The Bookshop Detectives are coming to Auckland! Please come and hang out with us at the completely fab Time Out Bookstore for riotous tales of policing, bookselling, writing and staying married throughout it all.

We'll do a little talk, then you can ask us questions if you'd like to, and we'll scribble on your book(s), even if we didn't write them.

If you're wondering who the heck we are, here is our official bio:

Gareth and Louise Ward are the real-life owners of independent bookshop Wardini Books, with stores in Havelock North and Napier, New Zealand.

Louise is known among the staff as Fearless Leader and Gareth as a bit of a dick; he is, however, the author of the Tarquin the Honest and The Rise of the Remarkables book series, as well as being the bestselling and award-winning author of The Traitor and the Thief and The Clockill and the Thief.

Gareth and Louise met at police training college in the UK and are both ex-coppers. Louise has one murder arrest to her name, is an English Literature Graduate and as an ex-teacher inflicted Shakespeare on inner-city twelve-year-olds. She regularly reviews books on RNZ.

Both are obsessed with their rescue dog Stevie, avoid housework and gardening, and live in the cultural centre of the universe that is Hawke’s Bay, Aotearoa New Zealand.

Great news for Time Out customers!

Much loved author, humourist and master of satire, David Sedaris is returning to Auckland. As a Time Out customer, you can snap up your tickets and guarantee the best seats with our exclusive pre-sale access.

Join David Sedaris for an evening filled with storytelling, observations, unpublished tales, audience Q&As and book signings. Book today! Tickets officially on sale Thursday 27 June via davidsedaristour.com.au.

Friday 31st January
7.00pm
Great Hall, Auckland Town Hall, Auckland, NZ

Sedaris is the bestselling author of the books Happy-Go-Lucky, Calypso, Theft By Finding, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Holidays on Ice, Naked, and Barrel Fever. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, BBC Radio 4 and podcast, This American Life.

A savant of razor-sharp and sardonic wit, this is a rare opportunity to spend an evening with one of the world’s pre-eminent humour writers.

“To see Sedaris live is pure joy. To watch this bookish, culotte-evangelising man read his life’s work on stage is word-nerd heaven, best topped off by spending three minutes with his full attention at the book-signing table after a show.” The Saturday Paper

“The happy-go-unlucky Sedaris is forever being frustrated, humiliated or downright annihilated, and the mishaps he chronicles probably explain why readers feel so fondly protective towards him.” The Guardian UK

When Sarah Catherall's marriage fell apart, it felt like a car crash. Grief, uncertainty and shame swallowed her whole. Shared friendships and extended family connections dissolved: it was a break-up of her entire world.

What she wishes she could tell herself now is that the worst thing that could ever happen to her became undeniably the best thing. Fifteen years on from her separation and stronger and happier than she has ever been, this is Sarah's guide to breaking up well, so that you can rise from the ashes as powerful and authentic as you can be.

With stories of her own, from dating 'sad dads' to holidaying as a solo parent with kids, Sarah shares her mistakes so you don't have to make the same ones. She gathers wisdom from relationship psychologists, sociologists, lawyers and divorce coaches; and advice from many others who've been through messy break-ups on such things as 'bird-nesting' adjustments, co-parenting well, and when to introduce new partners to your kids.

How to Break Up Well teaches you how to grow in strength by: finding your support network, regaining your confidence, practising self-care and identifying what you want and need from singledom. You will also read about how to leave a difficult relationship, the most effective ways of fighting for your kids and your assets, how to blend families with a new partner, and how to learn from your break-up so you can charge into the next chapter of your life fully healed.

How to be calm and content in a chaotic world

With 50 practical and easy-to-follow life hacks, this book will make you a calmer, happier and more chilled-out version of yourself.

The Buddha worked out how best to deal with the challenges we face today over 2000 years ago. His teachings show us that human stress, anxiety and suffering are nothing new.

Life Hacks from the Buddha will help you to quieten your mind, create more peaceful environments to live in, and find the calm and contentment you need to help you function at your very best, which will leave a lasting impression on everyone around you.

'Full of great tips for your mental wellbeing' - Sir John Kirwan

'Brilliant, relevant, practical. Ancient Eastern wisdom meets modern science' - Art Green

Join At the Bay | I te Kokoru and Time Out Books to celebrate the launch of One to Many and other experiments by Sharni Wilson. Launched by Ellie Kivinen of the Writers' Café Auckland, the event will feature wine, cheese, a very short reading and book signing. Books will be available for purchase on the night, downstairs at Time Out.

One to Many delves into relationships and their beginnings, middles and ends; how one person relates to another or to many others in circles of intimacy and exclusion.

An obsession with an internet stranger or with the one who got away. Asserting ownership over a lover or watching, helpless, as they recede on a mysterious tide. Relationships that stagnate or explode, that fail to launch or simmer with jealousy, desire or unrequited longing. Workplace and family skeletons. Explorations of artificial procreation and motherhood.

Prose, poetry and translation hybridise at unexpected intersections and dance in surreal meta-landscapes.

Cover art Mallory Morrison

Addictive. The best kind of experiment; an ambitiously hybrid and surreal work – Jen Calleja, author of Vehicle and I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For

Fiction at its most inventive – Ellie Kivinen, Writers’ Café Auckland

Wilson merges original work with translations, poetry with prose, social realism with science fiction and futuristic narratives. This collection showcases the strange and beautiful things that can happen when genre boundaries are crossed and narrative conventions are pushed to their limits. Familiar becomes unfamiliar; ordinary activities take on extraordinary or even terrifying qualities. The biological realities of parenthood are examined from many angles: at times poignant, at other times deeply creepy. There is an unrelenting interrogation of stories, of language itself, and of human relationships. This is a wide-ranging and consistently fascinating work. – Airini Beautrais, author of Bug Week & Other Stories and The Beautiful Afternoon

An arresting, exhilarating, unstable bricolage – sometimes dystopic, sometimes chick lit-ish, sometimes futuristic, sometimes topically issue-driven and sometimes socially realistic: its deft zigzagging between genres offers true hybridity – David Eggleton & Harry Ricketts, At the Bay | I te Kokoru competition convenors

About the author
Born and raised in Kirikiriroa, Sharni Wilson is an award-winning writer of fiction and a Japanese-to-English literary translator. She is the translator of Swan Knight by Fumio Takano (Luna Press, 2024). Her work has appeared in Landfall, World Literature Today and the Malahat Review, among others. One to Many and other experiments is her first book.

Join us to celebrate the launch of Becoming Tangata Tiriti: Working with Māori, Honouring the Treaty, by Avril Bell.

***

6pm
Wednesday 7 August

Mt Eden Village Centre
449 Mt Eden Road
Auckland

Thanks to Time Out Bookstore for bookselling on the night and Mt Eden Village Centre for hosting us!

RSVP to pressmarketing@auckland.ac.nz

Finance was at the centre of every stage of the colonisation of Aotearoa, from the
sale of Māori lands and the emigration of early colonists to the founding of settler
nationhood and the enforcement of colonial governance.

Join us in Time Out’s cosy upstairs space for a talk by Catherine Comyn on her
Ockham-longlisted book, The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa (ESRA, 2023).
This book tells the story of the financial instruments and imperatives that drove the
British colonial project in the nineteenth century. This is a history of the joint stock
company, a speculative London property market that romanticised the distant lands
of indigenous peoples, and the calculated use of credit and taxation by the British to
dispossess Māori of their land and subject them to colonial rule.

By illuminating the centrality of finance in the colonisation of Aotearoa, Comyn not
only reframes the understanding of this country’s history, but also the stakes of anti-
colonial struggle today.

Catherine Comyn (Ngāti Ranginui, Pākehā) is a PhD candidate in International
Political Economy at King’s College London. Her research focuses on finance capital
and colonisation, and possibilities for their overcoming.

Praise for The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa:

“The most stimulating book I have read on the colonisation of Aotearoa from the
exciting new generation of scholars”
- Jane Kelsey

“entirely novel, and desperately needed”
- Arama Rata

“Theoretically sophisticated, historically precise, and politically urgent”
- Max Haiven

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Wilbur Sargunaraj is a musician, speaker, and Cultural Intelligence Facilitator based in Treaty 6 Territory, Canada and India.  His years of cross-cultural experience, combined with his genuine love for connecting with people from diverse backgrounds, have given him a unique voice in the field of CQ.  Wilbur has pioneered a series of interactive and ground-breaking CQ concert events, exhibitions and workshops.  His focus is on helping individuals and organizations navigate today’s multicultural complexities by sharing valuable knowledge and fascinating anecdotes from his journeys.  Wilbur was born in a small prairie town on Treaty 7 Territory, Alberta, Canada; grew up in sweltering Tamil Nadu, India; and now resides in the freezing Canadian Prairies.  

Please note this event is upstairs.

Acclaimed Canadian author Norman Nawrocki launches his two new books of fiction, Red Squared Montreal and Isabelle Walks With Angels, A Montreal Urban Legend, Saturday September 30, 2023 @ Time Out Bookstore, 432 Mt Eden Road, Mt Eden Village, Auckland, 7pm. For this multi-media double launch he will read book excerpts, play his treated violin and screen a new short film, Isabelle Walks With Angels.

Red Squared Montreal book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fL3LJcPM1Pc      
Isabelle film & book teaser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1THJQ4cbEBk

BOOK & FILM DESCRIPTIONS:

Isabelle Walks With Angels, A Montreal Urban Legend (Les Pages Noires, 2023), is an extraordinary magical realist short story (embedded in an artbook) about a despairing woman who meets an all-women biker gang. Nawrocki says he wrote the story “for all the Isabelles of the world, shunted aside, marginalized and ignored.”

Isabelle Walks With Angels, the film, was created by the Montreal multi-disciplinary artist collective Isabelle’s Angels. It blends theatre, dance, animation, visual art and music (by one of Nawrocki’s bands, DaZoque!) and interprets his short story of the same name. 

Red Squared Montreal (Black Rose Books, 2023) revisits and reframes the historic and bloody student strike and mass social rebellion of 2012 that rocked Quebec, especially Montreal. It was the largest and longest civil disobedience movement in Canadian history involving hundreds of thousands. 

Norman Nawrocki is the author of sixteen books of fiction and poetry (with translations in French & Italian), two dozen plays, cabarets and musicals, and can be found on 68 albums of music. He tours the world and sometimes teaches.

Many apologies, this Instagram Live has been postponed.
Stay tuned for further details.

After Sarah Jane Barnett had a hysterectomy in her forties, a comment by her doctor that she wouldn't be "less of a woman" prompted her to investigate what the concept of womanhood meant to her. Part memoir, part feminist manifesto, part coming-of-middle-age story, Notes on Womanhood is the result. Here, Barnett examines the devastation she inflicted on herself as a young woman, the invisibility she feels as her youth fades, the power of female friendship, the stories women learn about midlife and menopause, and how being the daughter of a transgender woman changed her ideas of womanhood.

Reviews

I loved this book. It’s the kind of book you don’t know you need until you read it. Then you realise you really, really do – and, also, that many of your friends will too. – Ingrid Horrocks

Author description

Sarah Jane Barnett is an Aotearoa writer and editor. Her poetry, essays, interviews and reviews have been published widely in Aotearoa journals and magazines, as well as in Australia and the US. Her debut poetry collection A Man Runs into a Woman was a finalist in the 2013 New Zealand Post Book Awards. Her second collection WORK was published in October 2015. You can find her at: sarahjanebarnett.net

About the event:
Philip McKibbin, author of Love Notes: for a Politics of Love (New York: Lantern Books, 2019), will present a talk on the Politics of Love, a radical vision of politics. Following the talk, there will be an opportunity for discussion.

About the book:
In Love Notes, a collection of articles, essays, and presentations, Philip McKibbin introduces the Politics of Love and explores the possibilities of this emerging theory. The Politics of Love affirms the importance of love and reimagines our relationships: to ourselves, each other, non-human animals, and the natural environment. This love is inclusive, critical, generous, and constructive. Instead of a politics of fear and distrust, of separation and narrow-mindedness, the Politics of Love presents a new vision that extends beyond individuals, families, the nation state, and even human beings: it is love that will bring about justice for other species, and it may also enable us to address climate change. This book presents an intellectual journey; it charts a course for the future, and invites you to help take the Politics of Love forward. www.apoliticsoflove.com

About the author:
Philip McKibbin is a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand. He is of Pākehā (NZ European) and Māori (Ngāi Tahu) descent. He has written for the Guardian, Renegade Inc, and Takahē. He holds a Master of Arts in Philosophy from The University of Auckland, and diplomas in te reo Māori (the Māori language) from Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. He first wrote about the Politics of Love in 2015, with his friend and fellow New Zealander Max Harris. In 2018, they hosted “The Politics of Love: A Conference” at All Souls College, Oxford. www.philip-mckibbin.com

RSVP to p.r.mckibbin@gmail.com