1 Ordinary People Like Us by Kelly Ana Morey (Moa Press, $38)

A year on from Kelly Ana Morey’s death, her “epic Māori novel” is published. Morey’s friend, Catherine Chidgey, wrote for The Spinoff about what it was like to edit the novel while grieving her.

2 Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke (Fourth Estate, $37)

One of the more polarising novels of the last year, and one of the best selling.

3 Kitchen Confidential 25^th Anniversary Edition by Anthony Bourdain (Bloomsbury, $30) 

No better time to read Bourdain’s vivid, funny, delicious memoir.

4 London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe (Picador, $40)

Hard-hitting, meticulous, long-form investigation into a young man’s life and death.

5 Fruit Fly by Josh Silver (Oneworld, $37)

Terrific, gripping and soon to be adapted for TV.

6 Facing Up to Our Future edited by Peter Davis (Dunmore Press for the Helen Clark Foundation, $35)

Listen to Helen Clark discuss why this book and why now, on RNZ, here.

7 The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout (Viking Penguin, $38) 

“With exquisite prose and profound insight, Elizabeth Strout captures the way grief reverberates through decades, the comfort found in deep friendships and the freedom that comes when we break free of our secrets.” So says the Booker Prizes who have longlisted this lovely novel.

8 Transcription by Ben Lerner (Granta UK, $33)

I think that someone needs to bring Ben Lerner and pip adam together for a chat about words, technology and trying to be human.

9 Agrippa by Robert Harris (Hutchinson, $38)

The latest best-selling Roman re-telling.

10 The Valley: Crime and Punishment in a New Zealand City by Asher Emanuel (Bateman, $40)

Hanging on in there!

WELLINGTON

1 The Valley: Crime and Punishment in a New Zealand City by Asher Emanuel  (Bateman, $40)

2 kluge by pip adam (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38)

“At the heart of it was this opportunity to write a character that has no body,” said pip adam to Hera Lindsay Bird in this terrific interview. “I’m always trying to escape my body. And yeah, the idea of inhabiting this consciousness that has never known the disgust of being in a body was just intoxicating. What is it to only know pain in the abstract? What is it to be able to write an essay on envy but never to have felt it? So yeah, I read quite a few articles about the linguistics of LLMs and some of those traits I used but I wasn’t rigid about it. In a lot of ways the voice is a lot like my own internal experience. I guess in some ways I too could write an essay on envy and understand in an abstract way how it feels but it’s not something I understand in a bodily or intuitive sense.”