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Scribe Catalog

THE DARK CLOUD

The Hidden Costs of the Digital World Guillaume Pitron (trans. Bianca Jacobsohn)

A gripping new investigation into the underbelly of digital technology, which reveals not only how costly the virtual world is, but how damaging it is to the environment.

The Dark Cloud is the searing exposé of the immense toll the “cloud” takes on our environment. A simple “like” sent from our smartphones mobilizes a cascade of invisible consequences. This small notification, crossing the seven operating layers of the internet, travels around the world, using submarine cables, telephone antennas, and data centers, going as far as the Arctic Circle in what will soon constitute the largest infrastructure built by man.

It turns out that the digital world, essential for communicating, working, and consuming, is much more tangible than we would like to believe. Today, it absorbs 10 percent of the world’s electricity and represents nearly 4 percent of the planet’s carbon dioxide emissions. We are struggling to understand these impacts, as they are obscured to us in the mirage of “the cloud.”

In this follow-up to his global bestselling book, The Rare Metals War, Pitron, a journalist, researched the dark truth behind the easy mirage of our digital world, in an investigation carried out over two years, across four continents. The result shows the anatomy of a technology virtual only in name. Pitron argues that the cloud needs to be exposed and understood—because our future is implicated.

Praise for The Rare Metals War:

“Pitron weighs the awful price of refining the materials, ably blending investigative journalism with insights from science, politics and business.”
Simon Ings, New Scientist

“[E]xposes the dirty underpinnings of clean technologies in a debut that raises valid questions about energy extraction.”
Publishers Weekly

“An expert account of a poorly understood but critical element in our economy … Pitron delivers a gripping, detailed, and discouraging explanation.”
Kirkus Reviews

“This illuminating report from journalist Pitron (The Rare Metals War) … succeeds in exposing the unseen hardware and processes that keep the modern world running … Anyone who’s ever wondered where, exactly, “the cloud” is located will want to check this out.”

Publishers Weekly

Guillaume Pitron

Guillaume Pitron, born in 1980, is a French award-winning journalist and documentary-maker for France’s leading television channels. His work focuses on commodities and on the economic, political, and environmental issues associated with their use. The Rare Metals War, his first book, sold 80,000 copies in France and has been translated into ten languages. Guillaume Pitron holds a master’s degree in international law from the University of Georgetown (Washington, DC), and is a TEDx speaker. More information at www.en-guillaumepitron.com.

BULLDOZED

Scott Morrison’s Fall and Anthony Albanese’s Rise Niki Savva

WINNER OF THE 2023 ABIA GENERAL NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD

“The gripping inside story of how Scott Morrison went from miracle man to roadkill. Savva portrays a fatally flawed leader who trashed his government, his party, and his legacy.”
—Laurie Oakes

Between 2013 and 2022, Tony Abbott begat Malcolm Turnbull, who begat Scott Morrison. For nine long years, Australia was governed by a succession of Coalition governments rocked by instability and bloodletting, and consumed with prosecuting climate and culture wars while neglecting policy.

By the end, among his detractors—and there were plenty—Morrison was seen as the worst prime minister since Billy McMahon. Worse even than Tony Abbott, who lasted a scant two years in the job, whose main legacy was that he destroyed Julia Gillard, then himself, and then Turnbull.

Morrison failed to accept the mantle of national leadership, or to deal adequately with the challenges of natural disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic. He thought reform was a vanity project. He said he never wanted to leave a legacy. He got his wish.

Niki Savva, Australia’s renowned political commentator, author, and columnist, was there for all of it. In The Road to Ruin, she revealed the ruinous behavior of former prime minister Abbott and his chief of staff, Peta Credlin, that led to the ascension of Turnbull. In Plots and Prayers, she told the inside story of the coup that overthrew Turnbull and installed his conniving successor, Morrison.

Now she lays out the final unravelling of the Coalition at the hands of a resurgent Labor and the so-called teal independents that culminated in the historic 2022 election. With her typical access to key players, and her riveting accounts of what went on behind the scenes, Bulldozed is the unique final volume of an unputdownable and impeccably sourced political trilogy.


‘I don’t hold a hose, mate.’ Scott Morrison, 20 December 2019, on the Black Summer bushfires
‘It’s not a race.’ Scott Morrison, 11 March 2021, on the COVID-19 vaccine rollout

“Savva’s blunt and often eye-popping account of the Morrison Government has smashed the mould of contemporary writing on our country’s political contest … Savva’s book reflects the wisdom of her judgements about politics and people formed over decades as a political reporter, and the quality of her skills as a wordsmith. Bulldozed is also the third instalment of her account of the federal Coalition which gives readers an unparalleled view of a very particular period in Australian politics … Savva’s trilogy of books demonstrates how the finest in her profession can both gain an unparalleled insight into how politics really works but emerge on the other side with their independence intact.”

Judges’ comments for the 2023 Australian Political Book of the Year award

Niki Savva

Niki Savva is one of the most senior correspondents in the Canberra Press Gallery. She was twice political correspondent for The Australian, and headed up the Canberra bureaus of both The Herald Sun and The Age. When family tragedy forced a career change, she became Peter Costello’s press secretary for six years and was then on John Howard’s staff for three. Her work has brought her into intimate contact with Australia’s major political players for more than 40 years. She is a regular columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, and often appears on ABC TV’s Insiders.

Her first book, So Greek, a memoir, provided rare insights into the relationship between Howard and Costello, and the workings of their government. The Road to Ruin, the first volume in what became her trilogy about Australia’s Coalition governments that ruled from 2013 to 2022, was a major bestseller, and won the 2016 General Nonfiction Book of the Year Award at the Australian Book Industry Awards. The second volume, Plots and Prayers, which dealt with the government led by Malcolm Turnbull and the ascension of Scott Morrison, was also a bestseller. The third volume, Bulldozed, which dealt with the demise of the government led by Scott Morrison Turnbull and the ascension of Anthony Albanese, was also a major bestseller and won the 2023 General Nonfiction Book of the Year Award at the Australian Book Industry Awards.

In March 2017, the Melbourne Press Club presented Niki with a lifetime achievement award for ‘outstanding coverage of Australian politics as a reporter, columnist and author’.

BIRTH CANAL

Dias Novita Wuri

This dazzling novella from a rising star of Indonesian literature explores generational legacies, lost loves, the damage that war does to men, and the damage that men do to women.

In today’s Jakarta, an unnamed man tells the story of his lifelong friend Nastiti, and what happened on the day she vanished. In the Dutch East Indies’ Semarang, a young Indo-Dutch girl, Rukmini, is captured by the Japanese military and is forced into prostitution. Years later, Arini travels to the Netherlands to share her mother’s dark past with a researcher.

After the American occupation of Japan in WWII ends, a former war photographer revisits his memories of Hanako, the wife of a traumatised ex-Imperial soldier, but can’t escape his own darkness. And in present-day Osaka, a young Indonesian woman, Dara, haunted by her past and struggling to conceive, becomes obsessed with a Japanese porn star.

Full of surprising turns, and in stunning prose, Birth Canal tells the interwoven stories of women that span time and history.

Birth Canal was written with a dripping golden pen. Captivating and devastating, the stories of these women are told with truth and love.”

Laura McPhee-Browne, author of Cherry Beach and Little Plum

Dias Novita Wuri

Dias Novita Wuri was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1989. She graduated from Universitas Indonesia, majoring in Russian Language and Literature. In 2019, she earned a master’s degree in Comparative Literature from Queen Mary University of London. She has had short stories published in Indonesian newspapers since 2012. She has published two books, Jalan Lahir and Makramé, which was on the Khatulistiwa Literary Award longlist. She served as adviser in the literary section of the editorial board of jakartabeat.net.

A LITTLE GIVE

The Unsung, Unseen, Undone Work of Women Marina Benjamin

Sometimes I think that carrying—other people, the continuity of history, generational identity, the emotional load of the everyday—is the main thing that women do.

In Marina Benjamin’s new set of interlinked essays, she turns her astute eye to the tasks once termed “women’s work”. From cooking and cleaning to caring for an aging relative, A Little Give depicts domestic life anew: as a site of paradox and conflict, but also of solace and profound meaning. Here, productivity sits alongside self-erasure, resentment with tenderness, and the animal self is never far away, perpetually threatening to break through.

Drawing on the work of figures such as Natalia Ginzburg, Paula Rego, and Virginia Woolf, Benjamin writes with fierce candor of the struggle to overwrite the gender conditioning that pulls her back into “the mud-world of pre-feminism” even as she attempts to haul herself out. From her upbringing as the child of immigrants with fixed traditional values, to looking after her mother and seeing her teenager move out of home, she examines her relationships with with family, community, her body, even language itself. Ultimately, she shows that a woman’s true work may lie at the heart of her humanity, in the pursuit both of transformation and of deep acceptance.

“Acerbic and tender all at once, A Little Give voices the unspeakable tangle of feelings that assail women in middle age. I can think of few writers so astute and exact as Marina Benjamin.”

Katherine May, author of Wintering,

Marina Benjamin

Marina Benjamin’s most recent books are Insomnia, The Middlepause, Rocket Dreams, shortlisted for the Eugene Emme Award, and Last Days in Babylon, longlisted for the Wingate Prize. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and the digital magazines Literary Hub and Aeon, where she is a senior editor. She lives in London.

NAKED AMBITION

Robert Gott

“You’re a politician, a public figure. What on earth were you thinking?”

Up-and-coming junior minister Gregory Buchanan has had a portrait painted of himself by the acclaimed artist Sophie White—a painting she intends to enter in this year’s Archibald Prize. Until then, Gregory has hung it in pride of place on his dining-room wall. It’s a life-sized standing portrait, practically photographic in nature. And it’s a nude.

His wife will be home soon and he thinks the painting will be a pleasant surprise. Even more surprising will be an unexpected accumulation of guests: his sardonic mother, his fundamentalist mother-in-law, his lesbian sister, and the state governor, Louisa Wetherly—a senior government member has just resigned in scandalous circumstances, and she needs Gregory to step into the spotlight ahead of the coming election.

It’s going to be a wild afternoon, and an even wilder campaign—to do something about Gregory’s naked ambition.

“A madcap, witty delight—it’s like Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward, but naked.”

Toni Jordan, author of Dinner with the Schnabels and Prettier If She Smiled More

Robert Gott

Robert Gott was born in the Queensland town of Maryborough in 1957, and lives in Melbourne. He has published many books for children, and is also the creator of the newspaper cartoon The Adventures of Naked Man. He is the author of the William Power series of crime-caper novels set in 1940s Australia, comprising Good Murder, A Thing of Blood, Amongst the Dead, and The Serpent’s Sting, and of the Murders series, comprising The Holiday Murders, The Port Fairy Murders, The Autumn Murders, and The Orchard Murders.

TAKING SIDES

A Memoir About Love, War, and Changing the World Sherine Tadros

The deeply moving memoir of an award-winning war correspondent turned activist—and her rousing defense of human rights in times of resurgent authoritarianism.

As a broadcast journalist for Sky News and Al Jazeera, Sherine Tadros was trained to tell only the facts, as dispassionately as possible. But how can you remain neutral when reporting from war zones, or witnessing brutal state repression?

For twenty-six years, Tadros grew up in the quiet surroundings of her family’s London home, and yet injustice was something her Egyptian immigrant parents could never shelter her from. From her first journalistic assignment trapped inside a war zone in the Gaza Strip, to covering the Arab uprisings that changed the course of history, Tadros searched for ways to make a difference in people’s lives. But it wasn’t until her fiancé left her on their wedding day, and her life fell apart, that she found the courage to find her true purpose. It was the beginning of a journey leading to her current work for Amnesty International at the United Nations, where she lobbies governments to ensure that human rights are protected around the world.

With the compassion and verve of a clear-sighted campaigner and a natural storyteller, Tadros shares her remarkable journey from witnessing injustice to fighting it head-on in the corridors of power.

Taking Sides isn’t just a memoir but a call to action. It’s a testimony to how fighting inequality and injustice takes continuous engagement by those who choose to step up.”

Leymah Gbowee, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Liberian peace activist

Sherine Tadros

Sherine Tadros is the Deputy Director of Advocacy and Representative to the United Nations for Amnesty International, promoting human rights around the world. Until 2016, Tadros was a Middle East correspondent and news anchor for Al Jazeera English and Sky News, where among other events she reported on the Gaza Wars of 2008 and 2014, the Arab Uprisings, and the rise of the Islamic State group in Iraq. She’s received a Peabody Award, an Emmy nomination, and several Royal Television Society Awards, and has spoken widely, including at the UN General Assembly and a Rwandan peacebuilding conference, as well as moderating the FIFA Conference for Equality and Inclusion in Zurich. Tadros lives in New York and can be found on Twitter @SherineT.

FARM

The Making of a Climate Activist Nicola Harvey

"More than a memoir, Farm is a call to arms for farmers to do better, for people to understand food systems better, and for all of us to join together and help heal the planet."
Matthew Evans

Is it possible to survive as a new farmer and change the future of farming at the same time?


For years we’ve been told that the food system is destroying the planet. That there are too many cows and tractors, too much fertilizer, too much waste, and that farmers and food manufacturers are polluting our atmosphere. But we’ve also been told that food can help save us from the worst of global warming. How can it be both destroyer and savior?

In 2018, Nicola Harvey and her husband, Pat, left their careers and inner-city Sydney life to farm cattle in rural New Zealand. They thought it would be exciting, even relaxing, but soon found themselves in the middle of heated arguments and deep divisions about food, farming, and climate change.

In this profoundly personal story, Harvey takes readers into the heart of the industrialized global food system to share what life on the land is like when you’re a new farmer just trying to survive—and change the status quo.

At odds with her family and struggling to find a place within her new community, Nicola is at first outraged at the lack of action to curb global warming. When she realizes, though, that we're all being sold a false fix, she begins to transform the farm into a site of activism. In the kitchen and on the land, Nicola finds hope and a path towards a cooler future.

“Through her storytelling and reporting, Nicola Harvey renders in full color arguments about food and climate change that too often are portrayed as black and white. Humanity, compassion, and rigorous research make this an essential book for both those working on food system issues and those who simply care about food.”

Alicia Kennedy, food and drink writer, author of No Meat Required

Nicola Harvey

Nicola Harvey is a writer, producer, and a farmer. Previously with BuzzFeed as a managing editor, she's now a podcast producer, with credits under her belt including Pretty For an Aboriginal, Debutante, and A Carnivore's Crisis, the latter with Rachel Khoo.

THE LAST YAKUZA

Life and Death in the Japanese Underworld Jake Adelstein

The Last Yakuza tells the history of the yakuza like it’s never been told before in this gripping, true crime story by the author of Tokyo Vice.

Makoto Saigo is half-American and half-Japanese, living in small-town Japan. He has two talents: playing guitar and picking fights. When his dream of being a rock star fails to materialize, he turns to the only place where you can start from the bottom and move up through sheer performance, loyalty, and brute force—the yakuza.

Saigo, nicknamed Tsunami, quickly realizes that even within the organization, opinions are as varied as they come, and a clash of philosophies can quickly become deadly. One screw-up can cost you your life, or at least a finger.

The internal politics of the yakuza are dizzyingly complex, and between the ever-shifting web of alliances and the encroaching hand of the law that pushes them further and further underground, Saigo finds himself in the middle of a defining decades-long battle that will determine the future of the yakuza.

Written with the insight of an expert on Japanese organized crime and the compassion of a longtime friend, investigative journalist Jake Adelstein presents a sprawling biography of a yakuza, through postwar desperation, to bubble-era optimism, to the present. Including a cast of memorable yakuza bosses—Coach, the Buddha, and more—this is a story about the rise and fall of a man, a country, and a dishonest but sometimes honorable way of life on the brink of being lost.

“Journalist Adelstein parlays decades of reporting on Japanese organized crime into a propulsive history of the yakuza. Drawing on interviews with both his yakuza and Japanese law enforcement contacts, he examines how yakuza groups obtained power … He’s especially good at tracing the yakuza’s political influence in Japan, explaining how they bribed and blackmailed legislators into opposing bills that would have curbed their influence. Painstakingly reported and paced like a thriller, this is a must read for anyone interested in organized crime.”

Publishers Weekly

Jake Adelstein

Jake Adelstein has been an investigative journalist in Japan since 1993, reporting in both Japanese and English. From 2006 to 2007 he was the chief investigator for a US State Department-sponsored study of human trafficking in Japan. He has been writing for The Daily Beast, The Japan Times, and other publications since 2011, and was a special correspondent for The Los Angeles Times. Considered one of the foremost experts on organised crime in Japan, he works as a writer and consultant in Japan and the United States. He co-hosted and co-wrote the award-winning podcast about missing people in Nippon, The Evaporated: gone with the gods in 2023. He is the author of Tokyo Vice: a western reporter on the police beat in Japan, which is now a series on HBO Max, and also The Last Yakuza: life and death in the Japanese underworld (2023).He has appeared on CNN, NPR, the BBC, France 24, and other media outlets as a commentator on social issues in Japan, as well as its criminal justice system, politics, and nuclear industry giant, TEPCO.

THE AUTISTS

Women on the Spectrum Clara Törnvall (trans. Alice E. Olsson)

An incisive and deeply candid account that explores autistic women in culture, myth, and society through the prism of the author’s own diagnosis.

Until the 1980s, autism was regarded as a condition found mostly in boys. Even in our time, autistic girls and women have largely remained undiagnosed. When portrayed in popular culture, women on the spectrum often appear simply as copies of their male counterparts — talented and socially awkward.

Yet autistic women exist, and always have. They are varied in their interests and in their experiences. Autism may be relatively new as a term and a diagnosis, but not as a way of being and functioning in the world. It has always been part of the human condition. So who are these women, and what does it mean to see the world through their eyes?

In The Autists, Clara Törnvall reclaims the language to describe autism and explores the autistic experience in arts and culture throughout history. From popular culture, films, and photography to literature, opera, and ballet, she dares to ask what it might mean to re-read these works through an autistic lens — what we might discover if we allow perspectives beyond the neurotypical to take centre stage.

“Törnvall has written an important, illuminating first book, one that deserves to sit alongside the best insider accounts of autism … [The Autists] should be required reading for all parents, partners, friends and colleagues of anyone on the autism spectrum, as well as a road map for autistic women navigating the neurotypical world.”

James Cook, Times Literary Supplement

Clara Törnvall

Clara Törnvall has been a journalist and producer since the early 2000s. She’s produced programs for Swedish radio and TV, as well as written articles/chronicles for various media outlets. The Autists: women on the spectrum is her first book, and was written after her diagnosis with autism at the age of 42.

YOUNG RUPERT

The Making of the Murdoch Empire Walter Marsh

“From schoolboy socialist to boy publisher to mogul on the make: Young Rupert offers a revelatory glimpse of Murdoch becoming Murdoch."—Jeff Sparrow, author of No Way But This: in search of Paul Robeson

For half a century, the Murdoch media empire and its polarizing patriarch have swept across the globe, shaking up markets and democracies in their wake. But how did it all start?

In September 1953, 22-year-old Rupert Murdoch landed in Adelaide, South Australia. Fresh from Oxford with a radical reputation, the young and brash son of Sir Keith Murdoch had arrived to fulfill his father’s dying wish: for Rupert to live a “useful altruistic and full life” in the media.

For decades, Sir Keith had been a giant of the Australian press, but his final years were spent bitterly fending off rivals and would-be successors. When the dust settled on his father’s estate, Rupert was left with the Adelaide-based News Ltd and its afternoon paper The News—a minor player in a small, parochial city.

But even this inheritance was soon under siege, as the left-wing “Boy Publisher” stared down his father’s old colleagues at the city’s paper of record, The Advertiser, and a conservative establishment kept in power by a decades-old gerrymander.

Led by Rupert’s friend, ally, and editor-in-chief Rohan Rivett, the fledgling Murdoch press began a seven-year campaign of circulation wars, expansion, and courtroom battles that divided the city and would lay the foundations for a global empire—if Rupert and Rohan didn’t end up in custody first.

Drawing on unpublished archival material and new reportage, Young Rupert pieces together a paper trail of succession, sedition, and power—and a fascinating time capsule of Australian media on the cusp of an extraordinary ascension.

“[A] perceptive account of the first 30 years of media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s life … Thoroughly reported and novelistic in detail … this provides keen insight into the business magnate’s formative years.”

Publishers Weekly

Walter Marsh

Walter Marsh is a journalist based in Tarntanya/Adelaide with a background in history and culture. A former editor and staff writer at The Adelaide Review and Rip It Up, his writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Monthly, The Saturday Paper, and InDaily.

BIRD LIFE

A Novel Anna Smaill

The second novel by Booker Prize-longlisted author Anna Smaill. A lyrical and ambitious exploration of madness and what it is like to experience the world differently.

In Ueno Park, Tokyo, as workers and tourists gather for lunch, the pollen blows, a fountain erupts, pigeons scatter, and two women meet, changing the course of one another’s lives.

Dinah has come to Japan from New Zealand to teach English and grieve the death of her brother, Michael, a troubled genius who was able to channel his problems into music as a classical pianist—until he wasn’t. In the seemingly empty, eerie apartment block where Dinah has been housed, she sees Michael everywhere, even as she feels his absence sharply.

Yasuko is polished, precise, and keenly observant—of her students and colleagues at the language school, and of the natural world. When she was thirteen, animals began to speak to her, to tell her things she did not always want to hear. She has suppressed these powers for many years, but sometimes she allows them to resurface, to the dismay of her adult son, Jun. One day, she returns home, and Jun has gone. Even her special gifts cannot bring him back.

As these two women deal with their individual traumas, they form an unlikely friendship in which each will help the other to see a different possible world, as Smaill teases out the tension between our internal and external lives and asks what we lose by having to choose between them.

“Magic, mental illness, and sorrow drive this powerful offering … Smaill excels equally at emotional drama, magical realism, and horror. Readers will find much to love.”

Publishers Weekly, starred review

Anna Smaill

Anna Smaill is a poet and novelist. She was born in Auckland, New Zealand and lived in Tokyo for two years before moving to the United Kingdom where she completed a PhD at University College London. In 2015, she published her debut novel, The Chimes, which won the World Fantasy Award and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. She lives on Wellington’s south coast with her husband and their two children.

MINOR BODIES

Jonathan Bazzi (trans. Alice Whitmore)

Minor is the desiring body that runs, rises, gravitates towards larger, brighter, more dazzling bodies, that bestows on other bodies the status of suns and planets, fires to be orbited, the reason for everything. There is no center of the universe except the one we invent for ourselves.

Jonathan is twenty years old, gay, and full of life. He’s set out to escape the insignificance of his suburban home, to give himself instead and forever to the real city, Milan, where he hopes also to find love.

But when Jonathan finds love in all its messy, complicated, sexy reality, it is not enough. He has escaped the place and people of his childhood, but can he escape the man raised by those people and in that place, the man he has grown up to be?

Praise for Fever:“Jagged and tender, forthright and sly, this book felt so committed to its fierce, wise vision of the joys and terrors of having a body and living a life. It tells us real things, in a rich voice, with force and passion and insight. I couldn't put it down.”

Ronnie Scott, author of The Adversary

Jonathan Bazzi

Jonathan Bazzi was born in Milan in 1985. They have written for various newspapers and magazines, including Gay.it, Vice, and The Vision. Their first novel, Fever, was hailed as a significant addition to queer literature and won the Sila, Premio Opera Prima, Edoardo Kihlgren, and Bagutta literary prizes.

GUNFLOWER

Laura Jean McKay

The startling and highly anticipated new short story collection from Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning author of The Animals in That Country.

A family of cat farmers gets the chance to set the felines free. A group of chickens tells it like it is. A female-crewed ship plows through the patriarchy. A support group finds solace in a world without men.

With her trademark humor, energy, and flair, McKay offers glimpses of places where dreams subsume reality, where childhood restarts, where humans embrace their animal selves and animals talk like humans.

The stories in Gunflower explode and bloom in mesmerizing ways, showing the world both as it is and as it could be.

“It’s not often that a short story collection feels like more than the sum of its parts, but Gunflower is a work of rare depth and skill.”

Doug Johnstone, The Big Issue

Laura Jean McKay

Laura Jean McKay is the author of The Animals in That Country (Scribe, 2020) — winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Victorian Prize for Literature, and the ABIA Small Publishers Adult Book of the Year, and co-winner of the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Laura is also the author of Holiday in Cambodia (Black Inc., 2013). She was awarded the NZSA Waitangi Day Literary Honours in 2022.

THE NEW WORLD DISORDER

How the West is Destroying Itself Peter R. Neumann (trans. David Shaw)

The West has fatally overestimated itself. What does this mean for the world?

Over the past thirty years, through a mixture of naivety and arrogance, the West has lost its global advantage. The challenges are profound: the rise of China, climate change, and the polarization of society. The triumph of the West had seemed unstoppable not that long ago. After the end of the Cold War, the democratic market economy took hold in the former Eastern Bloc, Russia went from being an enemy to a partner, and even China turned to capitalism. Then came the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that shook the world. The War on Terror destabilized an entire region; the Arab Spring only brought forth new autocracies; and, following the annexation of Crimea, the confrontation with Russia intensified. Instead of a liberal world order, a new world disorder has emerged.

Peter R. Neumann is an internationally acclaimed expert on terrorism and geopolitics. In this astute, burning analysis of global politics, he lays out the dangers the world will face if the West fails to reinvent itself.

“A far-sighted analysis of the world order, and an urgent warning of what the future may hold in store.”

Peter Frankopan, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Silk Roads

Peter R. Neumann

Peter R. Neumann is Professor of Security Studies at King’s College London, where he directed the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) for many years. As an internationally sought-after expert, Neumann served as advisor to the USA at the United Nations in 2014. In 2017 he was special representative to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). He also writes for The New York Times and Der Spiegel, among others. His book The New Jihadists was a bestseller. He lives in Oxford. 

SISTERS IN ARMS

Shida Bazyar (trans. Ruth Martin)

An explosive feminist and anti-racist novel about the importance of friendship.

“We don’t exist in this world. Here, we are neither Germans nor refugees, we don’t report the news and we aren’t the experts. We’re some sort of wildcard.”

Hani, Kasih, and Saya have shared a deep friendship ever since they were kids. After years apart, the three young women meet again for a few days, to pick up where they left off. But regardless of what they have achieved, it becomes clear, again and again, that they can’t escape the racism that accompanies their daily lives: the glances, the chatter, the hatred, and the outright rightwing terror. But their friendship gives them stability. Until one dramatic night shakes everything up.

Sisters in Arms is a provocative, uncompromising, and moving novel about the extraordinary alliance between three young women and the only thing that makes a self-determined life possible in a society that doesn’t tolerate otherness: unconditional friendship.

“[W]ill appeal to fans of Elena Ferrante, Zadie Smith, and Kamila Shamsie … An immersive and thought-provoking read with a strong plot and relatable characters, and which explores urgent contemporary questions around racism and sexism in society.”

New Books in German

Shida Bazyar

Shida Bazyar, born in 1988, studied writing in Hildesheim, and, in addition to writing, worked in youth education for many years. Her debut novel Nachts ist es leise in Teheran (2016) won the Blogger Literary Award, Ulla Hahn Prize, and Uwe Johnson Prize, among others, and has been translated into Dutch, Farsi, French, and Turkish. Sisters in Arms is her second novel, and her first to be translated into English.

LIFE SKILLS FOR A BROKEN WORLD

Ahona Guha

A revolutionary framework for living well in a broken world, from acclaimed author and psychologist.

How can I manage heartbreak? How do I cope with death? How can I learn to tolerate anxiety and have hope?

In this helpful, practical, and realistic guide to good psychological health, Dr Ahona Guha shows us how to cope, thrive, and still feel hopeful for the future. Combining techniques from a range of therapeutic modalities, she demonstrates how we can build a range of essential psychological skills, and apply them to live a more tranquil and joyful life.

Life Skills for a Broken World is a breath of fresh air, cutting through the confusion to provide solid, practical, and evidence-based answers to existential questions, big and small.

“Dr. Guha's book is like therapy, activism, and a pep talk all rolled into one. Whether you're stressing about the state of the world or just trying to level-up your own life, she's got your back. It's all about taking baby steps to make big leaps—not just for you but for the world at large. So, give it a read and prepare to be the change you’ve been waiting for.”

Chantelle Otten, sexologist and author of The Sex Ed You Never Had

Ahona Guha

Dr Ahona Guha is a clinical and forensic psychologist. Her first book, Reclaim: understanding complex trauma and those who abuse was published by Scribe Publications in 2023. She works with victims of abuse and trauma, and clients with a range of other difficulties—such as anxiety, depression, perfectionism, burn-out, and relationship problems. She also works with perpetrators of harmful behaviours to assess risk, and provides treatment to reduce the risk they pose to others. She writes widely for the media on matters related to mental health, health, social justice, and equity. Her work has appeared in The Age, The Guardian, The Saturday Paper, Breathe Magazine, SBS, and ABC. You can find out more about her work at www.ahonaguha.com.