Pre-ordering is essential for the book being available to you on the evening as the title will be imported internationally.

About the book:

A fresh narrative history of the rise of Rome's empire in Italy, that exposes the monumental expansion of the Roman familial, social, political, and militaristic way of living across Italy.Before the Romans could become masters of the Mediterranean, they had to first conquer the people of their own peninsula. This book explores the origins of Roman imperialism and the creation of Rome's early Italian empire, bringing new light and interpretations to this important but problematic period in Roman history. It explains how and why the Romans were able to expand their influence within Italy, often through the use of armed conflict, laying the foundations for their great imperial project.This book critically reexamines and reframes the traditional literary narrative within an archaeologically informed, archaic Italian context. Jeremy Armstrong presents a new interpretation of the early Roman army, highlighting the fluid and family-driven character which is increasingly visible in the evidence. Drawing on recent developments within the field of early Roman studies, Children of Mars argues that the emergence of Rome's empire in Italy should not be seen as the spread of a distinct "Roman" people across Italian land, but rather the expansion of a social, political, and military network amongst the Italian people. Armstrong suggests that Rome's early empire was a fundamentally human and relational one. While this reinterpretation of early Roman imperialism is no less violent than the traditional model, it alters its core dynamic and nature, and thus shifts the entire trajectory of Rome's Republican history.FeaturesA fresh narrative history of the rise of Rome that assimilates the most current historical and archaeological researchDevelops a new model for understanding early Roman expansion within Italy, that puts social networks and familial connections at its coreOffers a new interpretaion of the early Roman army and its evolution

About the author:
Jeremy Armstrong is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Auckland, New Zealand and the author of Early Roman Warfare: From the Regal Period to the First Punic War and War and Society in Early Rome: From Warlords to Generals.

these poems were made during five years of eating and living in glaschu, scotland. they should not be taken as reviews - nor should the quality of the poems necessarily be seen to reflect on the quality of any food or place which may bare a similar name, in either a positive or negative light.

Food, culture, history, race, food. No-one combines these subjects like Glasgow based, England born, of Hong Kong heritage Sean Wai Keung.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Sean Wai Keung is a Glasgow-based poet and performer. His pamphlet you are mistaken won the Rialto Open Pamphlet Competition 2016 and he has also released how to cook and be happy, both with Speculative Books. He has developed solo performances with the National Theatre of Scotland, where he was a Starter Artist in 2017, Anatomy Arts, Magnetic North and the Fringe of Colour, and is also a poetry editor at EX/POST magazine. He holds degrees from Roehampton University, London, and the University of East Anglia, Norwich and has been published in 404Ink, Blood Bath, datableedzine and The Suburban Review, amongst others. Full credits can be found at seanwaikeung.carrd.co

It's getting colder as the flames
rise from the bonfires, real and virtual.
See how they flicker in the darkling air.

What is happiness in a suddenly unfamiliar world? What happens to us once the old connections spark and disappear? In this new poetry collection, with his characteristic humanity, intelligence and humour, Harry Ricketts writes of youth, hope, books and writers, and the friendships through which we come to know ourselves. Included in this book are poems about finding one's way through a world altered by loss, and the magical thinking that sustains us.

Harry Ricketts is a poet and literary scholar and has published around 30 books. He has lived in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, since 1981. Until his retirement in 2022, he was a professor in the English Programme at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. His books include the internationally acclaimed The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling (1999) and Strange Meetings: The Lives of the Poets of the Great War (2010). Recent poetry collections include Winter Eyes (2018) and Selected Poems (2021). With historian David Kynaston, he is the co-author of Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes: The Story of an Ashes Classic (Bloomsbury, 2024). His two most recent books with Te Herenga Waka University Press are the memoir First Things (2024) and the poetry collection Bonfires on the Ice (2025).

Steve Braunias is a multiple award-winning author, columnist, journalist and editor. He writes for the New Zealand Listener, serves as the literary editor of Newsroom, and is the author of 14 books. Steve was part of The New Zealand Herald reporting team who won Best Coverage of a Major News Event at the 2025 Voyager Media Awards for their coverage of the Polkinghorne trial.

Venue: Upstairs at Time Out Bookstore, 432 Mt Eden Road
Date: 24th October
Time: 7 – 9:00 pm

Free entry: all welcome. Bring a friend.

Join Estelle Bingham and Emma Farry as they share their healing journeys and read from their books, Manifest Your True Essence and Be Love: The Book of Reminders. This is a free community event and everyone is warmly welcome.

Estelle Bingham – author of Manifest Your True Essence
Emma Farry – author of Be Love: The Book of Reminders

Expect soulful conversation, laughter, and a heart-expanding evening in one of Auckland’s most beloved bookstores. Come and celebrate the magic of words, community, and connection. Estelle and Emma will share readings from their acclaimed books, and signed copies for you to take home.

An unsparing investigation into Spotify's origins and influence on music, weaving unprecedented reporting with incisive cultural criticism, illuminating how streaming is reshaping music for listeners and artists alike.

Drawing on over a hundred interviews with industry insiders, former Spotify employees and musicians, Mood Machine takes us to the inner workings of today's highly consolidated record business, showing what has changed as music has become increasingly playlisted, personalized and autoplayed.

Building on her years of wide-ranging reporting on streaming, music journalist Liz Pelly details the consequences of the Spotify model by examining both sides of what the company calls its two-sided marketplace: the listeners who pay with their dollars and data, and the musicians who provide the material powering it all.  The music business is notoriously opaque, but here Pelly lifts the veil on major stories like streaming services filling popular playlists with low-cost stock music and the rise of new payola-like practices.

For all of the inequities exacerbated by streaming, Pelly also finds hope in chronicling the artist-led fight for better models, pointing toward what must be done collectively to revalue music and create sustainable systems.  A timely exploration of a company that has become synonymous with music, Mood Machine will change the way you think about and listen to music.

Songs from the Shaky Isles is a fast-paced, big-picture account of how popular music arose in our far-flung island nation. It shows how wider society influenced, and was itself impacted by the country's musical culture, but with plenty of room for outrageous anecdotes and insightful analysis. It's a treat for music fans and history buffs alike.

From early Māori waiata and European settler folk songs that could only be heard in person through to modern pop/hip- hop hits that have spread digitally to all ends of the earth, this book is the complete guide to the bands and the songs that have reached iconic NZ status.

Songs from the Shaky Isles is a pictorial feast and features bands and musicians including Boh Runga from Stellar (featured on the cover), Bic Runga, Benee, The Chills, Dave Dobbyn, The Mockers, Fat Freddy’s Drop, Margaret Urlich, Jenny Morris, Lorde, Sir Howard Morrison, Ray Columbus, Max Merritt, The Human Instinct, Savage, Shihad, Shapeshifter, Six60, Scribe, Tex Morton, Walter Smith, Split Enz and so many more.

Gareth Shute has a wide-ranging understanding of popular music in New Zealand, which gives him a singular perspective on how it has progressed over the last century and a half. He is also a gigging musician with garage rock band, Thee Golden Geese. Since 2002, he has also helped run the label Lil Chief Records and in the first decade of the label he toured internationally with two of its bands: The Brunettes and The Ruby Suns. This gives him a unique insight as someone who not only researches local music history but is directly involved in the scene on a weekly basis.

The stories of sex workers in New Zealand as they changed the world.

In June 2003, New Zealand became the first country to decriminalise sex work. Through the lived experiences of twenty-five individuals who worked on the ships and the streets, in massage parlours and as private escorts, Untold Intimacies tells the story of sex work and its transformation in Aotearoa over thirty critical years.

This history carries readers from the regulation of brothels with the Massage Parlours Act of 1978, through the struggle for decriminalisation to the legally mandated national review of the law in 2008. Drawing on new and archival interviews, the story is told through the first-hand experiences of sex workers themselves – how they dealt with police, violence and health risks, and how they organised to change their world.

Untold Intimacies presents an in-depth historical investigation into the lives of some of the first people in the world to experience the transition to the decriminalisation of sex work.

Author

Dr Cheryl Ware is a historian of sex, gender and health in late-twentieth-century Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. She is the author of HIV Survivors in Sydney: Memories of the Epidemic (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) which received endorsement from internationally recognised leaders in oral history, Australian history, and histories of HIV and AIDS. Cheryl has held a Royal Society Te Apārangi Marsden Fund Fast-Start Grant, a Judith Binney Writing Award and a Kate Edger Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship for her research on histories of sex work, and was shortlisted for the New Zealand Historical Association’s Mary Boyd Prize for the best article on any aspect of New Zealand history. Cheryl has conducted over 120 in-depth interviews across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand and served on the executive committee of the National Oral History Association of New Zealand from 2018 to 2024. She completed Untold Intimacies as a senior research fellow at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland.

Endorsements

‘This is a serious and engaging account of our diverse sex worker histories. It captures a period that spans a tremendous change in policy and law for sex workers in Aotearoa New Zealand.’
— Dame Catherine Healy

‘This is a great book that straddles the fields of gender, sexuality, legal and social histories. It could have significant international appeal as histories of sex work are few and far between. International scholars will be able to look to Untold Intimacies as a key foundational reference.’
— Professor Noah Riseman, author of Transgender Australia: A History Since 1910

‘Untold Intimacies makes a significant contribution to New Zealand historical writing as well as the global literature on sex work. It will take its place as a significant intervention in the scholarship on the history of prostitution, sexuality, policing, violence, gender and women.’
— Professor Frank Bongiorno, Australian National University

‘This book provides a valuable contribution to scholarship in documenting the oral histories of sex workers in Aotearoa in the period 1978–2008. It offers excellent insight into this period of history that readers will learn a lot from. The storytelling is compelling and creates a sense for the reader of ‘getting to know’ participants. The stories feel authentic and are told in a way that unpacks the complexities and contradictions of the lives and experiences of its protagonists.’
— Associate Professor Lynzi Armstrong, Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington

A stunning debut novel about love, guilt and forgiveness. If you loved Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts by Josie Shapiro, you will adore The Stars are a Million Glittering Worlds.

Thea, a young woman crippled by guilt, flees to Central America to escape her life. In Guatemala, she meets the charismatic Chris and his partner, Sarah, and the three of them form a tight bond. But everything changes when a tragedy occurs.

Thea soon finds herself in a new relationship, bonded to her partner by grief. Together they do their best to start over in Hobart, but when tragedy strikes again - bringing up unanswered questions for Thea - she realises that if she wants to know the truth, she will need to come clean about her past.

Reviews
'A compelling plot, fully-imagined characters, and beautifully-observed settings. Butson gently guides the reader on a journey marked by pain, secrets and guilt to a place of forgiveness, acceptance and peace. A stunning debut.' - Laurence Fearnley

Author description
Gina Butson is a former lawyer who completed her MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) in 2023. Her short fiction has been published in Newsroom, Salient and Turbine. Gina won the Salient Creative Writing competition and was Highly Commended in the Sargeson Prize in 2024.

A first poetry collection full of telenoid daydreams and androids in the bureaucracy.

I was born this way.
I was made to be soft and pleasant to touch.
It’s the silicone. Father is considering
polyvinyl chloride for my future siblings
because it’s cheaper. I hope you understand
how special that makes me.

Were you born this way too?
Your body is not smooth but it is warm.

Exploring the ambiguities, paradoxes and kinships between human and machine in this first poetry collection, Jiaqiao Liu conjures passionate robots and open-source body hacking, password managers and fuzzy moon rovers, missed communications and learned sensations. Drawing on Chinese mythologies and experiments in form, Liu pulls us into a world that feels familiar to twenty-first-century cybercitizens, yet is new and strange to inhabit.

Is it natural to grow up?
Are you growing down?
Where will I grow up to?

Jiaqiao Liu (they/he) is a poet from Shandong, China, who grew up in Tāmaki Makaurau. Their writing has been included in journals including The Spinoff, badapple and OF ZOOS, as well as in anthologies such as Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems 2017 and A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand (Auckland University Press, 2021). Jiaqiao has an MA in creative writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. Dear Alter is their first book.

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

About the book: https://aucklanduniversitypress.co.nz/in-the-half...

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