This week’s best-selling books at the Unity stores in Willis St, Wellington, and High St, Auckland.
WELLINGTON UNITY
1 The New Animals by Pip Adam (Victoria University Press, $30)
We actually took out the final, over-egged sentence in Brannavan Gnanalingam’s review on Tuesday but we’ll restore it here: “It’s a masterpiece.”
2 The New Ships by Kate Duignan (Victoria University Press, $30)
Claire Mabey’s review of the New Zealand writer’s latest novel will feature in our Book of the Week slot next Thursday.
3 Warlight by Michael Ondaatje (Jonathan Cape, $35)
“Bomb damage has created a cratered, gap-toothed London in 1945. Food is still rationed. Fourteen-year-old Nathanial and 16-year-old Rachel should technically be at respective boarding schools, but they run away and return home to the care of the family’s ‘boarder’…This is a beautifully crafted novel”: David Herkt, Stuff.
4 Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester (HarperCollins, $37)
Engineering.
5 Priestdaddy: A Memoir by Patricia Lockwood (Penguin, $28)
Popular memoir.
6 The Idiot by Elif Batuman (Vintage, $26)
“Batuman wittily and wisely captures the tribulations of a shy, cerebral teenager struggling with love, friendship, and whether to take psycholinguistics or philosophy of language “: Huffington Post.
7 Less by Andrew Sean Greer (LittleBrown, $25)
“A struggling novelist travels the world to avoid an awkward wedding in this hilarious Pulitzer Prize-winning novel”: The New York Times.
8 Finding by David Hill (Puffin, $20)
YA fiction by the New Plymouth master of the form.
9 The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross (HarperCollins, $41)
Here is New Yorker writer Ross on New Zealand music, in 1995: “The greatest force of musical good in New Zealand has been the wizardly Chris Knox, who helped found the New Zealand punk scene in the late seventies and still holds a place of honor more than fifteen years later. Since stepping away from putative global fame in Toy Love, he has gone his own way, writing and performing music both manifestly bizarre and hopelessly irresistible. The self-lacerating punk who headed the Enemy is now forty-three and father to two kids, but he still speaks with the insular passion of the alienated adolescent. Even more than the 3D’s, he blends the competing impulses toward seductive pop and eloquent junk. But his paradoxical songs seem like nothing more than projections of his own personality. He has stuck to the same strange, brilliant thing no matter how many or how few are listening.”
10 Driving to Treblinka: A Long Search for a Lost Father by Diana Wichtel (Awa Press, $45)
A masterpiece.
AUCKLAND UNITY
1 Warlight: A Novel by Michael Ondaatje (Jonathan Cape, $35)
2 Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (HarperCollins, $25)
Popular novel.
3 The New Animals by Pip Adam (Victoria University Press, $30)
4 The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson (MacMillan, $35)
Advice manual.
5 Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester (William Collins, $37)
6 Pamper Me to Hell & Back by Hera Lindsay Bird (Smith|Doorstop Books, $17)
Love poems.
7 Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944 by Antony Beevor (Penguin Random House, $40)
“There was plenty of heroics in the battle for Arnhem, but Antony Beevor’s retelling makes clear just what a disaster Montgomery’s vainglorious plan was”: The Times.
8 Tinkering: The Complete Book of John Clarke by John Clarke (Text Publishing, $40)
“Dad was such a great storyteller and had so many stories in his life. He was endlessly entertaining about any topic”: Lorin Clarke, the comedian’s daughter, interviewed by Russell Baillie in the Listener.
9 Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday (Granta, $33)
“Thrilling novel about a relationship between an ageing writer and a young woman”: The Guardian.
10 Less by Andrew Sean Greer (Little, Brown and Company, $35)
The Spinoff Review of Books is proudly brought to you by Unity Books.