The week’s best-selling books at the Unity stores in Willis St, Wellington and High St, Auckland.
WELLINGTON UNITY
1 Terry’s Dumb Dot Story: Treehouse Tale by Andy Griffiths & Terry Denton (Pan Macmillan, $2)
Yes, really: $2!
2 Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (HarperCollins, $25)
Yes, really: she’s completely fine!
3 Driving to Treblinka: A Long Search for a Lost Father by Diana Wichtel (Awa Press, $45)
“I think I get by as a journalist by never imagining anyone actually reading what I’ve written, because it has a certain paralysing effect….This book is a much more personal piece and it involves family history and all those sorts of things. So it feels quite exposing”: the author of this celebrated family memoir, interviewed in the Listener.
4 Way With Words: A Memoir of Writing and Publishing in New Zealand by Chis MacLean (Potton Burton, $50)
A memoir of writing and publishing.
5 Go Girl: A Storybook of Epic NZ Women by Barbara Else (Puffin, $45)
Illustrated biographies for girls, of New Zealand women such as Dame Whina Cooper, Janet Frame, Kate Sheppard, Margaret Mahy, Lydia Ko, Lorde, Rita Angus, Te Puea Herangi and others.
6 Salt Fat Acid Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat (Canongate, $55)
Food.
7 Year at Hotel Gondola by Nicky Pellegrino (Hachette, $35)
The author is on a promotional tour of New Zealand this week. Pellegrino will appear at Effeto Broma in Havelock North on Sunday, April 8 at 3pm; at Palmerston North central library the following day at 6:30pm; Unity Books in Wellington on Tuesday, at 6pm; and at Paper Plus in Masterton on Wednesday at 6:30pm.
8 Macbeth by Jo Nesbo (Hogarth Shaespeare, $37)
Shakespeare’s tragedy retold as a thriller set in a Scottish town in the 1970s.
9 12 Rules for Life by Jordan B Peterson (Allen Lane, $40)
So we Googled other famous people called Jordan and found someone called Jordan Banjo.
10 Enlightenment Now: A Manifesto for Science, Reason, Humanism, & Progress by Steven Pinker (Allen Lane, $40)
“The big reveal at the end of the book is of the single thinker whose ideas capture, and perhaps even cause, everything that is wrong with today’s world: Friedrich Nietzsche”: The Guardian.
AUCKLAND UNITY
1 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson (Allen Lane, $40)
2 A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (Windmill Books, $26)
Trash fiction.
3 Poetry Magazine edited by Stephanie Burt, Paul Millar, and Chris Price (Poetry Foundation, $16)
Founded in Chicago in 1912, Poetry is the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world; this year, it published a special New Zealand edition, and it’s become the book of verse to buy in 2018.
4 Dear Oliver by Peter Wells (Massey University Press, $40)
Family memoir. In breaking news, Wells is a finalist in the 2018 Voyager Media Awards in the best personal essay category for his Spinoff series, “Hello Darkness”.
5 The Shepherd’s Hut by Tim Winton (Hamish Hamilton, $45)
Australian fiction.
6 The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken by The Secret Barrister (Macmillan, $38)
“The author, writing under a pseudonym, is a junior barrister practising criminal law in England and Wales. He or she is also a blogger who in 2016 and 2017 was named Independent Blogger of the Year at the Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards. As of March 2018 the author had a following on Twitter of nearly 88,000″: Wikipedia.
7 Wonder by RJ Palacio (Corgi Books, $23)
Classic novel for kids from 2012, reissued.
8 Salt Fat Acid Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat (Canongate, $55)
9 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (Vintage Books, $30)
The superstar author took to Twitter in December to say how much he liked the Herald review by Matt Heath.
10 Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (Arrow Books, $26)
The sci-fi book of the new Spielberg movie.
The Spinoff Review of Books is proudly brought to you by Unity Books.
