The Gathering by Anne Enright

$10.00 NZD

Category: Literary Fiction | Reading Level: very good

"The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn t the drink that killed him although that certainly helped it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother s house, in the winter of 1968. His sister Veronica was there then, as she is now- keeping the dead man company, just for another little while. The Gathering is a family epic, condensed and clarified through the remarkable lens of Anne Enright s unblinking eye. It is also a sexual history- tracing the line of hurt and redemption through three generations starting with the grandmother, Ada Merriman showing how memories warp and family secrets fester. This is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars. The Gathering sends fresh blood through the Irish literary tradition, combining the lyricism of the old with the shock of the new. As in all Anne Enright s work, fiction and non-fiction, this is a book of daring, wit and insight- her distinctive intelligence twisting the world a fraction, and giving it back to us in a new and unforgettable light." ...Show more

Blooming Books by Raymond Briggs

$45.00 NZD

Category: Artists | Reading Level: very good

Beginning with his first published illustration in 1958 and continuing through to the work he continues to produce today, Blooming Books is a stunning and diverse exploration of the work of this unique and brilliant artist. Commentaries by the journalist Nicolette Jones accompany extracts and, in some c ases, complete picture books, reviewing the background to Briggs's work and its underlying themes. Following a foreword from Raymond Briggs and Nicolette Jones's introduction, the book is divided into four main sections: The Early Years (including, among many others, The Elephantand The Bad Baby); The Nursery Classics (e.g. Father Christmas, , The Bear); A Gallery of Characters (e.g. Fungus, The Man, Ug) The Social Issues (When the Wind Blows, The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman, Ethel and Ernest). All of Briggs's work is here, from his captivating work for children through to the sharp and satirical works found in The Social Issues. Familiar favourites are also accompanied by some previously unseen material, including preparatory drawings for published titles and work from several planned sequels to Fungus and the Bogeyman. ...Show more

Glas by Jacques Derrida; John P. Leavey (Translator); Richard Rand (Translator)

$120.00 NZD

Category: Philosophy | Reading Level: very good

Jacques Derrida is probably the most famous European philosopher alive today. The University of Nebraska Press makes available for the first English translation of his most important work to date, Glas. Its appearance will assist Derrida's readers pro and con in coming to terms with a complex and contro versial book. Glas extensively reworks the problems of reading and writing in philosophy and literature; questions the possibility of linear reading and its consequent notions of theme, author, narrative, and discursive demonstration; and ingeniously disrupts the positions of reader and writer in the text. Glas is extraordinary in many ways, most obviously in its typography. Arranged in two columns, with inserted sections within these, the book simultaneously discusses Hegel’s philosophy and Jean Genet’s fiction, and shows how two such seemingly distinct kinds of criticism can reflect and influence one another. The customary segregation of philosophy, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, linguistics, history, and poetics is systematically subverted. In design and content, the books calls into question “types” of literature (history, philosophy, literary criticism), the ownership of ideas and styles, the glorification of literary heroes, and the limits of literary representation. ...Show more

Philobiblon The text and translation of E C Thomas edited with a foreword by Michael Maclagan by Richard de Bury

$55.00 NZD

Category: Books About Books | Reading Level: very good

Bi-lingual Latin and English text

The Divided World: Selected Stories by Owen Marshall

$15.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Fiction | Reading Level: very good

Solo Faces by James Salter

$14.00 NZD

Category: Hardback fiction | Reading Level: good-very good

Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe

$15.00 NZD

Category: Hardback fiction | Reading Level: very good

Fairburn by Denys Trussell

$40.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Literature | Reading Level: very good

The Skull Beneath the Skin by P. D. James

$12.00 NZD

Category: Hardback fiction | Reading Level: very good

Private detective Cordelia Gray is invited to the sunlit island of Courcy to protect the vainly beautiful actress Clarissa Lisle from veiled threats on her life. Within the rose red walls of a fairy-tale castle, she finds the stage is set for death. Richly intricate and literate, James's second Cordeli a Gray mystery shows James at the height of her storytelling powers (San Francisco Chronicle). ...Show more

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

$15.00 NZD

Category: Hardback fiction | Reading Level: very good

COSTA NOVEL AWARD WINNER Startlingly beautiful Breathtakingly exciting. The Guardian From the two-time Man Booker Prize finalist Sebastian Barry, a master storyteller (Wall Street Journal), comes a powerful new novel of duty and family set against the American Indian and Civil Wars Thomas McNulty, aged barely seventeen and having fled the Great Famine in Ireland, signs up for the U.S. Army in the 1850s. With his brother in arms, John Cole, Thomas goes on to fight in the Indian Wars against the Sioux and the Yurok and, ultimately, the Civil War. Orphans of terrible hardships themselves, the men find these days to be vivid and alive, despite the horrors they see and are complicit in. Moving from the plains of Wyoming to Tennessee, Sebastian Barry s latest work is a masterpiece of atmosphere and language. An intensely poignant story of two men and the makeshift family they create with a young Sioux girl, Winona, Days Without End is a fresh and haunting portrait of the most fateful years in American history and is a novel never to be forgotten." ...Show more

Here To Eternity: An Anthology of Poetry by Andrew Motion (ed.)

$20.00 NZD

Category: Poetry | Reading Level: very good

Basil Street Blues - A family story by Michael Holroyd

$25.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

Includes two volumes: Basil Street Blues which is part detective story, part family memoir and part an oblique voyage of self-discovery and Mosaic which shows the strange interconnectedness of our lives, and how other people's stories, however eccentric or extreme, echo our own dreams and experiences. ...Show more