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 Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (Faber & Faber, $37)
According to The Bookseller, hardback sales of Intermezzo are down compared to sales of Beautiful World, Where Are You over the same sales window. One suggestion is that shoppers aren’t shelling for hardbacks as the cost of living crisis continues over on that side of the world.
2 Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout (Viking Penguin, $38)
Strout’s latest has an extremely solid rating of 4.34 over on GoodReads after 11,454 have cast their stars. How many stars would you give this delightful collision of Lucy and Olive?
3 Kataraina by Becky Manawatu (Makaro Press, $37)
Manawatu’s sequel to her award-winning novel, Auē, is still going strong. Manawatu appears at the Nelson Arts Festival next weekend; and then in Wellington next month at Verb Readers & Writers Festival.
4 Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood (Allen & Unwin, $37)
Wood explains, in this fascinating article in The Guardian, how her Booker shortlisted novel took shape:
“I felt as if I started the book a dozen times, writing into one seam then coming to its end and crawling out backwards. Writing, throwing it out, starting again and throwing it out. For a couple of years I worked, every day thinking, “I haven’t even started”. But somehow the novel slowly formed itself, falling into shape in a kind of rush towards the end of the process.
I did know something of what I wanted – to grip the writing less tightly than I had before. I wanted to trust my reader more. Worn down by politics and the world’s aggression, I was tired of the impulse to control or harp. I came across this sentence from WB Yeats: “Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible,” from The Cutting of an Agate). This sentence became my guide.
I aimed for a bone-clean, understated novel. I wanted to invite the reader into a calm and spacious consideration of their own life as they join my narrator in hers.”
5 James by Percival Everett (Mantle, $38)
And in the same article, Everett says: “I wish I could say that for years the idea of making this novel burned in me, but I can’t. It was nothing so romantic. I was playing tennis and as I watched my crosscourt backhand barely miss the sideline by the length of the average adult body I thought, has anyone ever told Huck Finn’s story from Jim’s point of view?
This was an interesting notion, but also a discovery of what was wrong with my backhand. I was surprised to find that it had not been done, but I also acknowledged that the idea had not occurred to me until that moment. The fact is that I probably could not have written the novel until that time in my life, as a person and as a writer. Though I never intended the book as a corrective to Twain’s novel, I did want to address the failure of the culture to acknowledge the humanity of enslaved people. It was not so much that I wanted to give the character Jim agency (he already had that), but that I desired to offer him a method, a vehicle for expressing that agency.”
6 Butter by Asako Yuzuki (Fourth Estate, $35)
Back again: Butter.
7 Revenge Of The Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders and the Rise of Social Engineering by Malcolm Gladwell (Abacus, $40)
Brace yourself… it’s been (nearly) 25 years since The Tipping Point was published. According to this review on The Guardian, this is what Gladwell is trying to do with this latest iteration: “Apparently, his initial intention was simply to update the first book, but in the process he realised that he wanted to write a completely new work. The result is an odd and occasionally frustrating confection that takes the (sometimes disputed) conclusions of the original as a given, and then sets off on a self-consciously digressive examination of Miami’s corruption problem, a suicide outbreak at an elite school and the struggle for same-sex marriage, among several other seemingly unrelated subjects.”
8 Herbst: Architecture in Context by John Walsh (Massey University Press, $75)
Boldest cover of the year. Look at it!
9 Nexus: A Brief History of Information by Yuval Noah Harari (Penguin, $45)
“Confronting the avalanche of books on the prospects of AI, readers would do well to begin with this one.” Read the full review on Kirkus.
10 Becoming Aotearoa: A New History of New Zealand by Michael Belgrave (Massey University Press, $65)
The stonking new book from historian Michael Belgrave is a joy to read: don’t be put off by the size of it, readers will find a fluid, witty voice and a fascinating, fresh look at how Aotearoa, the people, came to be.
WELLINGTON
1 Back on Track? The NZ General Election Of 2023 edited by Stephen Levine (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $50)
Freshly launched on this week marking the anniversary of the 2023 election is Levine’s latest anthology of political reflection. Read an excerpt on The Spinoff, here.
2 Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (Faber & Faber, $37)
3 Becoming Aotearoa: A New History of New Zealand by Michael Belgrave (Massey University Press, $65)
4 Kataraina by Becky Manawatu (Makaro Press, $37)
5 Revenge Of The Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders and the Rise of Social Engineering by Malcolm Gladwell (Abacus, $40)
6 Women Living Deliciously by Florence Given (Brazen, $40)
With a very Sergeant Pepper’s cover, this is Given’s follow up to Women Don’t Owe You Pretty. Here’s the blurb: “Women Living Deliciously wants us to fall in love with our lives. It will help women uncover the sense of awe and wonder that has been buried by the layers of shame, perfectionism and self-objectification that get piled on us by the patriarchy. For too long we have internalised the belief that our bodies are things to be looked at – instead of lived in. That it’s embarrassing to fully express ourselves. That we cannot trust the parts of ourselves that are so full of desire.
This book will unpack the many barriers women face when trying to access joy so that they can discover the delicious life that’s theirs for the taking.”
7 Juice by Tim Winton (Hamish Hamilton, $55)
A compulsive new dystopia from one of Australia’s greatest.
8 Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday, $38)
Cosy, literary crime.
9 Poorhara by Michelle Rahurahu (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38)
A debut roadtrip novel making waves among fans who are comparing it to Rebecca K Reilly’s Greta & Valdin. Here’s the blurb: “ERIN can hear the whaanau whispering, and they won’t tell her why. She’s ditched school to help her aunty clean houses—even though she has a full-time job looking after all the moko. But no one cares, and soon she will be picked clean, like the bones in her maamaa’s bedroom.
STAR is home for the first time in years, and he’s worn the same clothes for days. Everything feels unfamiliar: the karakia, his nephews, the house that he grew up in. He’s too scared to tell his family that he’s bombing back at uni. And the past is an affliction, a gently rising tide.
It is 178 years after colonisation. Together, the cousins escape. Free-wheeling across the countryside in a car without a warrant, they cast their net widely. Their family mythologies, heartaches and rifts will surface, and amidst them the glint of possibility: a return to the whenua where it all began.
A tragicomedy set in the confines of a 1994 Daihatsu Mira, Poorhara is a journey of epic proportions – a poignant, expansive and darkly funny first novel written by a true poorhara.”
10 Make It Make Sense by Lucy Blakiston & Bel Hawkins (Moa Press, $37)
Nat Baker gives this nonfic, self-help/memoir a glowing review over on Kete Books: “Resembling Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of not giving a F*ck (which is really about defining which f*cks you do give) Make It Make Sense is also part-memoir in that it draws heavily on the lived experience of both authors, their work; relationships: romantic, platonic and familial; their travels; and their personal encounters with burnout, illness and heart-breaking loss. However, Make It Make Sense delighted most in reminding me of Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed – where Strayed reads a selection of advice columns written under her moniker ‘Sugar’ at The Rumpus. Like Tiny Beautiful Things, Make It Make Sense is pointed in its observations of our daily grind, the cost of living, finding love and the effects of being chronically online, while also being graceful with advice dispensed on how to rise above it all and ‘phoenix’ regardless. At times Blakiston will make you cry, Hawkins will have you nodding and shaking your head – but they will also make you laugh about things you might not relate to (see: rat-girling) or relate too much to. I thought I was the only one to deliver a boardroom presentation taking vomit-breaks at half-time.”