Dunedin Athenaeum and Mechanics Institute

Recent Books

Hope Rises

By David Baldacci

June 4, 2026

REVENGE IS A DISH BEST SERVED COLD . . .

After turning informant for the FBI against a global criminal empire, Walter Nash has lost everything he cherished to its ruthless leader, Victoria Steers. Once gentle and sensitive, Nash’s rigorous training has forged him into a figure of power and precision with a singular mission: to take down Steers.

Defeating a mastermind requires cunning. Known for her sharp instincts, Steers confides in only a trusted few, so to penetrate her inner circle and dismantle her operation, Nash must summon all of his savvy and strength.

But as he edges closer to the woman who unraveled his life, Nash finds himself oddly drawn to Steers in ways he never could’ve imagined. And what he uncovers will upend all he knows, leading him to a choice that will change everything.

Griefdogg

By Michael Winkler

June 4, 2026

Meet Jeffrey Watson-Johnson: hydrologist, husband of Martine, father of Bern, model citizen of Mildura.

But after he inherits a small fortune from an obscure aunt and has a disconcerting encounter with his cousin Pam, Jeffrey decides it’s time to change everything.

He tells Martine he wants to live as if he were the family pet.

Sleeping through the day or wandering beside the river, he discovers a new power: he can sense secret grief in others. What to do with this gift? Or with his awareness of the endless streams of water flowing unseen beneath the earth?

Michael Winkler’s first novel Grimmish became a cult hit. Griefdogg is another triumph. Funny, sad, always entrancing, it tells a crazy-sane story about identity, love, family and forgiveness.

Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century

By Ece Temelkuran

June 4, 2026

Dear stranger … Are you home? Do you feel at home? For how much longer?

Across the world the number of refugees and exiles, the dispossessed and displaced, the politically homeless
and the economically excluded is growing.

Now, Ece Temelkuran, who has for years been a political Cassandra, warning the West about the rise of fascism,
has written Nation of Strangers: a series of letters from one stranger to another. It is a book for anyone who feels
alienated by an ever-more monstrous world, and a roadmap for an uncertain future.

Butter

By Asako Yuzuki

June 3, 2026

There are two things that I can simply not tolerate: feminists and margarine.

Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in Tokyo Detention Centre convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, who she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation’s imagination but Kajii refuses to speak with the press. That is, until journalist Rika Machida writes a letter asking for her recipe for beef stew and Kajii can’t resist writing back.

Rika, the only woman in her news office, works late each night, rarely cooking more than ramen. As the visits unfold between her and the steely Kajii, they are closer to a masterclass in food than journalistic research. Rika hopes this gastronomic exchange will help her soften Kajii but it seems that she might be the one changing. With each meal she eats, something is awakening in her body. Might she and Kaji have more in common than she once thought?

Inspired by the real case of the convicted con woman and serial killer, ‘The Konkatsu Killer’, Asako Yuzuki’s Butter is a vivid, gripping exploration of misogyny, obsession and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan.

Transcription

By Ben Lerner

June 3, 2026

A writer returns to his college town, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor. But after he drops his smartphone in the hotel sink, he arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device – a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.

What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich and impoverish our connections to each other, that store and obliterate our memories, and a moving exploration of the relationships that make us who we are.

Land

By Maggie O'Farrell

June 2, 2026

On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster.

The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is unexpectedly sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and the lives of those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás, and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping and get them both home?

Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away. As spellbinding and varied as the landscape that inspired it, Land is, above all, a story of survival, for our times and for all time.

John of John

By Douglas Stuart

June 2, 2026

Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry home to the island of Harris to find that not much has changed except for him. In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal resumes his old life, caught between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, weaver, and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his Glaswegian grandmother Ella, who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for decades.

While Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, John is dismayed by his son’s long hair and how he seems unwilling to be Saved. As the seasons pass, everything is poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly entangled.

Henry Goes Bush

By Wayne Marshall

May 19, 2026

In 1892, New South Wales’ most promising writer and least promising teetotaller, Henry Lawson, is banished to Bourke to ‘find the real bush’. The goal: sober up, gather fresh material, and stop being such a disappointment. But what Australia’s favourite literary son discovers in the river town is less a glorious national frontier than a collective nervous breakdown.

History records this as the trip that defined his career. Wayne Marshall records it as a surrealist action movie where Lawson must outrun his own myth and a gunslinger known as The Rider, aka Banjo – a poet significantly better at being a legend than Henry is.

Henry Goes Bush confronts the madness that lies behind our colonial dreaming – a moment where history is a hallucination and ‘the bush’ a phantasmagoric theme park. A reality in which The Bulletin’s famed poetry wars are an actual shootout on the banks of the Darling River.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

By Kiran Desai

May 19, 2026

When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated, yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that only served to drive Sonia and Sunny apart.

Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India, fearing she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.

Heart the Lover

By Lily King

April 29, 2026

‘You knew I’d write a book about you someday’ Our narrator understands good love stories – their secrets, their highs and free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the rules.

She was in her senior year of college when star students Sam and Yash swept her into an intoxicating world of academic fervour, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. Their lives became quickly intertwined – with friendship but also with unpredictable passions and the intimations of first love.

Decades later, she is a successful writer, living a comfortable life with her husband and children, when a surprise visit brings the past crashing into the present, forcing her to confront the decisions and deceptions of her youth.

Written with the precision of poetry and the emotional tide of an epic, Heart the Lover is a celebration of literature and the life-long echoes of young love. This is King at her very best, affirming her as a masterful chronicler of the human experience and one of the finest novelists at work today.