The best-selling books at the two best bookstores eva.
WELLINGTON UNITY
1 The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy (Hamish Hamilton, $38)
Marion McLeod’s review will feature at the Spinoff Review of Books next week or maybe the week after. The author won’t be in any hurry to read it, put it that way.
2 The Whole Intimate Mess: Motherhood, Politics & Women’s Writing by Holly Walker (Bridget Williams Texts, $15)
Raw and revealing memoir about the pressures of being a working mum and an MP; quite simply one of the best non-fiction titles published in New Zealand in 2017, and a sure candidate for the 2018 Ockham national book awards.
3 Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls by Elena Favilli & Francesca Cavallo (Particular Books, $40)
Yes, but…Margaret Thatcher? Really?
4 Power by Naomi Alderman (Penguin, $26)
Sci-fi.
5 Men Without Women: Stories by Haruki Murakami (Harville Secker, $45)
“Murakami’s new collection of short stories tell the tales of men living in self-imposed exile and emotional isolation”: from a brilliant, lengthy essay by Thom Shackleford at the Spinoff Review of Books.
6 Matariki the Maori New Year by Libby Hakaraia (Raupo, $21)
Includes interviews with astronomers Richard Hall and Vicki Hyde, well known navigator Hekenukumai Busby, and Hapimana Rikihana, who still practises the ancient Māori art of mahi whai, or string patterns.
7 Underground Railroad: A Novel by Tyson Whitehead (Orbit, $25)
“This thrilling, genre-bending tale of escape from slavery in the American deep south contains extraordinary prose and uncomfortable home truths”: The Guardian.
8 Can you Tolerate This? by Ashleigh Young (Victoria University Press, $30)
Apply now for the 2017 Surrey Hotel Writers Residency and you could be the next Ashleigh Young! She was judged runner-up in the 2016 residency, and was awarded three nights at the Surrey; she later wrote of the experience, “The hotel cat slept on my bed and in the morning demanded food, of which I had none, so I put it outside, where it immediately dropped to the ground and wriggled around luxuriously. ‘This is how you should approach your writing,’ the cat seemed to be advising me. ‘Each moment is filled with the joyous possibility of sustenance.’ I shut the door on the cat, brewed some tea and buckled down.”
9 Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay (Constable & Robinson, $35)
“I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe.”
10 No Is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics by Naomi Klein (Allen lane, $35)
AUCKLAND UNITY
1 A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman (Vintage, $26)
“A broken man walks on stage and makes jokes for 194 pages. That’s the shortest summary I can think of for David Grossman’s magnificently comic and sucker-punch-tragic excursion into brilliance”: rave review from the New York Times of the Jerusalem-born author, and winner of the 2017 International Man Booker Prize for fiction.
2 Iceland by Dominic Hoey (Steele Roberts, $35)
The author, backgrounding his smash-hit debut novel set in Grey Lynn: “I stopped trying to write like someone who’d finished school, and instead adopted the voices of all the amazing people I knew who never got heard. The solo mums and petty criminals, the drug addicts and graffiti writers, the sex workers and unsigned bands.”
3 No is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein (Allen lane, $35)
4 The Power by Naomi Alderman (Penguin, $26)
5 Hunger: A Memoir of My Body by Roxane Gay (Corsair, $35)
6 The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy (Hamish Hamilton, $38)
7 The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O by Neal Stephenson & Nicole Galland (HarperCollins, $37)
Sci-fi.
8 Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Little Brown, $25)
9 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (Vintage, $30)
Well, brief-ish.
10 The New Zealand Project by Max Harris (Bridget Williams Books, $40)
Max!
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