Where our staff share their favourite new and old books with you. We hope this helps to inspire you and give you some ideas for that next tasty morsel you'd like to try.

Kita recommends
Pale Fire

Everyone has read Lolita. Comparatively few have read Pale Fire. Lacking the salacious nature of its earlier counterpart, and on first glance confusing, obscure, and needlessly tricky, it is frequently overlooked by readers in favour of something more direct and straightforward. However once you get over the shock of the unique structure, it soon becomes Nabokov's most engaging, fun, and arguably most successful work.

The novel takes the form of a long poem by the fictional American poet John Shade, and a (thoroughly) extended commentary by Shade's neighbour at the time of his unexpected death, Charles Kinbote. This isn't your conventional poetry commentary however, as it rarely comments much on the poem itself, instead choosing to meander into lengthy digressions referencing Kinbote's personal life, and strange tales of far-off land of Zembla and its exiled royalty. As reader you mine through these rich digressions for the plot, revealing the true nature two men's relationship, Kinbote's unexpected background, and the sequence of events that lead to the strange creation of the novel itself.

In this sense is not a novel to be read - it is a novel to be played, as if it were a game or a puzzle. All of Nabokov's work is marked by a tremendous playfulness, but it is with this particular work, more so than the others, where the structural form of the work matches this tone.

It is also hilarious - Nabokov here is in fine form as a dark humorist, with the wonderfully delusional and self-unreflexive Kinbote stuttering through American campus life with combined cluelessness and paranoia.

RRP $19.95

Kita recommends
River Cafe Cook Book Easy

The River Cafe Cook Books are marked by a sense of the pragmatic. There is no effusive language, no lengthy digressions into Italian market life, nothing which seeks to distract or draw attention from the food itself. The book is clearly and neatly presented, with the photography stark and gorgeous (the pages of the assorted and neatly organised bruschetta against the stark white backdrop are bizarrely pleasing).

All main areas of Italian cuisine are covered, with over 180 recipes. Emblematic is the Pumpkin Crostini - an entirely simple, quick (less than 30 minutes) and easy to prepare dish, which nonetheless tastes, with its combination of fennel, pancetta and pumpkin, complex and sophisticated.

This is a great book for home cooks who desire a complete lack of nonsense in their cookery - and long for a book where the seduction comes not from the language, but from the food itself.

Paperback: $45.00
Hardcover: $65.00

Kita recommends
Invisible Cities

Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino's masterwork, is a must for any library. A classic of post-modern literature, the book chronicles the travels of 13th century explorer Marco Polo across 55 marvelous fictitious cities, as he articulates them to the great Kublai Khan. There are cities built from the bricks of romantic persuit, cities composed entirely of plumbing pipes, cities hanging to its eventual peril on a gab between cliffs. Each serves to make a point about some area of human existence - from the nature of desire to the benefits of mortality. And each hit their respective marks wonderfully.

This is the literary equivalent of pure perfume - even in tiny dosages it is completely expansive, often overwhelming. You're not likely to find anything with a greater poignancy-to-page ratio.

RRP $24.95

Kita recommends
How Proust Can Change Your Life

How could you use Proust to improve one's own day-to-day experience? Surely it is a high ask - Proust himself lived in constant depression, resigned his life to failure and spent almost his entire time holed up in his bedroom with the curtains taped shut. But Alain De Botton successfully tackles the task, clarifying and articulating the wisdom that rested alongside his neurosis. Using Proust's In Search of Lost Time as a guide to life rather than just strictly as a work of literature, De Botton and Proust address such problems as the difficulties of friendship, the waning nature of desire, and the feelings of banal existence.

This is a gentle, caring, wonderfully profound book, written in De Botton's own inimitable style. De Botton has stated that he is not adverse to the "self-help" tag, since in its essence it is about providing some help tangible to the reader. With its strong elucidation, genuinely useful points and dry humour, this book is more effective in this regard than most.

RRP $25.00

Kita recommends
The Magnificent Meaulnes

The Magnificent Meaulnes (or, Le Grand Meaulnes in the original French, and The Lost Estate in the Penguin Classics edition) is a classic of late 19th century French literature, but reads today as a kind of early boy's own adventure. A bildungsroman, it focuses on the formative years of the young Francoise in the small village of Sologne, and the sudden arrival and subsequent friendship with the all-too-fearless, all-too-passionate Meaulnes. As quickly as he arrives Meaulnes disappears, then reappears changed, distant, and now solely concerned with an angelic girl he happened upon at a completely inexplicable costume party. The scenes where Meaulnes recounts this party have a real pleasant strangeness - the whole section floats ethereally, and is utterly seductive in its encapsulating of the magic of first love.

The true value in the novel, however, comes from Francois, who is buffeted about in the story and forced, by the blind will of friendship, to walk Meaulne's tracks, repairing the damage of his romantic and impetuousness nature and unjustly suffering for it. It is he you feel for the most, and who becomes its unlikely moral hero of the tale.

The story is convoluted and completely unlikely, but for some reason that's all forgivable. Perhaps because it is a boyhood adventure, speaking of a time right on the precipice of adulthood where everything seems possible as long as it exists within the vague notion of "the future". The story feels, then, like a complicated fantasy come to fruition, complete with the joys and tragedies such an equation might bring us. Lighter and softer then both titles, comparisons can nonetheless be made with Proust's In Search of Lost Time (with its resigned recollection), and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (with its narrative of romantic-obsession). It is both "ripping yarn" and "saddest thing ever".

RRP $24.95

Cecil and Jordan in New York

Gabrielle Bell splits her cartooning time between creating wry sketchbook autobiographical comics, such as those included in her 2006 graphic novel, Lucky, and working on more detailed fictional short stories. This collection represents her short comics work that has been published in various anthologies over the past five years. The surrealist title story, in which a young woman turns herself into a chair so as not to be too much of a bother to those around her, is being adapted into the short film, Interior Design, by director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep). Published by Drawn & Quarterly - click here for more information on this awesome pulbisher.

Memory: An Anthology

This fascinating anthology introduces us to a wide range of arguments on the subject of memory, the thread that holds our lives, and our history, together.
The book includes specially commissioned essays by the editors and by writers with expertise in different fields. Complimenting the essays are a rich selection of extracts from writers and thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle, Montaigne and Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Proust, Jorge Luis Borges and Haruki Murakami.

RRP $34.95

The Brain That Changes Itself

An astonishing new science called neuroplasticity is overthrowing the centuries-old notion that the human brain is immutable.
We see a woman born with half a brain that rewired itself to work as a whole, blind people who learn to see, learning disorders cured, IQs raised, aging brains rejuvenated, stroke patients learning to speak, children with cerebral palsy learning to move with more grace, depression and anxiety disorders successfully treated, and lifelong character traits changed.
Dr. Doidge has written an immensely moving, inspiring book that will permanently alter the way we look at our brains, human nature, and human potential.

RRP $35.00

The Red Highway

On returning from a war zone, Nicolas Rothwell begins to explore the deserts and towns, sleepy coastline and hidden worlds of Australia's north. As he travels, his journey gathers momentum and finds a shape. He has unforgettable, even mystical encounters: with a nun, an explorer, a collector and a hunter. It becomes a quest – for knowledge and a sense of home – that builds to a stunning culmination.

Rothwell's calm wondering at what he sees and hears on his travels left me with a feeling of enchantment. - Robert Dessaix

RRP $32.95