Welcome to Muirs Bookshop
We are a large Independent bookshop in the Main Street of Gisborne offering a wide range of best-selling and eclectic literary fiction, non-fiction and carefully selected children’s books. We also have an increasing second hand book selection in our Cemetery of Forgotten Books.
We have one of the most comprehensive collections of Maori books in print and most Maori children’s books too.
All Gisborne books still in print are on our shelves, as well as a great range in the New Zealand reference section.
We offer the full shopping experience, tremendous selection, great reading atmosphere, gift-wrapping and a beautiful range of cards, and can even put things in the post for you. The staff are all readers and only too willing to impart their knowledge and choices should you ask.
Covid under traffic light system. Masks and scanning required. Vaccination passes are not required.
Good reads from our collection.......
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RRP $37 From the night she is rescued as a baby out of the flames of a sinking ship; to the day she joins a pair of daredevil pilots looping and diving over the rugged forests of her childhood, to the thrill of flying Spitfires during the war, the life of Marian Graves has always been marked by a lust for freedom and danger. In 1950, she embarks on the great circle flight, circumnavigating the globe. It is Marian's life dream and her final journey, before she disappears without a trace. Half a century later, Hadley Baxter, a brilliant, troubled Hollywood starlet is irresistibly drawn to play Marian Graves, a role that will lead her to probe the deepest mysteries of the vanished pilot's life. |
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RRP $37 The remarkable story of all the other species of human 50,000 years ago, we were not the only species of human in the world. There were at least four others, including the Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonesis and the Denisovans. At the forefront of the latter's ground-breaking discovery was Oxford Professor Tom Higham. In The World Before Us, he explains the scientific and technological advancements - in radiocarbon dating and ancient DNA, for example - that allowed each of these discoveries to be made, enabling us to be more accurate in our predictions about not just how long ago these other humans lived, but how they lived, interacted and lived on in our genes today. This is the story of us, told for the first time with its full cast of characters. |
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RRP $35 1944, in the ruined wine cellar of a Tuscan villa, as bombs fall around them, two strangers meet and share an extraordinary evening. Ulysses Temper is a young British soldier, Evelyn Skinner is a sexagenarian art historian and possible spy. She has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the wreckage and relive memories of the time she encountered EM Forster and had her heart stolen by an Italian maid in a particular Florentine room with a view. Evelyn's talk of truth and beauty plants a seed in Ulysses' mind that will shape the trajectory of his life - and of those who love him - for the next four decades. Moving from the Tuscan Hills and piazzas of Florence, to the smog of London's East End, Still Life is a sweeping, joyful novel about beauty, love, family and fate. |
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RRP $38 Tim Marshall's global bestseller Prisoners of Geography showed how every nation's choices are limited by mountains, rivers, seas and concrete. Since then, the geography hasn't changed, but the world has. In this revelatory new book, Marshall takes us into ten regions that are set to shape global politics and power. Find out why the Earth's atmosphere is the world's next battleground; why the fight for the Pacific is just beginning; and why Europe's next refugee crisis is closer than it thinks. In ten chapters covering Australia, The Sahel, Greece, Turkey, the UK, Iran, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Spain and Space, delivered with Marshall's trademark wit and insight, this is a lucid and gripping exploration of the power of geography to shape humanity's past, present - and future. |
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RRP $38 - OUR PRICE $30 They'll search the world to find her. From the Sunday Times number one bestselling author Lucinda Riley, The Missing Sister is the seventh instalment in the multimillion-copy epic series The Seven Sisters. The six D'Apliese sisters have each been on their own incredible journey to discover their heritage, but they still have one question left unanswered: who and where is the seventh sister? They only have one clue - an image of a star-shaped emerald ring. The search to find the missing sister will take them across the globe - from New Zealand to Canada, England, France and Ireland - uniting them all in their mission to complete their family at last. In doing so, they will slowly unearth a story of love, strength and sacrifice that began almost one hundred years ago, as other brave young women risk everything to change the world around them. |
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RRP $38 A sweeping, masterful debut about a daughter's fateful choice, a mother motivated by her own past, and a family legacy that begins in Cuba before either of them were born. 1866, Cuba: Maria Isabel is the only woman working at a cigar factory, where each day the workers are read Victor Hugo and encouraged to recognize their value and strength. But these are dangerous political times, and as Maria begins to see marriage and motherhood as her only options for survival, the sounds of war are approaching. In present-day Miami, Jeanette is battling addiction. Daughter of Carmen, a Cuban immigrant, she is determined to learn more about her family history from her reticent mother and makes the snap decision to take in the daughter of a neighbour detained by immigration officers. Carmen, still wrestling with the trauma of displacement, must process her difficult relationship with her own mother while trying to raise a wayward Jeanette. Steadfast in her quest for understanding, Jeanette travels to Cuba to see her grandmother and reckon with secrets from the past destined to erupt. From 19th-century cigar factories to present-day detention centers, from Cuba to Mexico, Gabriela Garcia's Of Women and Salt follows Latina women of fierce pride and longing, all irrevocably linked by the inheritance of trauma, and the stories passed between them. It is a haunting meditation on the choices of mothers and the tenacity of women who choose to tell their stories despite those who wish to silence them. |
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RRP $33 This is not just another novel about a dead girl. When she arrived in New York on her 18th birthday carrying nothing but $600 cash and a stolen camera, Alice Lee was looking for a fresh start. Now, just one month later, she is the city's latest Jane Doe, an unidentified murder victim. Ruby Jones is also trying to start over; she travelled halfway around the world only to find herself lonelier than ever. Until she finds Alice's body by the Hudson River. From this first, devastating encounter, the two women form an unbreakable bond. Alice is sure that Ruby is the key to solving the mystery of her life - and death. And Ruby - struggling to forget what she saw that morning - finds herself unable to let Alice go. Not until she is given the ending she deserves. Before You Knew My Name doesn't ask whodunnit. Instead, this powerful, hopeful novel asks: Who was she? And what did she leave behind? The answers might surprise you. |
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RRP $37 Nic is a forty-five-year-old trivia buff, amateur nail artist and fairy godmother to the neighbourhood's stray cats. She's also the owner of a decade's worth of daily newspapers, enough clothes and shoes to fill Big W three times over and a pen collection which, if laid end-to-end, would probably circle her house twice. The person she's closest to in the world is her beloved niece Lena, who she meets for lunch every Sunday. One day Nic fails to show up. When Lena travels to her aunt's house to see if Nic's all right, she gets the shock of her life, and sets in train a series of events that will prove cataclysmic for them both. By the acclaimed author of An Isolated Incident, Love Objects is a clear-eyed, heart-wrenching and deeply compassionate novel about love and family, betrayal and forgiveness, and the things we do to fill our empty spaces. |
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RRP $37 What we do to the soil, we do to ourselves.Soil is the unlikely story of our most maligned resource as swashbuckling hero. A saga of bombs, ice ages and civilisations falling. Of ancient hunger, modern sicknesses and gastronomic delight. It features poison gas, climate collapse and a mind-blowing explanation of how rain is formed. For too long, we've not only neglected the land beneath us, we've squandered and debased it, by over-clearing, over-grazing and over-ploughing. But if we want our food to nourish us, and to ensure our planet's long-term health, we need to understand how soil works - how it's made, how it's lost, and how it can be repaired. In this ode to the thin veneer of Earth that gifts us life, commentator and farmer Matthew Evans shows us that what we do in our backyards, on our farms, and what we put on our dinner tables really matters, and can be a source of hope. Isn't it time we stopped treating the ground beneath our feet like dirt? |
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RRP $33 Yiannis is a poacher, trapping the tiny protected songbirds that stop in Cyprus as they migrate each year from Africa to Europe, and selling them on the black market. He dreams of finding a new way of life, and of marrying Nisha, who works for Petra and her daughter Angela. Nisha is raising Angela, mothering her own child back in Sri Lanka by the screen of a phone. When Nisha disappears, Yiannis is convinced he is responsible, paralysed by heartbreak and fear. Petra is forced to care for her child again, and when little Angela insists that they find Nisha, she begins to see that Nisha hasn't simply run away, and that no one else will bother to look for her. With infinite tenderness and skill, Christy Lefteri has crafted a powerful story about the unseen who walk among us, cleaning our homes and caring for our children - what it is to migrate in search of freedom, only to find yourself trapped. Songbirds is a triumphant exploration of loss, the strength of the human spirit and the unbreakable bonds of courage, and of love. |
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RRP $37 Meet Eve, who has departed from her thirty-year career to become a Free Spirit; Sally, who has waved goodbye to her indifferent husband and two grown-up children; and Anastasia- defiantly independent narrowboat-dweller, suddenly vulnerable as she awaits a life-saving operation. Inexperienced and ill-equipped, Sally and Eve embark upon a journey through the canals of England, guided by the remote and unsympathetic Anastasia. As they glide gently - and not so gently - through the countryside, the eccentricities and challenges of canalboat life draw them inexorably together, and a tender and unforgettable story unfolds. Disarmingly truthful and narrated with a rare, surprising wit, THREE WOMEN AND A BOAT is a journey over the glorious waterways of England and into the unfathomable depths of the human heart. |
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RRP $40 The highly-anticipated portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, by the prize-winning, bestselling author of Say Nothing. The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions - Harvard; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Oxford; the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations in the arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing Oxycontin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis-an international epidemic of drug addiction which has killed nearly half a million people. In this masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, Patrick Radden Keefe exhaustively documents the jaw-dropping and ferociously compelling reality. Empire of Pain is the story of a dynasty: a parable of 21st century greed. |
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RRP $33 Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, How Beautiful We Were tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean-up and financial reparations are made - and ignored. The country's government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interest only. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. But their fight will come at a steep price...one which generation after generation will have to pay. Told through the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community's determination to hold onto its ancestral land and a young woman's willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people's freedom. |
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RRP $33 November, 1921. Edward VIII, Prince of Wales and future ruler of India, is arriving in Bombay to begin a four-month tour. The Indian subcontinent is chafing under British rule, and India's only female lawyer, Perveen Mistry, isn't surprised when local unrest spirals into riots. But she's horrified by the death of Freny Cuttingmaster, an eighteen-year-old student who falls from a second-floor gallery just as the prince's grand procession is passing by her college. Freny had come for a legal consultation just days before her death, and what she confided makes Perveen suspect that her death was not an accident. When Freny's death is indeed ruled a murder, Perveen knows she can't rest until she sees justice done. |
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RRP $40 From the bestselling philosopher, an ambitious and gripping history of science, thought, life on earth and the human mind itself - and what we might know in the future What do we know, and how do we know it? What do we now know that we don't know? And what have we learnt about the obstacles to knowing more? In a time of deepening battles over what knowledge and truth mean, these questions matter more than ever. Bestselling polymath and philosopher A. C. Grayling seeks to answer them in three crucial areas at the frontiers of knowledge- science, history, and psychology. In each area he illustrates how each field has advanced to where it is now, from the rise of technology to quantum theory, from the dawn of humanity to debates around national histories, from ancient ideas of the brain to modern theories of the mind. A remarkable history of science, life on earth, and the human mind itself, this is a compelling and fascinating tour de force, written with Grayling's verve, clarity and remarkable breadth of knowledge. |
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RRP $35 In the dying days of the American Civil War, newly freed brothers Landry and Prentiss find themselves cast into the world without a penny to their names. Forced to hide out in the woods near their former Georgia plantation, they're soon discovered by the land's owner, George Walker, a man still reeling from the loss of his son in the war.When the brothers begin to live and work on George's farm, the tentative bonds of trust and union begin to blossom between the strangers. But this sanctuary survives on a knife's edge, and it isn't long before the inhabitants of the nearby town of Old Ox react with fury at the alliances being formed only a few miles away . . . |
Moth
Of Women and Salt
How Beautiful We Were
The Sweetness of Water
I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelf by Grant Snider
Match a Pair of Birds: A Memory Game
Bug Bingo