Lamplight Books

06/05/2026

This Friday Lamplight will have a pop-up for Streetside - a free and unticketed series of bite-size events across Britomart on Friday 8 May. Support your favourite writers and purchase a copy of their book 📚
See you there!

29/04/2026

We are on the move! We are heading to the Aotearoa Art Fair at the Viaduct Events Centre, 161 Halsey Street, Wynyard Quarter. We will be selling a range of art books from Thursday to Sunday right next to the cafe. See you there, from tomorrow …

Thursday 1-9pm
Friday & Sat 11-6pm
Sunday 11-5pm

18/04/2026

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet is in store in a beautiful clothbound compendium!

If you’ve ever heard of the ‘Ferrante Fever’, here’s why. Set in the town of Naples Post WW-II Italy, we follow Lenu and Lila through to adulthood. Ferrante’s smooth prose belies the harsh social realism Lenu and Lila are exposed to. The book’s impressionistic edges are a keen insight into the emotional atmosphere of the novels where private and public realities are interwoven with female friendship at its core.

17/04/2026

15/04/2026

Notebook of a Return to My Native Land by Aimé Cesairé
This is also a favourite of mine. Another long-form, autobiographical poem, Notebook of a Return to my Native Land was published in 1939 by the co-creator of négritude, Aimé Cesairé. I really enjoyed Jasen Allen-Paisant’s introductory note to the poem, which helped me to embrace the immediate unfamiliarity of the style, and appreciate how masterful Cesairé is at bringing language to life in surprising ways. In Allen-Paisant’s introduction, as with my experience of this text, I felt and sensed the work before I understood it intellectually. It’s dense with images, symbolism, and poetic techniques that layer and shift notions of time and space. The result is a marvelous revelation, of mending through destruction and the hope of life beyond Western subjectivity.

14/04/2026

Coeur de Lion by Ariana Reines
Published in 2007 by the American Poet Ariana Reines, Coeur de Lion is a book-length epistolary love poem. In a recent interview at Cluny Institute's METANOIA (2025) conference, Reines commented that “I tried to study when people feel that they’re falling in love and need to send a certain kind of text message. [...] I’m very very interested in that charge, because that charge grips people in language when they feel this communication is really important. Like something has to pass through language that is bigger than it, that is other to it, that has to go between me and this person, and I really care about how it works. I’m filled with somatic and sensory and [spiritual] energy, and I am invested in how it’s going to work.” For me, this comment is a perfect entry to Reines’ body of work.
Despite being published in 2007, Coeur de Lion defines a period in which digitality begins to permeate the everyday, with references to Gmail, We**am, and Youtube throughout the book. The sans serif font, even, is reminiscent of online communication, and reading it prompted me to think about how the depths of human emotion are explored and potentially exhausted in online environments.

13/04/2026

Light Film by Sholto Buck
Although Sholto is one of my dearest friends, I can honestly say that there is no bias at play here, because of how impressive this collection of poetry is. Sholto has an uncanny ability to layer up the affective power of poetic images in order to produce a beautiful and intense experience of language. His writing in this collection, and in general, has a lovely rhythmic quality that I enjoy reading at different paces. Sometimes I will read his poems very quickly, and feel taken by the direct attitude of the poems. And then gradually, when I take time going through the lines, the shifting quality of the language becomes curious and difficult to grasp, like oil. Reading this collection made me sharply aware of language’s mysterious properties. Sholto accretes meaning, and presses intricately onto the page. The title Light Film is very apt.

12/04/2026

Fale Aitu | Spirit House by Tusiata Avia
Fale Aitu, Tusiata Avia’s 2016 poetry release, was introduced to me a couple of years ago by a fellow friend of Lamplight, Damien Levi. He said it was one of his favourite poetry books, and it definitely stands up. The book accomplishes a multitude of spatial and temporal perspectives, as Avia writes through her own unsettling childhood, as an adult, and from locations as diverse as Christchurch, Samoa, New York, and Gaza. Avia’s brutal honesty towards cultural memory offers a refreshing take on political issues, but where the book really shines to me is when Avia projects this honesty towards her own past. The catharsis she attains through her own emotional excavation, produces a wondrous, prophetic reading experience.

11/04/2026

Bonnie Harvey lives in her own beautiful universe and here at Lamplight Books, we’re lucky enough to bask in a tiny little part of it five days of every week.
For someone who only wears black, Bonnie has the softest heart, and if acts of kindness were paid out in $100.00 bills, Bonnie would be dressed in head-to-toe Yohji Yamamoto.
Steeped in a fine arts background, Bonnie has brought a level of knowledge us literary types sorely needed. Now when an artist visits the store.
Bonnie scrawls their name on a post-it note so we can act with the appropriate amount of nonchalance.
She has also taught us that a brief idea stretched out into a giant paragraph is called art writing.
Working in a bookstore opens up a whole new world of reading and Bonnie has perfected her reading tastes with ease, and lucky for us, she is sharing them all this week as part of our Friends of Lamplight series. We told you she inhabits a beautiful world.

10/04/2026

Finally The Tunnel is available for pre-order, a highly anticipated 2026 rerelease!

02/04/2026

Reminder this Easter weekend we will be closed on Friday and Sunday but open on Saturday 11-4 and Monday 11-3pm !

Our Easter pick: Brought about by an iconic friendship between prize-winning artist Chantal Joffe and internationally acclaimed writer Olivia Laing, Painting Writing Texting is a beautiful record of their many conversations and projects that spun out from their first creative act.