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)
Latest self-help bestseller that is proving controversial out there on the Reddit and GoodReads opinionscapes.
2 Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape, $26)
Last year’s Booker Prize winner (FYI: this year’s International Booker Prize longlist is out!)
3 Understanding Te Tiriti by Roimata Smail (Wai Ako Press, $25)
Want to brush up on Te Tiriti but don’t have a lot of time? This brilliant guide is clear and most importantly, very short.
4 The Vegetarian by Han Kang (Granta, $28)
“An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing,” says Kirkus Reviews about Nobel Prize for Literature recipient Han Kang’s most famous novel.
5 James by Percival Everett (Mantle, $38)
Roundly beloved retelling of Huckleberry Finn.
6 Becoming Tangata Tiriti: Working with Maori, Honouring the Treaty by Avril Bell (Auckland Uni Press, $30)
Twelve non-Māori voices talk about how they incorporate Te Tiriti into their lives and work.
9 Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-Reum (Bloomsbury UK, $25)
Another cosy, comforting novel from Korea (see also: cosy, comforting novels from Japan) that has taken off all over the world. Books editor Claire Mabey analyses this phenomenon in an essay on The Spinoff coming this very weekend.
10 Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (Viking Penguin, $38)
This novel as been quietly gaining readers worldwide since it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024. Here’s the blurb:
“It’s 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is well and truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel’s life is as it should be: led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel’s doorstep-as a guest, there to stay for the season…
Eva is Isabel’s antithesis: sleeps late, wakes late, walks loudly through the house and touches things she shouldn’t. In response Isabel develops a fury-fuelled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house-a spoon, a knife, a bowl-Isabel’ suspicions spiral out of control. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel’s paranoia gives way to desire – leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva – nor the house in which they live – are what they seem.”
WELLINGTON
1 High Wire by Michael Fitzsimons (The Cuba Press, $25)
A brand new poetry collection from a Wellington local. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:
“There’s the intimate world of his hillside home with Rose overlooking Wellington Harbour, and the wider world where friends and whānau live, and miseries, as Suzanne Aubert said, ‘ride behind us on horseback’. Everywhere Michael looks, life is both precious and precarious: a thrilling high-wire existence. Some of the best lines of High Wire are simply that – a handful of words on a page to mark something fleeting that will make a reader laugh or puzzle or wonder. You can’t ask more of poetry than that.”
2 Cactus Pear for My Beloved: A Family Story from Gaza by Samah Sabawi (Penguin, $40)
A timely memoir from Australia-based writer whose family had to flee their home. Here’s the blurb:
“The story of a family over the past 100 years, starting in Palestine under British rule and ending in Redland Bay in Queensland.
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.
Filled with love for land, history, peoples it is more than anything else a family story and a love story told with enormous humanity and feeling. How the son (one of six), born at the height of the displacements to a disabled father and illiterate mother, a believer in peaceful resistance, became a leading poet and writer in Palestine, before being forced, with his own young family in tow, to flee and start a new life in Australia.”
3 Through Shifts & Shocks: Lessons from the Front Line of Technology & Change by Steve Vamos (Wiley, $39)
Self-help in the genre of tech.
4 The Clean’s Boodle Boodle Boodle by Geoff Stahl (Bloomsbury, $28)
Part of the 33 1/3 Oceania series, close look at The Clean’s 1981 EP and the development of the “Dunedin Sound”.
5 Route 52: A Big Lump of Country Unknown by Simon Burt (Ugly Hill, $40)
A compelling collection of travel and observational writing about the people and places in and around and between Masterton and Waipukarau.
6 The Vegetarian by Han Kang (Granta, $28)
7 Understanding Te Tiriti by Roimata Smail (Wai Ako Press, $25)
8 Three Days in June Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus, $36)
The queen of contemporary relationship fiction returns with another compelling, perfectly paced novel about Gail Baines and the troubles of her grown up children and her ex-husband, Max.
9 Star Gazers by Duncan Sarkies (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38)
Hail the advent of the alpaca novel! Sarkies’ allegory tackles ruptures to democracy, cheating, sneaking, really good sorts amid terrible people. And innocent alpacas. Read the eleven things Sarkies learned while researching and writing this novel on The Spinoff, here.
10 Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape, $26)
