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 Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic, $30)
Haymitch’s Hunger Games.
2 Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Wynn-Williams (Pan UK, $40)
“Darkly funny and genuinely shocking,” says the NY Times. “She got a bloody good story out of it,” says The Spinoff.
3 Butter by Asako Yuzuki (Fourth Estate, $35)
Devour this foodie crime novel then go to see the author at the Auckland Writers Festival next month.
4 The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (Hay House, $32)
The very latest self-help smash hit all about letting people behave as they are want.
5 See How They Fall by Rachel Paris (Moa Press, $38)
A perfectly bingeable whodunnit, just right for a long weekend escape. Read an interview with the author about the making of the book right here on The Spinoff.
6 Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Fourth Estate, $38)
There’s an interesting take on this latest novel from Adichie over on Vulture – here’s a preview: “Dream Count proves that she is still a gifted storyteller, yet her fame has indeed affected her work. Dream Count comprises four linked novellas (as well as an epilogue-esque chapter), and each section follows a different woman’s, well, dreams. There’s Chiamaka, a hopeless-romantic travel writer who yearns for a soulmate; Zikora, an ambitious lawyer who wants to have both a high-powered career and a picture-perfect family; Kadiatou, a long-suffering maid who seeks opportunity in America; and Omelogor, a depressed graduate student who craves intellectual freedom. Adichie’s writing is as confident as ever, and she retains her talent for rendering heterosexual intimacy — a bad boyfriend ‘wanted the unusual more than he wanted the true,’ while a Christian dating site ‘felt ghostly, with too few men, and even fewer Black men.'”
7 The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides (Michael Joseph, $40)
A retelling of Cook’s final, fatal voyage. Doug Bock Clark gives the book a thorough going over in the NY Times. Here’s a snippet: “The Wide Wide Sea presents Cook’s moral collapse as an enigma. Sides cites other historians’ arguments that lingering physical ailments — one suggests he picked up a parasite from some bad fish — might have darkened Cook’s mood. But his journals and ship logs, which dedicate hundreds of thousands of words to oceanic data, offer little to resolve the mystery. ‘In all those pages we rarely get a glimpse of Cook’s emotional world,’ Sides notes, describing the explorer as ‘a technician, a cyborg, a navigational machine.'”
8 The Cafe with No Name by Robert Seethaler (Canongate, $37)
Elizabeth Strout herself endorsed this bestselling novel. Here’s the publisher’s blurb: “It is 1966, and Robert Simon has just fulfilled his dream by taking over a café on the corner of a bustling Vienna market. He recruits a barmaid, Mila, and soon the customers flock in. Factory workers, market traders, elderly ladies, a wrestler, a painter, an unemployed seamstress in search of a job, each bring their stories and their plans for the future. As Robert listens and Mila refills their glasses, romances bloom, friendships are made and fortunes change. And change is coming to the city around them, to the little café, and to Robert’s dream.”
9 Mahjong House Rules from Across the Asian Diaspora by Nicole Wong (Hardie Grant Books, $40)
A beautifully personal guide to Mahjong: “With vibrant photography and detailed instructional diagrams, author Nicole Wong walks you through gameplay, just how her grandfather would have. In addition, Mahjong delves into the strategy, history, and design of the game and discusses various popular styles of play (American mah-jongg, Japanese riichi mahjong, and more). A bonus essay also breaks down the mahjong hands in the pivotal scene from the 2018 hit film Crazy Rich Asians, and snippets of the author’s family history are sprinkled throughout, telling a story of diaspora through mahjong and showcasing mahjong culture, past and present.”
10 Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst (Picador, $38)
Hook it to my veins. Hollinghurst is the most beautiful writer and this book sounds exquisite as per: “Dave Win is thirteen years old when he first goes to stay with the sponsors of his scholarship at a local boarding school. This weekend, with its games and challenges and surprising encounters, will open up heady new possibilities, even as it exposes him to their son Giles’ envy and violence. As their lives unfold over the next half a century, the two boys’ careers will diverge dramatically: Dave, a gifted actor struggling with convention and discrimination, Giles an increasingly powerful and dangerous politician.
Our Evenings is Dave Win’s own account of his life as a schoolboy and student, his first love affairs, in London, and on the road with an experimental theatre company, and of a late-life affair, which transforms his sixties with a new sense of happiness and a perilous security.”
WELLINGTON
1 Surplus Women by Michelle Duff (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35)
A magnificent collection of short stories that range from realism, to historical fiction, to speculative futures. Duff is a superb writer: every sentence sings and every story lingers.
2 Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Fourth Estate, $38)
3 Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Wynn-Williams (Pan UK, $40)
4 Bookshop Detectives #2: Tea and Cake and Death by Gareth & Louise Ward (Penguin, $38)
Delicious cosy crime to take with you to the couch with your Easter eggs and your hot crossed buns this weekend.
5 Companion to Volcanology by Brent Kininmont (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $25)
A new book of poetry that spans Aotearoa and Japan.
6 Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape, $26)
A lyrical contemplation of our Earth and what it promises and what it holds.
7 Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (Profile Books, $49)
Never have we needed visionaries so urgently. In this book Klein and Thompson “unpick the barriers to progress and show how we can, and must, shift the political agenda to one that not only protects and preserves, but also builds. From healthcare to housing, infrastructure to innovation, they lay out a path to a future defined not by fear, but by abundance.”
8 James by Percival Everett (Picador, $25)
The Huckleberry Finn retelling that many think ought to have won the Booker Prize in 2024.
9 Atlas Of The New Zealand Wars Volume One 1834–1864: Early Engagements to the Second Taranaki War by Derek Leask (Auckland University Press, $90)
A monumental publication thirty years in the making: “Beginning with early skirmishes off the Taranaki coast and at the Chathams, Volume One follows the tracks inland from the Bay of Islands towards the Hokianga in the Northern Wars; it reveals the web of Te Rauparaha’s influence radiating out from Kāpiti to Port Nicholson and across Cook Strait to the Wairau; it takes us inside the barracks and ramparts of the colony’s new towns; and concludes as the brewing unrest around Waitara in Taranaki explodes into war.
Through the maps, we meet the people: Hōne Heke and FitzRoy, Te Rangitāke and Pratt, warriors and missionaries; and we go where they went: from the flagpole at Kororāreka to Kawiti’s pā at Ruapekapeka, up the Hutt River to Boulcott’s farm, across Taranaki from Waitara to Kaitake pā. Through both tāngata and whenua we understand the conflicts and their consequences anew.”
10 See How They Fall by Rachel Paris (Moa Press, $38)
