Wild Dark Shore
3.490 kr.Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny weather-lashed island that is home to the world’s largest seed bank. As Shearwater risks being lost to rising sea levels, the island’s researchers have fled, and only the Salts remain.
Until, during the worst storm in living memory, a stranger washes ashore. The family nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, but it seems she isn’t telling the whole truth about why she’s there. And when Rowan stumbles upon sabotaged radios and a recently dug grave, she realises that she’s not the only one on the island with a secret.
A novel of breathtaking twists and dizzying beauty, Wild Dark Shore is about the impossible choices we make to protect the people we love.
Political Girl: Life and Fate in Russia
6.990 kr.What can you do when your country becomes a repressive authoritarian state?
2014: Russia prepares to host the Winter Olympics. Russia invades Crimea. Putin is re-elected president. Several political prisoners are amnestied and released early from prison.
Maria Alyokhina is among them. She had spent two years in a penal colony after performing the punk prayer ‘Virgin Mary, Banish Putin’ with her friends in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. They had warned the rest of the world of the dangers of authoritarianism, but the Russia she finds when she gets out of prison is even more oppressive. What can you do, she asks, when your country has been seized by all-powerful men who are waging war against another country and their own citizens?
As Maria recounts her brave and colourful protests, we are drawn straight into the world of grassroots opposition and witness the absurd measures the Russian state takes to contain protest. And when the full-scale war against Ukraine starts and the Russian opposition is repeatedly silenced, Maria and her activist friends continue to resist despite the high stakes. They fight increasingly absurd cycles of detention and house arrest: sometimes with the smallest acts such as going for a walk or having a rainbow ice cream, until, faced with a new prison sentence, she escapes Russia in May 2022 dressed as a food delivery courier.
Her story, like her life, is fiercely courageous, darkly funny and highly inspiring to anyone who wants to stand up for the truth.
Nymph
3.990 kr.Not yet thirty, Bathory has assembled a peculiar résumé: model, sex worker, linguist, Latin scholar, and assassin. The last of these has been the family trade for generations. Growing up, Bathory, her mother, and her father made an isolated, strange, and loving – if very unusual – family unit. Her lonely childhood games mimicked spycraft and wet-work, while her parents watched and shared their arcane theories about love and death.
As a student in New York, her life changes on accepting a job at a dilapidated card shop in Manhattan. This is a front for an agency that allows her to put her inherited skills to use while pursuing romance in the city.
However, steering clear of attachment is as dangerous as anything else she does and means sidestepping a certain alluring figure from her father’s past. She is equally intent on dying young, a less difficult proposition given her heritage, the company she keeps – call girls, conflicted cops, trustfund hoodlums – and the people pursuing her.
Will Bathory escape both fate and family, or does satisfaction and salvation lie only in their embrace?
The Future of Truth
4.390 kr.What if a lie could be true?
At the heart of this fascinating and iconoclastic book lies Werner Herzog’s concept of ‘ecstatic truth’ – a truth that is often hidden behind the facts and our conceptions of reality but can be gleaned through the poetic imagination, in art, literature and cinema, when we open ourselves up to an aesthetic experience.
Written in Herzog’s inimitable style, these stories, anecdotes and reflections take us from present-day deep fakes and the opportunities and perils of AI to ancient Egypt and Rome, where rulers resorted to lies and propaganda in the same way as governments do today; from Scott and Amundsen’s race to the South Pole to alien abduction claims and the making of Herzog’s own films. With its singular vision and unique voice, The Future of Truth is a compelling meditation on the relationship between fact and fiction – evidence and imagination – by one of today’s most fascinating and idiosyncratic thinkers.
The Cosmic Oval
3.190 kr.The Cosmic Oval is an elliptical entrance into an exploration of feminist cosmologies, storytelling and the many ways of knowing and imagining the hot blue beginnings of time. By turn dreaming and waking, Ella Finer’s essay enters history and imagination from the sleep side, taking its cue from Anne Carson. Finer attends to cultural memory as composition, gathering cosmic guides with whom to listen beyond what is given to hear.
In west London, the entrance to architect and theorist Charles Jencks’ Cosmic House is overlooked by The Cosmic Oval, a representation of the origin of the universe referencing both contemporary scientific discoveries about its elliptical shape and ancient cosmogonic myths. Invited by the Cosmic House to write an imagined conversation between figures who inhabit the frieze surrounding the Oval, such as Hannah Arendt, Imhotep and John Donne, Finer re-orchestrates cultural history to explore social scenes of study and the way knowledge moves through bodies and time.
The Site of Memory
2.990 kr.The Site of Memory describes Toni Morrison’s work of literary archaeology. She offers insights into how she arrives at a text through the act of imagination bound up with memory and shows how she explores two worlds – the actual and the possible – via the nimbus of emotion surrounding the journey of an image: from picture to meaning to text.
Exploring the radical possibilities of literature and the limits of history, Morrison finds a truth deeper than documentation in the silences and omissions in African American narratives of the past. Fiction, for Morrison, is a practice of ethical restoration: a means to recover what history has neglected through the ‘flooding’ of a rush of imagination. In The Site of Memory, ancestral presence, emotion and imagination converge. If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.
Among the Thugs
4.990 kr.They have names like Barmy Bernie, Daft Donald, and Steamin’ Sammy. They like lager (in huge quantities), the Queen, football clubs (especially Manchester United), and themselves. Their dislike encompasses the rest of the known universe, and England’s soccer thugs express it in ways that range from mere vandalism to riots that terrorize entire cities. Now Bill Buford, editor of the prestigious journal Granta, enters this alternate society and records both its savageries and its sinister allure with the social imagination of a George Orwell and the raw personal engagement of a Hunter Thompson.
Falling Animals
3.490 kr.On an isolated, windswept beach, a pale figure sits serenely against a sand dune staring out to sea. His hands are folded neatly in his lap and there is a faint smile on his otherwise lifeless face. After months of fruitless investigation, the nameless stranger is buried in an unmarked grave, but the mystery of his life and death lingers on, drawing the nearby villagers into its wake. From strandings to shipwrecks, it is not the first time that strangeness has washed up on their shores.
As a chorus of voices come together to unravel the story of one man, alone on a beach, a crosshatched portrait begins to emerge, threaded by lives both true and imagined, real and surreal, past and present.
Our World: Iceland
3.890 kr.Góðan daginn! Spend a day in Iceland eating hafragautur for breakfast, visiting the farm in the countryside, and driving past volcanoes and the northern lights. Even learn words in Icelandic with pronunciation guides throughout the story.
Night of the Living Rez
4.390 kr.A boy unearths a jar that holds an old curse, which sets into motion his family’s unravelling; a man, while trying to swindle some pot from a dealer, discovers a friend passed out in the woods, his hair frozen into the snow; and two friends, inspired by Antiques Roadshow, attempt to rob the tribal museum for valuable root clubs. Night of the Living Rez, the book that heralded the arrival of a standout talent in contemporary fiction, is an unforgettable portrayal of an Indigenous community.
