130,000+ Books, Games & Puzzles in-stock 🇳🇿

Come visit us this weekend!🚀 Auckland Bookstore • Open 7 days, 8:30am–5pm

Incinarration

What Do We Carry?
Series: The French List
Brief Description
A genre-defying book about survival, transformation, and the human ability to rise from the ashes. Hélène Cixous's powerful new book, masterfully translated by Peggy Kamuf, is a vivid journey through fire. From the ashes of wars, wildfires, and upheaval, Cixous traces a dramatic path across time—from... Read More
Format: Hardback
TEMPORARILY OUT OF STOCK Please add to wishlist to be notified when back in stock

Sorry, we're currently out of stock of Incinarration. Please add to your Wishlist and we'll send you an email as soon as it's back in stock.

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

A genre-defying book about survival, transformation, and the human ability to rise from the ashes.

Hélène Cixous's powerful new book, masterfully translated by Peggy Kamuf, is a vivid journey through fire. From the ashes of wars, wildfires, and upheaval, Cixous traces a dramatic path across time—from the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of Oran to the European wildfires of 2022—weaving a rich, intimate narrative that merges history, autobiography, and myth.

With her piercing, lyrical voice, Cixous confronts the human cost of destruction and upheaval, and asks a universal question: What do we carry with us when everything we know is falling to ashes?

In Incinarration, Cixous finds hope in the power of words, memory, and imagination to illuminate our darkest moments and redeem the future. As forests burn and regimes collapse, Cixous shows us how stories become a form of resistance—a way to remember, to bear testimony, and to find renewal in the face of oblivion.

Series: The French List

View all
  • Bliss
    An engrossing novel about love and grief that introduces an important francophone author to English-speaking readers. Rome, 2014, late summer. While he is reading on his sun-drenched terrace, Giangiacomo’s heart stops. A quick, painless death—something he had always hoped for, his daughter, Elvira, remembers. A few days later, Elvira comes across an unfinished manuscript in her father’s flat. In it,...
    Hardback
    $3999
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • Little Grey Lies
    London between the wars was a place of anxiety and uncertainty. After the postwar boom of the 1920s, the aftereffects of the stock market crash hit London, and, even as the fortunes of the aristocracy went into decline, there was hunger and a rising tide of virulent fascism. It is in this setting that Max, a French journalist looking for...
    Paperback
    $3599
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • Mysterious Solidarities
    When translator Claire Methuen travels back to her hometown of Dinard for a family wedding, she runs into her old piano teacher, Madame Ladon. After befriending the ageing woman, Methuen begins to toy with the idea of a permanent return to live in Brittany. She becomes increasingly obsessed by her childhood sweetheart, Simon Quelen, who, now married and a father,...
    Hardback
    $4699
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • Nevermore
    A meditation on loss and recovery through the act of translation and its recuperative powers. An unnamed translator mourning the loss of a close friend retreats to Dresden to translate the "Time Passes" section of Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse. Translating this lyrical evocation of time and its devastations in a city with which the writer has no connections...
    Hardback
    $4799
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • Old World
    Traversing heritage across three continents, this poignant coming-of-age novel chronicles the enduring presence of systemic racism and the resistance to it. Born in Cameroon and raised in the suburbs of Paris, Nathan feels unmoored, as if he does not belong in France. His mother tells him about his great-grandfather who left Cameroon for New Orleans to seek his fortune shortly...
    Hardback
    $4799
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • The Emperor
    A tragicomic novel that explores deep-seated tensions and social violence in Haiti. After committing an irreparable crime, the narrator of The Emperor waits in his bedroom for the police to arrest him. His past reverberates inside of him like a drum: his youth spent in captivity as a zonbi, under the control of a charlatan Vodou leader, and many an...
    Hardback
    $3999
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • The Fount of Time
    “Last Kingdom is a set of books that... is neither philosophical argumentation nor little disparate, scholarly essays, nor novelistic narrative; gradually, for me, all genres have fallen away.” So writes Pascal Quignard of his monumental book series, Last Kingdom. In the latest volume, The Fount of Time, he focuses on the paradoxically immediate presence in our lives of the deepest,...
    Hardback
    $4699
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • The Last Days of Mandelstam
    The year is 1938. The great Russian poet and essayist Osip Mandelstam is forty-seven years old and is dying in a transit camp near Vladivostok after having been arrested by Stalin’s government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into exile with his wife. Stalin, “the Kremlin mountaineer, murderer, and peasant-slayer,” is undoubtedly responsible for his fatal decline. From...
    Hardback
    $4099
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • Tristan
    Introducing a refreshing young French voice to English readers, this slim novel is both a riveting love story and an examination of humanity’s assault on the natural world. After a seven-day journey on the South Atlantic Ocean aboard a lobster boat servicing Cape Town, Ida arrives on the island of Tristan. In the little island community, a village nestled on...
    Hardback
    $3999
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • We Defy Augury
    We defy augury. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come … the readiness is all. Under the sign of Hamlet’s last act, Hélène Cixous, in her eightieth year, launched her new book—and the latest chapter in her Human Comedy, her Search for Lost Time. Surely one of the most...
    Hardback
    $4099
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • Andre Gorz
    The first and exhaustive biography of twentieth-century leftist philosopher André Gorz. Recognised as one of the most lucid and innovative critics of contemporary capitalism, André Gorz (1923–2007) was known for asking fundamental questions regarding the meaning of life and work. This first biography of a unique figure operating at the confluence of literature, philosophy, and journalism revisits half a century...
    Hardback
    $5699
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • Correspondence
    Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein. Few can be said to have had as broad an impact on European art in the twentieth century as these two cultural giants. Pablo Picasso, a pioneering visual artist, created a prolific and widely influential body of work. Gertrude Stein, an intellectual tastemaker, hosted the leading salon for artists and writers between the wars in...
    Paperback
    $5299
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781803096285

Publisher: Seagull Books London Ltd

Format: Hardback

Date Published: 05 June 2026

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Seagull Books London Ltd

Contributors:

  • Translated by Peggy Kamuf

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 20.0mm

Width: 152.0mm

Height: 229.0mm

Weight: 340g

Pages: 152

About the Author

Hélène Cixous is professor emeritus of literature at the Université Paris VIII, where she founded and directed the Centre de recherches en études féminines. She is the author of more than seventy works of fiction, plays, and collections of critical essays, including Mdeilmm, Rêvoir, Well-Kept Ruins, We Defy Augury, and Tomb(e). Peggy Kamuf is professor emerita of French and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. Her most recent book is Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty.

Also by Hélène Cixous

View all
  • We Defy Augury
    We defy augury. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come … the readiness is all. Under the sign of Hamlet’s last act, Hélène Cixous, in her eightieth year, launched her new book—and the latest chapter in her Human Comedy, her Search for Lost Time. Surely one of the most...
    Hardback
    $4099
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • Death Shall Be Dethroned
    Death Shall Be Dethroned is the “shadow book” of Los, a Chapter, Hélène Cixous tells us. It came along after Los, but it was always there "hidden" in her notebooks, in the Beethoven notebook, say, the one Jacques Derrida gave her. But when it tapped at the window, she ignored it until the day she had to let it in....
    Paperback
    $2399
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • Mdeilmm
    Weaving together history, literature, and personal experience, this recent book from a master of literature crafts a mesmerizing exploration of language, loss, and the enduring power of the spirit world. The strange word Mdeilmm was reported to have been uttered by the spirit of Shakespeare when called up during a séance in 1854 at the instigation of the French poet...
    Hardback
    $4799
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • Rêvoir
    A genre-defying account of confinement and its literary echoes through history. As the pandemic sweeps through Paris in March 2020, the writer HC faces a choice: stay in Paris or flee to the countryside? The weight of historical responses bears down on her—those of her ancestors and Jewish writers during moments of persecution. Still uncertain, she flees to the country...
    Hardback
    $3999
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • Well–Kept Ruins
    A genre-defying book from one of France’s most well-known philosopher-writers. In the Lower Saxony region of northwestern Germany sits the city of Osnabrück. This is where, in 1648, the Peace of Westphalia was signed, bringing the Thirty Years’ War and one of the most calamitous periods of European history to an end. But the city was later to witness another...
    Hardback
    $3999
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks
  • Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing
    Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing is a poetic, insightful, and ultimately moving exploration of "the strange science of writing." In a magnetic, irresistible narrative, Cixous reflects on the writing process and explores three distinct areas essential for "great" writing: The School of the Dead – the notion that something or someone must die in order for good writing...
    Paperback
    $4799
    Elsewhere:
    $5199
    Available
    Ships in 3-4 weeks

More from Biography & Memoir

View all
  • New Release
    One Helluva Ride
    "This book is about where I came from, what I fought against, and what I chose formyself. Fame can blur the truth; this is my attempt to bring it back into focus." A legendary actor and Hollywood Icon whose five-decade career spans film, television,and producing, Michael Douglas has won two Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award, fiveGolden Globes, a Primetime Emmy,...
    Paperback
    $3200
    Elsewhere:
    $3999
    In Stock
    Ships Monday
  • Book cover for 'Swan Song: Diana, my sister' by Charles Spencer, featuring a black-and-white portrait of Diana with white and gold text on a gray background.
    New Release
    Swan Song
    Beautiful. Beloved. Hunted. The extraordinary life and death of Diana, as told by her brother, Charles – available to pre-order now. ‘When asked, ‘What was it like, growing up with Diana?’, my first thought is always, But I don’t know what it was like not to grow up with her…’ In September 1997, Charles Spencer stood in Westminster Abbey before...
    Hardback
    $5499
    Elsewhere:
    $6500
    (1)
    In Stock
    Ships Monday
  • New Release
    Fictional Selves
    From the beloved actor and star of Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet and Sex and the City comes a candid and deeply personal memoir. In this highly anticipated memoir, the beloved actor and star of Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Sex and the City and more shares his utterly original account of his offbeat journey in Hollywood, his battles with fear and...
    Hardback
    $4799
    Elsewhere:
    $6000
    In Stock
    Ships Monday
  • New Release
    The Steps
    The long-awaited memoir from a true Hollywood icon. We know Sylvester Stallone as one of the most revered actors, writers, and directors of all time, yet his life story is every bit as dramatic, intense, and inspiring as his greatest creations on screen. Bringing together a no-holds-barred account of a fascinating life with messages of hope, positivity, and resilience, in...
    Paperback
    $3299
    Elsewhere:
    $3999
    In Stock
    Ships Monday
  • New Release
    Home Again
    Join rock-legend, former Shihad frontman and lead singer of The Adults, Jon Toogood in this unflinching and no-holds-barred memoir Home Again.This is more than a rock story. Toogood looks back on a 37-year career that helped define New Zealand rock music, and the personal cost that came with it. From a music-obsessed childhood in Wellington to the deafening roar of international stages, this...
    Paperback
    $3199
    Elsewhere:
    $3999
    (1)
    In Stock
    Ships Monday
  • Dogs, Boys and Other Things I've Cried About
    From the social media superstar behind @SimonSits, Isabel Klee--known for her heartwarming tales of dog rescue--comes an utterly winning memoir about a twentysomething woman's search for true love in New York City and the dogs who helped her find it. A Jersey girl by birth, Isabel Klee had always wanted to live in New York City. At age 20, she...
    Paperback
    $3299
    Elsewhere:
    $3999
    In Stock
    Ships Monday
  • Famesick
    Chronicling the tumultuous decade between the premiere of Girls to her 2021 shotgun wedding (minus the baby, because she has no uterus), Lena Dunham takes us through her journey with her trademark mix of humor, unsparing honesty, and keen eye for detail. We peek behind the scenes - of her work, her family, her relationships, and her battle to reclaim her body...
    Paperback
    $3299
    Elsewhere:
    $3500
    In Stock
    Ships Monday
  • This Angry Pen of Mine
    This Angry Pen of Mine by Layne Staley invites you to dive into the untold creative world of Layne Staley, the legendary voice behind Alice in Chains. This extraordinary collection showcases his handwritten lyrics, deeply personal poetry, stunning original artwork, rare photos, fan tributes, and so much more. Step into the world of Layne Staley like never before. For the...
    Hardback
    $7299
    Elsewhere:
    $8999
    In Stock
    Ships Monday
  • Signed Copy
    Stakes
    Read our interview with author Noelle McCarthy! A darkly funny, sparkling follow-up to the author’s bestselling memoir Grand. You have to invite him in. You have to want the vampire’s badness in the house with you. Growing up in Catholic Ireland, Noelle McCarthy is captivated by Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The vampire is a risk-free fantasy, a suave alternative to the fraught realities...
    Paperback
    $3199
    Elsewhere:
    $4000
    In Stock
    Ships Monday
  • Built for This
    Raised among strong women, butcher's benches, and hard ideas about what men are meant to be, Brad Poulter grows up knowing he's different long before he has the words for it. But in late '90s small-town New Zealand, 'different' isn't discussed, it's managed. Joining the Royal New Zealand Navy offers escape, certainty, and belonging. The rules are clear, the uniform...
    Paperback
    $3199
    Elsewhere:
    $3799
    In Stock
    Ships Monday
  • Even the Good Girls Will Cry
    Thanks to a thrown beer bottle and a fan letter to a P.O. box, Melissa Auf der Maur's first band scored an opening slot for the Smashing Pumpkins in her bohemian home town, Montreal. Sensing Melissa's talent, Billy Corgan recommended her to Courtney Love. Whisked from her local scene, Melissa joined Hole just after the deaths of Kurt Cobain and...
    Paperback
    $3199
    Elsewhere:
    $3999
    (1)
    In Stock
    Ships Monday
  • An Ocean and a Day
    An utterly riveting, moving and poignant memoir of grief and loss that will speak to anyone who's ever lost someone they love. An Ocean and a Day is Hannah Richell's personal account of losing her husband, Matt, in a surfing accident on Tamarama beach in 2014. It is the story of the grief journey she travelled over the first two...
    Paperback
    $3199
    Elsewhere:
    $3799
    In Stock
    Ships Monday

Why buy from us?

Book Hero is not a chain store or big box retailer. We're an independent 100% NZ-owned business on a mission to help more Kiwis rediscover a love of books and reading!

Service & Delivery

Service & Delivery

Our warehouse in Auckland holds over 100,000 books, toys, board games and puzzles in-stock so you're not waiting for your order to arrive from overseas.

Auckland Bookstore

Auckland Bookstore

We're primarily an online store, but for your convenience you can pick up your order for free from our bookstore, which is right next door to our warehouse in Hobsonville.

Our Gifting Service

Our Gifting Service

Books make wonderful thoughtful gifts and we're here to help with gift-wrapping and cards. We can even send your gift directly to your loved one.