privileged Thatcher-era London of Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, it also recalls the work of Édouard Louis, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara. It is a blistering debut by a brilliant novelist with a powerful and important story to tell.     ...Show more

Normal People by Sally Rooney

$23.99 NZD

Category: Fiction Contemporary | Reading Level: good

A universal story of love, friendship, and growing up. At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He's popular and well-adjusted, star of the school football team, while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her job at Marian ne's house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers-one they are determined to conceal. A year later, they're both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. And as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other. Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the complex entanglements of family and friendship. Longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize Winner of Novel of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards Winner of the Costa Novel Award " Rooney] has been hailed as the first great millennial novelist for her stories of love and late capitalism... she writes] some of the best dialogue I've read."--The New Yorker   ...Show more

Letters from Berlin by Tania Blanchard

$38.00 NZD

Category: Fiction Contemporary

From the bestselling author of The Girl from Munich and Suitcase of Dreams comes an unforgettable tale of love, courage and betrayal inspired by a true story Berlin, 1943 As the Allied forces edge closer, the Third Reich tightens its grip on its people. For eighteen-year-old Susanna Göttmann, this means her beloved adopted family including the man she loves, Leo, are at risk. His mother - Susie's godmother - is forced to register as a Jew and wear the Star of David, bearing the resentment of the village she has always called home. Desperate to protect them any way she can, Susie accepts the help of an influential Nazi officer. It means she must abandon any hope of a future with Leo and enter the terrifying world of the Nazi elite. But all is not lost as her newfound position offers more than she could have hoped for ... With critical intelligence at her fingertips, Susie seizes a dangerous opportunity to help the resistance. The decisions she makes could change the course of the war, but what will they mean for her family and her future? Praise for Tania Blanchard 'Packs an emotional punch that will reverberate far and wide' Weekly Times 'Captures the intensity of a brutal and unforgiving war, successfully weaving love, loss, desperation and, finally, hope into a gripping journey of self-discovery' Courier Mail 'A tumultuous journey from order to bedlam, and from naive acceptance of the status quo to the gradual getting of political wisdom' Sunday Age 'Combining historical tragedy, romance, and true stories ... Superb and enriching' Better Reading   ...Show more

Home Stretch by Graham Norton

$37.99 NZD

Category: Fiction Contemporary

Compelling new novel of stigma and secrecy from Sunday Times bestseller. It is 1987 and a small Irish community is preparing for the wedding of two of its young inhabitants. They're barely adults, not so long out of school and still part of the same set of friends they've grown up with. As the friends head home from the beach that last night before the wedding, there is a car accident. Three survive the crash but three are killed. And the reverberations are felt throughout the small town. Connor, the young driver of the car, lives. But staying among the angry and the mourning is almost as hard as living with the shame, and so he leaves the only place he knows for another life. Travelling first to Liverpool, then London, by the noughties he has made a home - of sorts - for himself in New York. The city provides shelter and possibility for the displaced, somewhere Connor can forget his past and forge a new life. But the secrets, the unspoken longings and regrets that have come to haunt those left behind will not be silenced. And before long, Connor will have to meet his past. ...Show more

Dublin Palms by Hugo Hamilton

$22.99 NZD

Category: Fiction Contemporary

The palm trees give the street a holiday atmosphere. There must be something in the soil they like. They have straight leaves that get a bit ragged, with split ends. At night you hear them rattling in the wind. The narrator of Dublin Palms has returned to Dublin to set up home with his partner Helen and their two children. Their lives are filled with optimism, but also a sense of dislocation. Overshadowed by the Troubles in the North, their family enterprise begins to come apart. As the creditors line up to be paid, they must consider leaving everything behind. What will they gain when they stand to lose all? In this spectacular novel from the author of The Speckled People, a family tries to hold on in a falling world. It is a powerful story of fragmentation and belonging, of emigrants and people returning home. ...Show more

All Our Shimmering Skies by Trent Dalton

$35.00 NZD

Category: Fiction Contemporary

The bestselling author of Boy Swallows Universe, Trent Dalton, returns with All Our Shimmering Skies - a glorious novel destined to become another Australian classic. Darwin, 1942, and as Japanese bombs rain overhead, motherless Molly Hook, the gravedigger's daughter, turns once again to the sky for gui dance. She carries a stone heart inside a duffel bag next to the map that leads to Longcoat Bob, the deep country sorcerer who put a curse on her family. By her side are the most unlikely travelling companions: Greta, a razor-tongued actress and Yukio, a fallen Japanese fighter pilot. 'Run, Molly, run,' says the daytime sky. Run to the vine forests. Run to northern Australia's wild and magical monsoon lands. Run to friendship. Run to love. Run. Because the graverobber's coming, Molly, and the night-time sky is coming with him. So run, Molly, run. All Our Shimmering Skies is a story about gifts that fall from the sky, curses we dig from the earth and the secrets we bury inside ourselves. It is an odyssey of true love and grave danger; of darkness and light; of bones and blue skies. A buoyant, beautiful and magical novel abrim with warmth, wit and wonder, a love letter to Australia and the art of looking up.     ...Show more

The Night of All Souls by Philippa Swan

$36.00 NZD

Category: Fiction Contemporary

In this highly entertaining novel, Edith Wharton is variously reimagined- as a host in the afterlife, a historical figure in a modern novella, and as an elusive presence in the pages of her own writing. But when a lifelong secret is exposed, it's almost too shocking to be true. Hugely acclaimed during her lifetime, writer Edith Wharton is back - with the most extraordinary opportunity. Summoned to a room in the afterlife, Edith finds the manuscript of a new novella inspired by her life. A letter from her one-time editor advises Edith to consider carefully whether to destroy the work or allow its publication. Is this a chance to correct her image of haughtiness and privilege, and to reignite interest in her writing? Edith begins reading the novella to her astonished companions; and what unfolds is a cautionary story of online fame. But as she gradually remembers the details of her life, Edith becomes fearful about what the work might reveal and is haunted by the words- The letters survive, and everything survives.  ...Show more