Alternatives Bookshop

Alternatives Bookshop Contact information, map and directions, contact form, opening hours, services, ratings, photos, videos and announcements from Alternatives Bookshop, Book shop, 105 Hyde Street, Bellingen.

From mushroom foraging to quantum physics, indigenous wisdom to prize-winning fiction, we handpick select titles on natural history, earth spiritualism, the mind, the world, and beyond.

Last month the Bellingen Story Circle was packed to the rafters. Every seat taken, people crowded up against the walls, ...
25/05/2026

Last month the Bellingen Story Circle was packed to the rafters. Every seat taken, people crowded up against the walls, the bookshop holding everything it could.

The story was Iron John. First recorded by the Brothers Grimm, it is the tale of a wild man found lurking at the bottom of a forest pond. Ancient, rusted, feral. He is hauled up, caged, and locked away. And then a young prince, by accident or fate, sets him free.

What follows is an initiation. The boy must leave the safety of the palace and enter the wild man’s world. He must work, fail, disguise himself, descend into the dark. Robert Bly, in his landmark reading of the tale, saw Iron John as a map of masculine development: the journey every young man must take away from the mother’s protection and the father’s approval, down into the deep masculine, the instinctual, the undomesticated. The wild man is not the enemy. He is the guide. But the road is not comfortable, and it is not short.

Nathan Meola’s telling carried us through every descent, and together we crossed every threshold. Elijah Kindred moved between instruments, shaping the story’s wildness and its tenderness in equal measure, the music rising and falling with the old tale’s pulse. This was one to remember.

The next Bellingen Story Circle is this Thursday 28 May. Nathan turns now to one of the oldest love stories in the ancient world — the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche.

We have been hitting capacity. Book ahead to secure your spot. Tickets via the link in our bio.

💘


Let us introduce you to Foshe. Three masterful musicians, each with their own projects and directions, who come together...
13/05/2026

Let us introduce you to Foshe. Three masterful musicians, each with their own projects and directions, who come together to play fully improvised polyrhythmic jazz. Hard to pin down. A longtime favourite.

Improv gigs are something different. Watching these three communicate non-verbally — through their instruments, a cracked smile, a quick glance, the occasional tongue poke when it gets complicated — makes the room feel alive. One offers a riff, a melody, a fresh count. The others try to catch its rhythm, its vibe, and push it further. No fixed track. No expectation to meet. Just feeling and flowing.

Polyrhythm takes it to another level. Our modern ears are trained on 4/4, the count you bop along to without thinking. But 3/4, 5/8, 7/8, for example, all carry a different feel entirely. And when multiple musicians hold different times simultaneously, something strange happens: the rhythms drift apart, move out of phase, and then synchronise again over larger cycles. Watching the boys navigate this in real time is electric.

Everything you’ll hear online is recorded from previous live improv gigs just like ours. Go find them.

A big thanks to Foshe for coming to play for us at our Tiny Bookshop Concert.

And keep an eye out. They’ll be back fo sho. 🤍


ft.
🎹
🎸 .music
🥁

📷 .vandyke

Last month the Bellingen Story Circle brought us Thousandfurs. One of the most psychologically confronting tales in the ...
27/04/2026

Last month the Bellingen Story Circle brought us Thousandfurs. One of the most psychologically confronting tales in the Grimm canon. One that most retellings quietly set aside, and for good reason. It doesn’t soften what it carries.

A king, grief-stricken after the death of his wife, becomes fixated on his daughter — the only one worthy, he declares, to be his next queen. To escape, the princess makes impossible demands: gowns the colour of the sun, the moon, and the stars, and a cloak sewn from a thousand different furs. When her father meets every demand, she flees into the forest, wrapped in her cloak, her identity buried beneath it.

This is a tale that moves through violation, exile, disguise, and the long, circuitous road back to selfhood. Marion Woodman drew on it as a central thread in Leaving My Father’s House, her landmark work on feminine psychology — reading the princess’s flight and her years in hiding as the soul’s necessary withdrawal before it can be truly known and claimed. The cloak of a thousand furs is not only disguise but protection: the self goes underground until the conditions are right for it to emerge.

What the tale asks, quietly and persistently, is what it costs to become yourself. And what it takes to be truly seen.

Storyteller Nathan Meola carried us through this dense mythic terrain, accompanied as ever by musician Hamzah Mas, who traced the story’s descent into shadow and reemergence into the light.

—

This Thursday 30th April, the Bellingen Story Circle returns with another formidable tale: Iron John, by the Brothers Grimm.

All welcome. Tickets via the link in our bio.

27/01/2026

Our inaugural Tiny Bookshop Concert.
Baran Yildiz & Greg Sheehan.
Watch the full concert via link in bio.

One of the most influential works of twentieth-century science fiction. Strange and philosophical. After an unexplained ...
16/12/2025

One of the most influential works of twentieth-century science fiction. Strange and philosophical.

After an unexplained extraterrestrial visitation, six zones around the world are left irrevocably altered. The aliens themselves never appear; they simply come and go, leaving behind debris, artefacts, and environments that defy human understanding. These places, known as the Zones, are lethal, wondrous, and irresistible.

Roadside Picnic follows Redrick “Red” Schuhart, a stalker who illegally enters one such Zone to retrieve its dangerous relics for profit. But this is not a story about alien contact so much as its aftermath: how humanity responds when confronted with something radically beyond its comprehension.

The Strugatsky brothers use science fiction as a philosophical instrument, exploring chance, exploitation, desire, and the limits of human meaning. The title’s metaphor is telling: humanity may be no more than animals rummaging through the leftovers of a cosmic picnic, unable to grasp the intentions of those who passed through.

Bleak, darkly humorous, and profoundly unsettling, Roadside Picnic is a meditation on hope and futility, wonder and ruin. On what happens when the universe refuses to explain itself.

A provocative and influential meditation on character, destiny, and the idea that each life is shaped by an inner callin...
15/12/2025

A provocative and influential meditation on character, destiny, and the idea that each life is shaped by an inner calling.

In The Soul’s Code, Jungian psychologist James Hillman challenges the dominant belief that we are formed solely by genetics and environment. Instead, he revives an ancient idea: that each person arrives in the world with a unique pattern, image, or calling already present. Drawing on Plato’s notion of the daimon — an in-dwelling spirit or guiding force — Hillman suggests that character is not made, but revealed over time.

Through vivid readings of lives as diverse as artists, political figures, and spiritual leaders, Hillman argues that vocation, talent, and even struggle are expressions of this inner acorn striving to become itself. Against therapeutic models that frame life primarily through trauma or deficit, he offers a vision of development oriented toward meaning, necessity, and destiny.

Philosophical rather than prescriptive, The Soul’s Code is not a self-help manual but a challenge to how we think about growth, childhood, education, and success. Whether taken as metaphor, psychology, or mythic truth, Hillman’s central question lingers long after reading: What is it in me that must be lived? And how faithfully am I answering it?

A modern classic that continues to provoke, inspire, and divide, The Soul’s Code speaks to anyone wrestling with questions of purpose, individuality, and the shape of a life well lived.

One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. A surreal masterpiece of satire, theology, and love. When the Devil...
14/12/2025

One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. A surreal masterpiece of satire, theology, and love.

When the Devil arrives in Stalinist Moscow, chaos follows. Accompanied by a talking cat, a naked witch, and a cast of infernal mischief-makers, he exposes the hypocrisies of power, censorship, and moral cowardice with merciless humour.

Parallel to this carnivalesque descent runs a retelling of the trial of Jesus by Pontius Pilate, and a tender, defiant love story between a writer known only as the Master and his devoted Margarita.

Blending political satire, metaphysical inquiry, folklore, and romance, The Master and Margarita moves effortlessly between the absurd and the profound. It is a novel about good and evil, freedom and fear, art and truth, and about love as the one force capable of transcending tyranny and time.

Inventive, daring, and endlessly re-readable, Bulgakov’s cult classic is both a savage indictment of totalitarianism and a joyous celebration of imagination’s power to survive it.

A timely guide to how power really works in Australia, and why an engaged public matters more than ever in recent memory...
12/12/2025

A timely guide to how power really works in Australia, and why an engaged public matters more than ever in recent memory.

Trust in politics and public institutions is at a historic low, and confusion about how our system functions is widespread. How Australian Democracy Works offers a much-needed pulse check: a lucid, grounded explanation of our political history, the Constitution, parliament, government, and the major forces shaping contemporary Australia, from misinformation and polarisation to pressing policy debates.

Edited by Amanda Dunn and written by leading academic contributors from The Conversation, this collection brings clarity to how the system operates, how it has evolved, and what’s at stake if we don’t safeguard it. It’s a call to better understand who we are as a political community, where we’ve come from, and how we might strengthen our democracy for the future.

Clear, informed, and highly readable, this is essential civic literacy for anyone wanting to be a more confident, engaged participant in Australian public life.

A darkly funny, fiercely imaginative novel about three Ukrainian women, one endangered snail, and the absurdities and de...
11/12/2025

A darkly funny, fiercely imaginative novel about three Ukrainian women, one endangered snail, and the absurdities and devastations of life under capitalism and war.

* Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025
* A Best Book of the Year: Guardian, The New Yorker, NPR and more

Set in Ukraine on the cusp of invasion, Endling follows Yeva, a rogue scientist determined to save the last of an exceedingly rare snail species, financing her research by entertaining Western men who flock to Ukraine in search of compliant brides. Meanwhile, sisters Nastia and Solomiya navigate the same romance-tour underworld while secretly searching for their missing mother, a disappeared activist who fought the industry from within.

What begins as a sharp satire of post-Soviet capitalism unfolds into a wild, tender, and often devastating road novel: three women, a truck full of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, the final surviving snail of his kind, crossing a country whose future is collapsing beneath their feet.

Blending absurdism with political acuity, heartbreak with biting humour, Maria Reva delivers a story that is startlingly original, formally inventive, and deeply human. Endling is a novel about survival, resistance, kinship, and the strange, stubborn hope that persists even at the edge of extinction.

A luminous exploration of one of the world’s most beautiful, resilient, and misunderstood creatures.In The Language of B...
09/12/2025

A luminous exploration of one of the world’s most beautiful, resilient, and misunderstood creatures.

In The Language of Butterflies, science journalist Wendy Williams follows these extraordinary insects across the globe, revealing a world of staggering feats and delicate interdependencies. From monarchs migrating thousands of kilometres each year, to caterpillars that trick ants into caring for them, butterflies prove to be far more intelligent and adaptable than we imagine.

Williams traces our long human fascination with butterflies from the obsessions of early lepidopterists, the cultures that revered them, to the scientists working urgently to understand and protect them today. Along the way, she shows how butterflies act as bellwethers of climate change, as well as sources of inspiration for breakthroughs in ecology, design, and even medicine.

This enchanting book reveals the inner lives of butterflies and the deep, ancient partnership between humans and these vanishing species. The Language of Butterflies is a love letter to their beauty, a celebration of wonder, and a call to cherish what remains.

A leading neuroscientist’s exploration of the one thing we know from the inside: consciousness.In Then I Am Myself the W...
30/11/2025

A leading neuroscientist’s exploration of the one thing we know from the inside: consciousness.

In Then I Am Myself the World, Christof Koch argues that to understand consciousness we must understand what it does: how it exerts causal power, shapes experience, and changes the world from within. At the centre of the book is the bold proposal that consciousness arises wherever information is richly integrated, and that its essence is the capacity to influence itself.

Drawing on decades of research, as well as his own near-death experiences, psychedelic encounters, and work at the scientific frontier, Koch investigates the physical origins of consciousness in the brain and how these principles can be used to detect consciousness in animals, in patients with disordered states of awareness, and even in machines.

Koch challenges the familiar idea that the brain is simply a biological computer running “mind software.” Instead, he argues that consciousness is built into the causal structure of highly connected neural networks, and that subjective experience is as real as anything in science because “we matter to ourselves.”

Sweeping and provocative, Then I Am Myself the World offers a radical rethinking of what consciousness is, where it comes from, and why our fragile, private inner lives may be the most precious phenomena in the universe.

Address

105 Hyde Street
Bellingen, NSW
2454

Opening Hours

Monday 10am - 3pm
Tuesday 10am - 3pm
Wednesday 10am - 3pm
Thursday 10am - 3pm
Friday 10am - 3pm
Saturday 10am - 3pm

Telephone

+61487579204

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Alternatives Bookshop posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Alternatives Bookshop:

Shortcuts

Share

Category