The mesmerising new novel from the twice Booker-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming Home

‘If she was my double and I was hers, was it true that she was knowing, I was unknowing, she was sane, I was crazy, she was wise, I was foolish? That summer, the air was electric between us as we transmitted our feelings to each other across three countries.’

Elsa M. Anderson is a classical piano virtuoso. In a flea market in Athens, she watches an enigmatic woman buy two mechanical dancing horses. Is it possible that the woman who is so enchanted with the horses is her living double? Is she also looking for reasons to live?

Chasing their doubles across Europe, the two women grapple with their conceptions of the world and each other, culminating in a final encounter in a fateful summer rainstorm.

A vivid portrait of a long-held identity coming apart, August Blue expands our understanding of the ways in which we seek to find ourselves in others and create ourselves anew.

Hamish Hamilton, 2023

The grandson of Prince Genji lives outside of space and time and wanders the grounds of an old monastery in Kyoto. The monastery, too, is timeless: a place of prayer and deliverance, with barely a trace of any human presence. The wanderer is searching for a garden that has long captivated him: “he continually saw the garden in his mind’s eye without being able to touch its existence.” This exquisitely beautiful novel by National Book Award–winner László Krasznahorkai—perhaps his most serene and poetic work—describes a search for the unobtainable and the riches to be discovered along the way. Despite the difficulties in finding the garden, the reader is closely introduced to the construction processes of the monastery (described in poetic detail) as well as the geological and biological processes of the surrounding area (the underground layers revealed beneath a bed of moss, the travels of cypresstree seeds on the wind, feral foxes and stray dogs meandering outside the monastery’s walls), making this an unforgettable meditation on nature, life, history, and being.

New Directions, 2023

A powerful novel of the saving grace of language and human connection, from the celebrated author of The Vegetarian

In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight.

Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it’s the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages.

Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish – the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to one another. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity – their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to expression.

Greek Lessons is a tender love letter to human intimacy and connection, a novel to awaken the senses, vividly conjuring the essence of what it means to be alive.

Hamish Hamilton, 2023

We are in the midst of a technological revolution. Is it changing what it means to be human?

From genetic engineering to Chat GPT, from cybersex to cyberwar, and from mood-altering pharmaceuticals to the widespread automation of work, new technologies are rewriting the terms of our existence. We celebrate this as ‘progress’ but often these developments are in line with the priorities of power and profit. The bright young things of Silicon Valley celebrate their ability to ‘move fast and break things’. But what if new technologies are breaking us?

In this timely and provocative book, Richard King argues that modern societies need to develop a more critical attitude to new and emerging technologies. We need, he suggests, to rethink our relationship to our tools from a radically humanistic perspective, enlisting philosophy, anthropology and the arts in the fight against dehumanising machines. It is not enough to let the market decide which technologies are good for us. We need to ask what we want from technology. And the question of what we want is a question about who we are.

As science, technology and capitalism fuse, and activists and entrepreneurs talk openly of a ‘post-human’ future in which individuals will transform themselves using data and biotechnologies, we are entering unchartered territory – a territory marked with the mapmaker’s warning, Here Be Dragons … Here Be Monsters. It’s time for a lively conversation about humanity in tech-driven world.

Monash University Press, 2023

fiction

Oh, humanity!

This book really moved me in a powerful way.  It reaches profound philosophical revelations through living a thoughtful life and putting one foot in front of the other.  The musings on class, love, family and all its permeations, motherhood and childhood were truly beautiful in their simple truth.

Viking, October 2022