The witty new novel from this internationally acclaimed Polish author blends horror, folklore and feminist parable.

In September 1913, Mieczyslaw, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at a health resort in what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the day – will there be war? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior?

But disturbing events are happening in the guesthouse and its surroundings. Someone-or something-seems to be infiltrating their world. As our student attempts to decipher the sinister forces at work, little does he realise they have already chosen their next target.

As in her acclaimed novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Tokarczuk blends horror story, comedy, folklore, and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.

From the Australian Book Industry-Award winning author of Australian Abstract.

‘Containing a sublime collection of works, Amber Creswell Bell’s book is a deeply fascinating insight into Antipodean portraiture.’ – DAVID WENHAM

Since the advent of the camera nearly two centuries ago, a portrait is no longer expected to be an exact likeness. From surrealist renderings to abstract interpretations, contemporary artists have shed the convention of traditional portraiture, experimenting with an array of styles to convey the personality and character of their subjects.

In About Face, Amber Creswell Bell examines the practices of a diverse canvas of portrait painters in Australia and New Zealand. The dynamic nature of both the artists and their work reflects an evolution of culture, society and creative practice. These painters use portraiture to convey a narrative, engage with social, political or environmental issues or evoke the complexity of the human experience; some are simply fascinated by human faces.

Whatever the artist’s motivation, every work makes clear that portraiture has always been a powerful means of telling stories and exploring our individual and collective identities.

A brilliant exploration of freedom – what it is, how it’s been misunderstood, and why it’s our only chance for survival – by the acclaimed, bestselling author of On Tyranny.

Freedom is the great Western commitment, but we have lost sight of what it means – and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power- we think we’re free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government interference. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from, as freedom to – the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.

Drawing on the work of philosophers and political dissidents, conversations with contemporary thinkers and his own experiences, Snyder identifies the practices and attitudes – the habits of mind – that will allow us to design a government in which we and future generations can flourish. We come to appreciate the importance of traditions but also the role of institutions. Intimate yet ambitious, this book helps forge a new consensus rooted in a politics of abundance, generosity and grace.

Snyder’s book On Tyranny has inspired millions around the world to fight for freedom; On Freedom helps us see exactly what we’re fighting for. It is a thrilling intellectual journey and a tour de force of political philosophy.

One of the staff’s most anticipated books of 2024! We have been LOVING this one…

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

“A canvas of vividly impressionistic splashes of growing up young, gifted, Black, and female.” ―The Philadelphia Inquirer

In this memoir of perceptions and ideas, renowned feminist intellectual bell hooks presents a stirringly intimate account of growing up in the South. Stitching together the gossamer threads of her girlhood memories, hooks shows us one strong-spirited child’s journey toward becoming a writer. Along the way, hooks sheds light on the vulnerability of children, the special unfurling of female creativity, and the imbalance of a society that confers marriage’s joys upon men and its silences on women. In a world where daughters and daddies are strangers under the same roof, and crying children are often given something to cry about, hooks uncovers the solace to be found in solitude, the comfort to be had in the good company of books.

Bone Black allows us to bear witness to the awakening of a legendary author’s awareness that writing is her most vital breath.

New edition introduced by Yomi Adegoke

“With the emotion of poetry, the narrative of a novel, and the truth of experience, bell hooks weaves a girlhood memoir you won’t be able to put down―or forget. Bone Black takes us into the cave of self-creation.” ―Gloria Steinem

Welcome to Rook Hall.

The stage is set. The players are ready. By night’s end, a murderer will be revealed.

Ex-detective Jackson Brodie is staving off a bad case of midlife malaise when he is called to a sleepy Yorkshire town, and the seemingly tedious matter of a stolen painting. But one theft leads to another, including the disappearance of a valuable Turner from Burton Makepeace, home to Lady Milton and her family. Once a magnificent country house, Burton Makepeace has now partially been converted into a hotel, hosting Murder Mystery weekends.

As paying guests, a vicar, an ex-army officer, impecunious aristocrats, and old friends converge, we are treated a fiendishly clever mystery; one that pays homage to the masters of the genre-from Agatha Christie to Dorothy Sayers.

Brilliantly inventive, with all of Atkinson’s signature wit, wordplay and narrative brio, Death at the Sign of the Rook may be Jackson Brodie’s most outrageous and memorable case yet.

From the gothic, magical halls of the Scholomance trilogy, through the realms next door to Spinning Silver and Uprooted, and the dragon-filled Temeraire series, this stunning collection takes us from fairy tale to fantasy, myth to history, and mystery to science fiction as we travel through Naomi Novik’s most beloved stories. Here, among many others, we encounter…

• A mushroom witch who learns that sometimes the worst thing in the Scholomance can be your roommate.
• The start of the Dragon Corps in ancient Rome, after Mark Antony hatches a dragon’s egg and bonds with the hatchling.
• A young bride in the middle ages who finds herself gambling with Death, for the highest of stakes.
• A delightful reimagining of Pride & Prejudice, in which Elizabeth Bennet captains a Longwing dragon.
• The first glimpse at the world of Abandon, the setting of Novik’s upcoming epic fantasy series-a deserted continent populated only by silent and enigmatic architectural mysteries.

Though the stories are vastly different, there is a unifying theme: wrestling with destiny, and the lengths some will go to find their own and fulfill its promise.

India is the forgotten heart of the ancient world…

For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilisation, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific.

William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India’s oft-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. For the first time, he gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to the Buddhism of China, from the trade that helped fund the Roman Empire to the creation of the numerals we use today (including zero), India transformed the culture and technology of its ancient world and our world today as we know it.

When assembling my work, I assembled myself, laid out on an autopsy table (of sorts). And soft meteorites presented itself as three themes – art, death, and friendship.

In soft meteorites Nathan Shepherdson has installed a type of two-way valve that attaches the page to the flesh. Moments are emptied of words then refilled with fresh observations. The pulse quietly excludes standard angles for a free-form geometry that collects spiralling perspectives. He sings inside the silence he listens to. Meditations are a material. Sometimes lean and elegant, almost emaciated. At other times the complexities compound themselves under lingua-thermal pressure, moving very fast, jumping ship like a sailor who doesn’t even know if the ocean is still there. Wry smiles are laid out like the silver-plated cake forks inherited from your grandmother, tattered velvet a warm home for memories used only on special occasions. Memory and Memoriam are primary yet differentiated blocks by which Shepherdson’s body is drawn but not yet quartered. Elastic hands reach into holes that aren’t there to find the ones that are.

The counterbalance is in the mood and gestures Shepherdson creates, which invite and repel the chaos which parades unnoticed in its endless supply of costumes. The question mark, inverted, bristles added to its profiled dome sweeps it all away with thinking. Falling is the secondary purpose of any cliff small or large. Micro-shadows from dust disturbed form answers and shapes for capture and translation before they again settle into nothing.

Short stories from 25 emerging and established writers of Middle Eastern and North African origins, a unique collection of voices and viewpoints that illuminate life in the global Arab/Muslim world.

“Provocative and subtle, nuanced and surprising, these stories demonstrate how this complicated and rich region might best be approached–through the power of literature.” –Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Committed

Stories from the Center of the World gathers new writing from the greater Middle East (or SWANA), a vast region that stretches from Southwest Asia, through the Middle East and Turkey, and across Northern Africa. The 25 authors included here come from a wide range of cultures and countries, including Palestine, Syria, Pakistan, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, and Morocco, to name some.

In “Asha and Haaji,” Hanif Kureishi takes up the cause of outsiders who become uprooted when war or disaster strikes and they flee for safe haven. In Nektaria Anastasiadou‘s “The Location of the Soul According to Benyamin Alhadeff,” two students in Istanbul from different classes — and religions that have often been at odds with one another — believe they can overcome all obstacles. MK Harb‘s story, “Counter Strike,” is about queer love among Beiruti adolescents; and Salar Abdoh‘s “The Long Walk of the Martyrs” invites us into the world of former militants, fighters who fought ISIS or Daesh in Iraq and Syria, who are having a hard time readjusting to civilian life. In “Eleazar,” Karim Kattan tells an unexpected Palestinian story in which the usual antagonists — Israeli occupation forces — are mostly absent, while another malevolent force seems to overtake an unsuspecting family. Omar El Akkad‘s “The Icarist” is a coming-of-age story about the underworld in which illegal immigrants are forced to live, and what happens when one dares to break away.

Contributors include: Salar Abdoh, Leila Aboulela, Farah Ahamed, Omar El Akkad, Sarah AlKahly-Mills, Nektaria Anastasiadou, Amany Kamal Eldin, Jordan Elgrably, Omar Foda, May Haddad, Danial Haghighi, Malu Halasa, MK Harb, Alireza Iranmehr, Karim Kattan, Hanif Kureishi, Ahmed Salah Al-Mahdi, Diary Marif, Tariq Mehmood, Sahar Mustafah, Mohammed Al-Naas, Ahmed Naji, Mai Al-Nakib, Abdellah Taia, and Natasha Tynes…