“No, emptiness is not nothingness”: New Sci Fi & Fantasy

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“No, emptiness is not nothingness. Emptiness is a type of existence. You must use this existential emptiness to fill yourself.” ― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

Welcome to our latest selection of recently acquired science fiction and fantasy titles. As always, we have a cosmos of choice awaiting our readers.

This month’s selection includes three titles from our own fair shores, the first of which is the eagerly anticipated new book by H. G Parry called Heartless. Regular readers will know that H. G. Parry is one of our personal favourites and we were thrilled to see a new title from this wonderful author on the shelves. Another treat from Aotearoa  comes in the form of  best-selling, award-winning  author David Hair’s latest release that’s called The Burning Land, and the third member of our local trio of talent is local author Helen Vivienne Fletcher, who releases a collection of stories called Beside the River Styx. It’s fabulous to see so much exceptional home-grown talent out there. The other title that caught our eye was A View from the Stars by Liu Cixin, author of the exceptional modern classic The Three-Body Problem, currently one of the most popular television adaptations around. If you’ve not read any Liu Cixin before and enjoy deep, thought-provoking cutting-edge science fiction we thoroughly recommend his work.

To see our full list of selected titles and borrow any that interest you, just browse below.

Heartless / Parry, H. G.
“At the age of seven, in a London workhouse, newly-orphaned James meets ten-year-old Peter. Mysterious, mercurial, thoughtless to the point of cruelty, Peter nonetheless takes a liking to James. The two forge a strange friendship, bound together by their shared love of stories…But one fateful night, Peter vanishes from his bed, and in the morning James is found lying alone and broken in the courtyard outside…Over twenty years later, on the deck of a whaling ship in the frozen wastes of the Arctic…James’s obsession with finding his childhood friend will lead him to mutiny and murder, beyond the edges of the world, and finally to an island that shouldn’t exist.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

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Anything Can Happen – New Biographies and Memoirs in the Collection

The nights are getting shorter and colder, it’s time to curl up with a good book and a warm beverage of choice.  Biographies and memoirs are always good to curl up with on a winter evening, and we’ve got some fabulous new ones in the collection.  Take a look at these we’ve selected from this month’s new stock.

Anything can happen / Hampton, Susan
“Funny, heartbreaking, it has exactly the arc of a good story, with a theme about storytelling and lies and how truth and memory are complex. It keeps in play so many things: irony and spirituality, a slice of social history of Sydney’s inner west, a farm in Victoria, a lesbian subculture, Mardi Gras, the literary pleasures of teaching writing. With the eye of a poet, and the dry drollery of someone who has experienced it all, straight and married, gay and married, mother, friend, lover, writer, this is a raw and powerful account of a life lived fully.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

No son of mine : a memoir / Corcoran, Jonathan
“Born and raised in rural West Virginia, Jonathan Corcoran was the youngest and only son of three siblings in a family balanced on the precipice of poverty. His mother, a traditional, evangelical, and insular woman who had survived abuse and abandonment, was often his only ally. In No Son of Mine, Corcoran traces his messy estrangement from his mother through lost geographies: the trees, mountains, and streams that were once his birthright, as well as the lost relationships with friends and family and the sense of home that were stripped away when she said he was no longer her son.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Missing persons : or, My grandmother’s secrets / Wills, Clair
“When Clair Wills was in her twenties, she discovered she had a cousin she had never met. Born in a mother-and-baby home in 1950s Ireland, Mary grew up in an institution not far from the farm where Clair spent happy childhood summers. Yet Clair was never told of Mary’s existence. How could a whole family–a whole country–abandon unmarried mothers and their children, erasing them from history? To discover the missing pieces of her family’s story, Clair searched across archives and nations, in a journey that would take her from the 1890s to the 1980s, from West Cork to rural Suffolk and Massachusetts, from absent fathers to the grief of a lost child.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

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The things that make me different: New fiction

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“The things that make me different are the things that make me, me.”  A.A. Milne (Piglet)

Welcome to our latest selection of titles from our recently acquired fiction books. As always, we have a wide variety of authors and novels to suit all tastes.

In amongst this month’s literary treasures, we have the much-anticipated Aotearoa debut novel from Joy Holley called Dream girl. We also have a new collection of short stories from A. A. Milne, which gives readers the chance to see another side of this much beloved children’s author. Black silk & sympathy by Aotearoa bestselling author Deborah Challinor is a book inspired by Victorian funeral practices. We also have three books that directly feature books in their storylines: The Titanic Survivors Book Club by Timothy Schaffert, The underground library by Jennifer Ryan, and Days at the Morisaki bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa. All of these titles show how important books are to various cultures, at all times throughout history. We would also like to make a special mention of Scrap by Calla Henkel, a novel that has scrapbooks at its core.

To see our full list of selected titles and borrow any that interest you, just browse below.

Dream girl / Holley, Joy
“Alice wants a heart-shaped bed. Mary, Genevieve and Angelica want to know the future. June says she wants Lena to rescue her from a rat, but really she wants Lena to make out with her. Eve wants to get Wallace alone at the strawberry farm. Olivia just wants to leave the haunted boarding school and go home. Bittersweet and intimate, comic and gothic, Dream Girl is a collection of stories about young women navigating desire in all its manifestations. In stories of romance and bad driving, ghosts and ghosting, playlists and competitive pet ownership, love never fails to leave its mark.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

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I’m going on an adventure! New travel books

A tent silhouetted against a starry sky, with three books in foreground, about camping, travel in Italy, and travel in Antarctica

For a long time, adventurers have been exploring the world and some have been kind enough to write down and share their experiences with us. Some of us may prefer only to travel in luxury but we can still experience these adventures vicariously through a great range of books. In this month’s new travel books, we can cycle all over the world, move to the desert with only our dogs or be struck by a whale while sailing to New Zealand (!). Have a browse, and enjoy!

A flat place / Masud, Noreen | ebook available – A flat place
“Raw and radical, unfamiliar and beguiling – a journey through Britain’s breathtaking flatlands and a reckoning with the painful memories and hidden histories contained in those landscapes. Noreen weaves her impressions of the natural world with the poetry, folklore and history of the land, and with recollections of her own early life, rendering a startlingly strange, vivid and intimate account of a post-traumatic, post-colonial landscape – a seemingly flat and motionless place which is nevertheless defiantly alive.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Never leave the dogs behind : a memoir / Madia, Brianna | ebook available – Never leave the dogs behind | audiobook available – Never leave the dogs behind
“The author of the New York Times bestseller Nowhere for Very Long continues her story with this deeply honest, moving account of a woman walking the line between independence and isolation when she moves to the Southwest desert with nothing and no one but her four dogs.” (Catalogue)

Everest, Inc. : the renegades and rogues who built an industry at the top of the world / Cockrell, Will
“Unlike any book to date, Everest, Inc. gets to the heart of the mountain through the definitive story of its greatest invention: the Himalayan guiding industry. Everest, Inc. transcends stereotypes and tells the uplifting counternarrative of the army of journeymen and women who have made people’s dreams come true, and of the Nepalis who are pushing the industry into the future.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Life at full tilt : the selected writings of Dervla Murphy / Murphy, Dervla
“Life at Full Tilt is a whirlwind tour of Dervla Murphy s travels. It begins in Spain in 1956, before her first book, and follows in her tracks for over fifty years. Ethel Crowley, an Irish sociologist, has for the first time looked at all Dervla s writing her journalism and her twenty-four books selecting half-a-dozen extracts from each. She introduces us to a complex character, hard to pin down, but a role model for women and environmentalists, Irish to her fingertips and a crucial part of the larger English tradition of travel writing.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Maurice and Maralyn : a whale, a shipwreck, a love story / Elmhirst, Sophie
“Bored of 1970s suburban life, Maralyn has an idea: sell the house, build a boat, leave England forever. It is hard work, turning dreams into reality, but finally they set sail for New Zealand. Then, halfway there, their beloved boat is struck by a whale. It sinks within an hour, and the pair are cast adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Filled with danger, spirit and tenderness, this is a book about human connection and the human condition.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

In Italy : Venice, Rome and beyond / Zarin, Cynthia
“From acclaimed poet and New Yorker writer Cynthia Zarin comes a deeply personal meditation on four Italian spaces. Here we encounter a writer deeply engaged with narrative in situ – a traveller moving through beloved streets, sometimes accompanied, sometimes solo.” (Catalogue)

Under the stars camping Australia & New Zealand : the best campsites, huts, glamping and bush camping / Reid, Sarah
“Sleep under the stars in Australia and New Zealand’s most spectacular spaces. Discover more than 200 out-of-this-world camping hotspots in this epic guide with practical details and expert tips for an adventure like no other – making it easier than ever before to plan the ultimate camping trip.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Antarctica cruising guide / Carey, Peter W.
“This bestselling Antarctica travel guide includes fascinating, full accounts of interesting places, spectacular landscapes, and local plants and wildlife. A definitive field guide to Antarctica, this book caters to visitors traveling by luxury liner, adventure cruise, or private boat. Written by experienced Antarctic scientists and travel guides who are recognized experts in the continent’s wildlife, conservation, and political history, every page offers gorgeous color photographs of the great white south.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

From Finland and the Fairground: New Classical CDs

With the arrival of autumn the nights grow longer, providing an ideal opportunity to listen to more music.  This blog explores a selection of the new classical CDs we added to our collection in April, each offering rarities and innovation. Two of these recordings feature artists and composers well-known in Wellington: Amalia Hall, concertmaster of Orchestra Wellington, and Christopher Park have recorded works for violin and piano by Philipp Schwarenka, while the New Zealand String Quartet, an ensemble-in-residence at Victoria University of Wellington, offers a second installment of notes from a journey featuring new works by New Zealand composers.  A new recording of an Offenbach opéra-bouffe will transport you to nineteenth-century Paris, while the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra navigates Sibelius’s ‘psychological’ symphony, and Le Consort reveals that there is always more to Vivaldi than we expect. Read, listen, and enjoy!

Haydn All-Stars / Trio Ernest
Trio Ernest (violinist Stanislas Gosset, pianist Natasha Roque Alsina, and cellist Clément Dami) formed in 2019, and for the last five years they have been busy touring and performing, immediately attracting attention for their imaginative programming. Haydn All-Stars is a recording project built around four piano trios by Joseph Haydn— the composer who transformed the piano trio from its early existence as a piano work with violin and cello accompaniment or obligato into a more complex form, establishing a meaningful voice for each instrument so that the piano trio might become a sublime form of musical discourse. Trio Ernest interleaves between the Haydn trios several pieces that offer homage or allusion to Haydn’s music. Brahms’s song ‘Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer’ and Ravel’s Menuet sur le nom de Haydn, both arranged for piano trio by Carlos Roque Alsina, and Jaqueline Fontyn’s Lieber Joseph! each respond to Haydn’s music in enigmatic ways. Trio Ernest offers precise and expressive performances of each work, demonstrating the individual prowess and thoughtful ensemble that have earned the Trio prize and accolades over the last five years.

notes from a journey II : te haerenga / New Zealand String Quartet
In 2011 the New Zealand String Quartet released Notes from a Journey, comprising five works by New Zealand composers  written between 2015 and 2021. Last year a second volume followed, notes from a journey ii: te haerenga. Some of these pieces — Tabea Squire’s I Danced, Unseen, Ross Harris’s String Quartet No. 9, and Gillian Whitehead’s Poroporoaki — formed part of the NZSQ’s 2023 ‘Woven Pathways’ national tour, while the pieces by Gareth Farr, Salina Fisher, and Louise Webster are favourites from earlier performances. The works recorded here have emerged from a variety of sources: I Danced, Unseen began its life as a collaboration between the NZSQ, Dance Collective Aotearoa, and choreographer Loughlan Prior, while Whitehead’s Poroporoaki and Fisher’s Tōrino respond in different ways to taonga pūoro. Ross Harris’s String Quartet No. 9 exhibits a distilled postmodern plurality in its chorale-based archism and subsequent fragmentation. The journey through these works is also a portrait of the richness of talent and imagination among New Zealand composers, performed by musicians whom they know as friends.

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Lasting Impressions: new art & design books

This month’s art and design picks aim to inspire and educate, with books that provide masterclasses in everything from drawing to photography or even how to forage your own paint!

The drawings of Vincent van Gogh / Lloyd, Christopher
“A compelling and authoritative overview of the drawings of Vincent van Gogh, one of the most celebrated and intriguing figures in the history of art. Vincent van Gogh believed that drawing was the ‘root of everything’. This was reflected in the remarkable number of more than a thousand graphic works produced by the artist during his short, dramatic life – many of them personal, often lonely explorations of the emerging modern world, anxieties that still speak to us today” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Breathing space : Iranian women photographers
“A remarkable look at Iran through the lenses of 23 women photographers, at a moment in history when Iranian women are fighting for their rights with courage and determination. Exploring a range of photographic styles and genres, they record the past and present upheavals of their homeland as well as tackling subjects such as the nature of memory, the tension between tradition and modernity, and the scars of conflict and loss. Whether documentary or conceptual, their images have global resonance and speak of the hunger for freedom and the power of women to shape the world”(Adapted from Catalogue)

Botany for the artist / Simblet, Sarah
“This beautifully illustrated guide to botany in art explores the extraordinary world of plants and inspires you to try drawing them yourself. Masterclasses by famous artists – from Renaissance masters to contemporary illustrators – showcase different approaches to drawing and painting plants over the centuries. Botany for the Artist is a visual feast, not just for anyone wishing to create fresh, vibrant, drawings, but for gardeners, photographers, and everyone who is passionate about plants and how they are portrayed in art.” (Adapted from Catalogue) Continue reading “Lasting Impressions: new art & design books”