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BooksAugust 26, 2016

The weekly Unity Books best-seller list – August 26

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The best-seller chart at Unity Books for the week just ended: August 26

AUCKLAND STORE

White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World (Text, $37) Geoff Dyer

Reliably unreliable narratives.

2 Things That Matter: Stories of Life & Death from an Intensive Care Specialist (Allen & Unwin, $37) by Dr David Galler

Op lit.

3 The Girls (Chatto & Windus, $37) by Emma Cline

Mansonania.

4 Tide: The Science and Lore of the Greatest Force on Earth (Viking, $40) by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

Tales from the topographic oceans.

5 Hera Lindsay Bird (Victoria University Press, $50) by Hera Lindsay Bird

Popular verse.

6 Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Granta, $33) by Madeleine Thien

Longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker prize for fiction. Opening sentences: “In a single year, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life.”

7 Bright Edge of the World (Tinder Press, $38) by Eowyn Ivey

Alaskan rhapsodic fiction.

8 Can you Tolerate This? (Victoria Univesity Press, $30) by Ashleigh Young

Essays by New Zealand’s best writer of prose.

9 Tail of the Taniwha: A Collection of Short Stories (Beatnik Publishing) by Courtney Sina Meredith

Short stories much praised by Lloyd Jones and Paula Morris.

10 The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (Canongate, $40) by Olivia Laing

New Zealand’s best writer of prose has promised to write an essay about it.

WELLINGTON STORE

 1 Hera Lindsay Bird (Victoria University Press, $25) by Hera Lindsay Bird

 2 Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts I and II (Little Brown, $50) by JK Rowling, Jack Thorne and John Tiffany

Try, try, try to understand; he’s a magic man. 

3 The 78-Storey Treehouse (Pan Macmillan, $18) by Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton

Delightful.

4 Complacent Nation (Bridget Williams Books, $15) by Gavin Ellis

Ben Thomas read it, and felt ill.

5 Can You Tolerate This? (Victoria University Press, $30) by Ashleigh Young

6 Silk Roads: A New History of the World (Bloomsbury, $28) by Peter Frankopan

Goodbye yellow silk road.

7 The Sympathizer (Piatkus, $28) by Viet Thanh Nguyen

The year’s best novel?

8 Barkskins (Fourth Estate, $37) by Annie Proulx

The year’s best novel?

9 Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (Penguin, $16) by Carlo Rovelli

Lesson four, on particles: “Even if we observe an empty region of space, in which there are no atoms, we still detect a minute swarming of these particles. There is no such thing as a real void, one that is completely empty.”

10 Labour: The New Zealand Labour Party 1916-2016 (Victoria University Press, $50) by Peter Franks & Jim McAloon

Loving them is red.

Keep going!