Recent Books

1985

By Dominic Hoey

July 1, 2025

It’s 1985 and Obi’s on the cusp of teenagehood, after a childhood marked by poverty, dysfunctional family dynamics, (dis)organised crime and violence. His dad’s delusional, his mum’s real sick, the Rainbow Warrior just exploded, and it’s time for Obi to grow up and get out of the spacies parlour.

When he and his best mate Al discover a map leading to unknown riches, Obi wonders if this windfall could be the thing that turns his family’s fortunes around. Instead, he’s thrown into an adventure where the stakes are a lot higher than the games he loves.

An electric novel about life in a multi-cultural, counter-cultural part of Auckland pre-gentrification. 1985 is an adventure story with a local flavour, a coming-of-age story for the underdogs, the disenfranchised and the dreamers.

Dream Count

By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

July 1, 2025

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until — betrayed and brokenhearted — she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America – but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations on the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.

Bad Archive

By Flora Feltham

June 23, 2025

Bold, beautiful and constantly surprising essays about life, loss, joy and the fabric of memory.

In this deftly woven work Flora Feltham explores the corners where her memories are stashed: the archive vault, her mother’s house, a marriage counsellor’s office, the tip and New World. She takes us on a frenzied bender in Croatia, learns tapestry and meets romance novelists, all while wondering how families and relationships absorb the past, given everything we don’t say about grief, mental illness or even love. Most importantly, she asks, how do you write about a life honestly – when there are so many flaws in the way we record history and, more confrontingly, in the way we remember?

The Beautiful Afternoon

By Airini Beautrais

June 5, 2025

In The Beautiful Afternoon, award-winning poet and short-story writer Airini Beautrais plumbs history, literature, Star Wars, sea hags, beauty products, tarot, swimwear, environmentalism and pole dancing to deliver a virtuoso inquiry into how we become, and change, who we are.

Beautrais surveys the many influences on her life, from Lord Byron and Dante to Dolly magazine and 90s R&B, with intense curiosity and a fierce intelligence. Whether saving the planet in her Quaker childhood and activist youth, surviving the lonely years of early motherhood, or confronting the fears and freedoms of midlife – in which she writes about the body becoming a poem and human touch beginning to feel safe again – Beautrais’ lucid examination of experience reveals that the personal is inescapably political.

Throughout these wide-ranging essays her vigilant critique of entrenched patriarchal control turns anger to resistance, as a woman finds a way out of its grip, back to herself and the world.

The Emperor of Gladness

By Ocean Vuong

June 5, 2025

One summer evening in the town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on a bridge, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond.

The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which our lives are changed by the most unexpected of people. When Hai takes a job at a diner to support himself and Grazina, his fellow workers become the family he didn’t expect to find. United by desperation and circumstance, and existing on the fringes of society, together they bear witness to each other’s survival.

Never Flinch

By Stephen King

June 5, 2025

When the Buckeye City Police Department receives a disturbing letter from a person threatening to ‘kill thirteen innocents and one guilty’ in ‘an act of atonement for the needless death of an innocent man’, Detective Izzy Jaynes has no idea what to think. Are fourteen citizens about to be slaughtered in an unhinged act of retribution? As the investigation unfolds, Izzy realises that the letter writer is deadly serious, and she turns to her friend Holly Gibney for help.

Meanwhile, controversial and outspoken women’s rights activist Kate McKay is embarking on a multi-state lecture tour, drawing packed venues of both fans and detractors. Someone who vehemently opposes Kate’s message of female empowerment is targeting her and disrupting her events. At first, no one is hurt, but the stalker is growing bolder, and Holly is hired to be Kate’s bodyguard – a challenging task with a headstrong employer and a determined adversary driven by wrath and unhinged righteousness.

Featuring a riveting cast of characters both old and new, including world-famous gospel singer Sista Bessie and an unforgettable villain addicted to murder, these twinned narratives converge in a chilling and spectacular conclusion – a feat of storytelling only Stephen King could pull off.

Carved in Blood

By Michael Bennett

June 5, 2025

In the depths of the bleak New Zealand winter comes the rising of Matariki – a sacred constellation in Māori culture, heralding a time of new beginnings. For former Detective Senior Sergeant Hana Westerman, life is good: her work in her hometown of Tātā Bay is going well, the community is thriving, and her daughter Addison is getting engaged.

But this Matariki brings unwelcome change. When Hana’s ex-husband Jaye walks into an Auckland liquor store and directly across the path of a gunman, their family’s hard-won peace is shattered.

With the stakes at their highest, Hana finds herself picking up a path she thought she’d never return to. Desperate for answers, she rejoins the police to help scour the city for the unidentified shooter. But as the investigation progresses, she finds herself unprepared for the darkness of the world she is entering.

A darkness much closer to home than she knows.

Air

By John Boyne

June 5, 2025

Being in limbo, 30,000 feet in the air, offers time to reflect and take stock. For Aaron Umber, it’s an opportunity to connect with his 14-year-old son as they travel halfway across the world to meet a woman who isn’t expecting them.

Unsettled by his past, and anxious for his future, Aaron is at a crossroads in life. The damage inflicted upon him during his youth has made him the man he is, but now threatens to widen the growing fissures between him and his only child. This trip could bind them closer together, or tear them further apart.

In this penetrating examination of action and consequence, fault and attribution, acceptance and resolution, John Boyne gives us a redemptive story of a father and a son on a moving journey to mend their troubled lives.

The Prophet

By Paul Lynch

June 5, 2025

On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her doorstep. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police want to speak with her husband, Larry, a trade unionist for the Teachers’ Union of Ireland. Things are falling apart.

Ireland is in the grip of a government that is taking a turn towards tyranny. And as the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society – assailed by unpredictable forces beyond her control and forced to do whatever it takes to keep her family together.

Exhilarating, terrifying, propulsive and confrontational, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality and devastating insight, a novel that can be read as a parable of the present, the future and the past.

Kairos

By Jenny Erpenbeck

May 15, 2025

Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power. And the world around them is changing too: as the GDR begins to crumble, so too do all the old certainties and the old loyalties, ushering in a new era whose great gains also involve profound loss.

From a prize-winning German writer, this is the intimate and devastating story of the path of two lovers through the ruins of a relationship, set against the backdrop of a seismic period in European history.