The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.
AUCKLAND
1 Tiahuia: A Karanga for My Mother by Merenia Gray (Huia Publishers, $45)
Striking cover! Here’s the publisher’s blurb for this new release: “As the whāngai daughter of Te Puea Hērangi, an inspiring leader of the Waikato, Tiahuia Te Puea Hērangi witnessed and took part in some of the major events that changed Aotearoa New Zealand. Merenia Gray, Tiahuia’s daughter, explores Tiahuia’s life and her whakapapa. Using stories, poetry, letters and interviews, Merenia retells the stories of how her ancestors survived Te Rauparaha’s raids, signed the Treaty of Waitangi, and came from Norfolk and Aberdeen to settle in Nelson. Tiahuia was a teacher, an artist, a Wellington City Councillor, a graduate of Victoria University, a nurse, a lifelong member of Ngati Pōneke, and a skilled practitioner of a range of Māori performing arts, particularly karanga. She was a unique woman whose life drew together te ao Māori and te ao Pākehā.”
2 Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape, $26)
This year’s galactic Booker Prize winner.
3 Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (Faber & Faber, $37)
This year’s Rooney.
4 Understanding Te Tiriti by Roimata Smail (Wai Ako Press, $25)
This 32-page guide to the basics of Te Tiriti will be enjoying a bump in the bestsellers thanks to the new story that broke this week reporting that a generous anonymous donor is backing the dissemination of Smail’s book to every high school in the country.
5 Becoming Tangata Tiriti: Working with Maori, Honouring the Treaty by Avril Bell (Auckland Uni Press, $30)
Matches well with item 4, this book is about how to honour Te Tiriti now you know all about it.
6 The Vegetarian by Han Kang (Portobello Books, $28)
Another slim Booker Prize winning novel, this one is the extraordinary story of one woman’s refusal to live nicely in a society that perpetuates violence against women. One of the best novels you’ll ever read.
7 Atua Wahine: The Ancient Wisdom of Māori Goddesses by Hana Tapiata (Harper Collins, $37)
Majestically bound guide book to Atua Wahine and how they can help you navigate the age we’re in.
8 Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik (Harper Collins, $40)
Joan Didion and Eva Babitz: both brilliant writers, and friends? Here’s a summary from The Guardian review of Anolik’s attempt to unspool the frenemies: “After a while, though, it came to me that these women had not, after all, engaged in much of a correspondence; the letter offered as bait at the start of Lili Anolik’s book, in which Babitz says mean things to Didion (‘Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?), had, it turned out, never been posted. At which point, my disappointment was severe. I wanted to bust right out of the airless room in which I’d been kept for 190-odd pages, listening to Anolik’s annoying, digressive, smart-alecky prose – a style known to me as High 21st-Century Frantic American. Quickly, someone, open a window! Let me out of here.”
9 The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami (Harvill Secker, $55)
New Murakami. Here’s the blurb: “When a young man’s girlfriend mysteriously vanishes, he sets his heart on finding the imaginary city where her true self lives. His search will lead him to take a job in a remote library with mysteries of its own.
When he finally makes it to the walled city, a shadowless place of horned beasts and willow trees, he finds his beloved working in a different library – a dream library. But she has no memory of their life together in the other world and, as the lines between reality and fantasy start to blur, he must decide what he’s willing to lose.”
10 Karla’s Choice: A John le Carré Novel by Nick Harkaway (Viking Penguin, $38)
“Karla’s Choice, perhaps the most intriguing of the le Carré-related publications to have appeared since his death, puts these achievements front and centre,” writes Anthony Cummins in The Guardian. “Set after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold but before Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, it’s a new mission for the spymaster George Smiley, from the pen of le Carré’s son, novelist Nick Harkaway, who makes clear that while this might have been a book he was born to write, it was far from easy. He describes sending the manuscript to the author Joe Hill, Stephen King’s son, ‘one of the few people on Earth who can claim to understand the scale of my fear around this book’, and the extent to which it’s a family affair supplies an off-page frisson that he doesn’t shy away from in a winning foreword. (Will the book succeed? ‘We’re about to find out.’)”
WELLINGTON
1 Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape, $26)
2 Understanding Te Tiriti by Roimata Smail (Wai Ako Press, $25)
3 Wild Wellington: Nga Taonga Taiao: A Guide to the Wildlife & Wild Places of Te Whanganui-a-tara by Michael Szabo (Te Papa Press, $45)
Lovely cover, well-organised, neat size. Ideal Christmas present to self or to someone else.
4 Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (Faber, $45 hardback, $37 paperback)
5 Atua Wahine: The Ancient Wisdom of Māori Goddesses by Hana Tapiata (Harper Collins, $37)
6 Kataraina by Becky Manawatu (Makaro Press, $37)
“In Te Ao Māori, we have duality: Papa and Raki, tapu and noa, te kore and te ao. In her interview with Lynn Freeman, Becky describes Auē as a breath in and hoped that Kataraina would be a breath out. In another RNZ interview, Manawatu described Auē as masculine and Kataraina as feminine. (‘Did I say that?’ said Manawatu in her Auckland Writers Festival session with Irish writer Sinéad Gleeson.) Auē and Kataraina absolutely work in this way. Now, having read both, I can’t have one without the other.” Read more of Jenna Todd’s review on The Spinoff.
7 All Fours by Miranda July (Canongate, $37)
The mid-life novel that everyone is talking about. Here’s an excerpt from a lively review on The Cut: “The narrator is an L.A.-based multimedia artist – ‘picture a woman who had success in several mediums at a young age’ – not unlike Miranda July. Also like July, she is queer and married to a man, a fellow creative type, raising a nonbinary child. She is haunted by literal and metaphorical death. Her child was almost stillborn. Her grandmother jumped out of a window at age 55 because ‘she couldn’t bear to see her looks go,’ and then 23 years later, her aunt jumped out of the same window. But while the narrator is ruminating on the death-in-life that looms for women when they run out of estrogen, she is, for what she fears is a limited time only, hornier than a teenage boy. She masturbates, over the course of the novel, approximately ten times, has sex nine times, and at one point experiences an exquisite moment of intimacy when someone else removes her bloody tampon.”
8 Butter by Asako Yuzuki (4th Estate, $35)
The cult Japanese bestseller about murder and food.
9 Toi Te Mana: A History of Māori Art by Deidre Brown & Ngarino Ellis & Jonathan Mane-Wheoki (Auckland University Press, $100)
Brown and Ellis wrote for The Spinoff about the making of this landmark publication: “The book represents our understanding of Māori art based on our 100 years’ combined experience teaching, researching and writing in the discipline as Māori art historians. Our definition of Māori art is non-negotiable. It is art made by anyone who is Māori. We took this position in order to investigate, in detail, a broad range of visual arts, makers’ stories and our changing practices, dating from the time of our first Polynesian ancestors to the present day. The approach yielded three recurring themes within this great diversity of Māori art: tikanga, whenua and whakapapa.”
10 City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami (Harvill Secker, $55)