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 Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (Hay House, $32)
Wildly varying reviews over on the wild west of Good Reads. “The Let Them Theory is single handedly the best ‘make your life better’ book that I have ever read,” said Erin with her five star rating.” But Chrystal’s one star comes with, “I wanted to like this book. There’s actually really good concepts hidden in this book. Unfortunately the author extended the book about 3 times longer than needed.”
2 The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides (Michael Joseph, $40)
Billed as ‘The final, fatal adventure of Captain James Cook”, Sides’ bestseller is a fictionalisation of Cook’s final voyage and eventual death. For another angle on this topic, see this poem by Tusiata Avia.
3 Understanding Te Tiriti by Roimata Smail (Wai Ako Press, $25)
Short, succinct guide to Aotearoa’s founding document. Goes well with the rest of the resources on this handy list.
4 The Vegetarian by Han Kang (Granta, $28)
Simply one of the greatest novels of the last 20 years. A burning, delicate story of resistance.
5 We’ll Prescribe You a Cat by Syou Ishida (Doubleday, $36)
Another bestselling Japanese novel translated for our reading pleasure. Here’s a snippet from the publisher’s blurb:
“On the top floor of an old building at the end of a cobbled alley in Kyoto lies the Kokoro Clinic for the Soul. Only a select few – those who feel genuine emotional pain – can find it. The mysterious centre offers a unique treatment for its troubled patients: it prescribes cats as medication.
Get ready to fall in love:
– Bee, an eight-year-old female, mixed breed helps a disheartened businessman as he finds unexpected joy in physical labour;
– Margot, muscly like a lightweight boxer, helps a middle-aged callcentre worker stay relevant;
– Koyuki, an exquisite white cat brings closure to a mother troubled by the memory of the rescue kitten she was forced to abandon;
– Tank and Tangerine bring peace to a hardened fashion designer, as she learns to be kinder to herself;
– Mimita, the Scottish Fold kitten helps a broken-hearted Geisha to stop blaming herself for the cat she once lost.”
6 Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape, $26)
Last year’s Booker Prize Winner about astronauts looking at the whole of Earth from their space windows.
In this life-affirming book, Gabor Maté connects the dots between our personal suffering and the relentless pressures of modern life – showing that ill health is a natural reflection of our disconnection from our true selves. Drawing on four decades of clinical experience, and stories of people transforming their bodies and minds, Dr Maté offers a hopeful pathway to reconnection and healing.”
9 Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq (Picador, $38)
The eighth novel from bestselling French author irked NY Times reviewer, Dwight Garner. Here’s a wedge of what he served:
“The plot of Annihilation grows in so many directions that it is like a tree without a trunk. This novel describes sophisticated terrorist attacks meant to destabilize capitalism and the West. These attacks give Paul a chance to utter this ur-Houellebecqian line: “If the terrorists’ goal was to annihilate the world as he knew it, to annihilate the modern world, he couldn’t entirely blame them.”
10 The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa by Catherine Comyn (ESRA, $30)
An absolutely ingenious piece of scholarship: goes well with item 3, above. Here’s the full blurb:
“Finance was at the centre of every stage of the colonisation of Aotearoa, from the sale of Maori lands and the emigration of early colonists to the founding of settler nationhood and the enforcement of colonial governance. This book tells the story of the financial instruments and imperatives that drove the British colonial project in the nineteenth century. This is a history of the joint-stock company, a speculative London property market that romanticised the distant lands of indigenous peoples, and the calculated use of credit and taxation by the British to dispossess Maori of their land and subject them to colonial rule. By illuminating the centrality of finance in the colonisation of Aotearoa, this book not only reframes our understanding of this country’s history, but also the stakes of anti-colonial struggle today.”
WELLINGTON
1 Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (Hay House, $32)
2 Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape, $26)
3 Black Sugarcane by Nafanua Purcell Kersel (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30)
A beautiful, energising and far-ranging debut collection of poetry that spans prose-poetry and small but striking images, like this:
Salani
A tidal pool
fenced with mangroves
is a buoyant graveyard
for tens of thousands of
empty water bottles.
4 Understanding Te Tiriti by Roimata Smail (Wai Ako Press, $25)
5 The Vegetarian by Han Kang (Granta, $28)
6 Kataraina by Becky Manawatu (Makaro Press, $37)
“Becky Manawatu’s extraordinary debut novel Auē knocked me for six and I didn’t think it would be possible to love the sequel even more than that special book,” wrote WORD Christchurch’s Kiran Dass in The Spinoff’s best books of 2024. “Yet here we are. Revisiting the Te Au whānau, Kataraina is a refined and evocative novel written with such hospitable, attentive delicacy, steeped in the natural world, Te Ao Māori, kai, women as the bracings of family and community, and it chimes in the key of the Kāi Tahu dialect. Manawatu’s writing is as intensely beautiful as it is diamond hard.”
7 Futures of Democracy, Law & Government: Contributions to a Conference in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Palmer edited by Mark Hickford & Matthew Palmer Snr (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $70)
A collection of papers written for a Symposium held at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington in October 2022 in honour of Geoffrey Palmer and to mark the University’s Governing for the Future strategic theme in the 125th year since the Victoria College Act 1897. “In the essays in this book, eminent judges, scholars and politicians discuss themes that have animated his career in public affairs, including: constitutional government; democracy and its integrity; indigenous-state relations and te Tiriti o Waitangi; the environment and climate change; law reform and human rights.”
8 Butter by Asako Yuzuki (4th Estate, $35)
“Eating gets sexy in this offbeat confidence tale.” Read the full review over at Kirkus.
9 James by Percival Everett (Mantle, $38)
For many, the novel that should have won the Booker Prize in 2024.
10 Cactus Pear for My Beloved: A Family Story from Gaza by Samah Sabawi (Penguin, $40)
No better time than right now to support Palestinian writers. Samah Sabawi shares the story of her parents and many like them who were born as their parents were being forced to leave their homelands. Sabawi’s father was Abdul Karim Sabawi, a celebrated poet and novelist who was exiled from Gaza in 1967 for his part in the Palestinian resistance in the Six Day War.