Only 17 shopping days till Xmas, for God’s sake! Find what you’re looking for by perusing the week’s bestselling books at the Unity stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.
AUCKLAND UNITY
1 Upcycling With Style by Sarah Heeringa (New Holland, $40)
Publisher’s blurbology: “Reclaim unloved objects and improve your home and garden with this inspiring book about upcycling. Author Sarah Heeringa taps into our desire to be creative and furnish our homes with items that have meaning and provides guidance and step-by-step projects to put this into practice.”
2 Becoming by Michelle Obama (Penguin Random House, $55)
“The former first lady’s wit and warmth shine through in an extraordinarily candid account of her life inside and outside the White House”: Guardian.
3 Houses of Aotearoa by Andrew Patterson (Thames & Hudson, $95)
Publisher’s blurbology: “A selection of beautiful houses set amid the world’s most stunning landscapes, designed by award-winning New Zealand architect Andrew Patterson.”
4 The Friday Poem edited by Steve Braunias (Luncheon Sausage Books, $25)
Now in its third reprint, this anthology of 100 poems taken from The Spinoff Review of Books by such as Colin Craig, Courtney Sina Meredith, Sam Hunt, poet laureate Selina Tusitala Marsh, Bill Manhire, Ashleigh Young and others has become the poetry gift book to get this Xmas.
5 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (Vintage, $30)
“A swash-buckling account that begins with the origin of the species and ends with post-humans”: Guardian.
6 Normal People by Sally Rooney (Faber & Faber $33)
A love story that has become the novel to get in 2018.
7 Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver (Faber & Faber, $37)
“Donald Trump’s name doesn’t appear in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, but the president prowls all through these pages. He’s ‘the Bullhorn,’ ‘the tyrant who promises to restore the old order,’ the ‘billionaire running for president who’s never lifted a finger,’ the candidate who brags that ‘he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and people would still vote for him.’ He’s the animal spirit of a political movement that’s draining the middle class, breaking the joists of civil society and pushing the planet toward ecological calamity…Kingsland suggests that Trump is not unique but merely the latest outbreak of a virus that periodically infects America”: Washington Post.
8 Vladimir Putin: Life Coach by Robert Sears (Canongate, $28)
Satire, from the guy who compiled The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump.
9 Milkman by Anna Burns (Faber & Faber, $33)
Winner of the 2018 Man Booker prize for fiction.
10 Finding Gobi by Dion Leonard (HarperCollins, $20)
The true story of a stray dog which latched onto a long-distance runner and ran with him through the Gobi Desert. Jesus!
WELLINGTON UNITY
1 My Body, My Business: New Zealand sex workers in an era of change by Caren Wilton with photographs by Madeleine Slavick (Otago University Press, $45)
A powerful extract – the story of “Stevie”, a trans man who works in the sex industry – appeared this week at The Spinoff Review of Books.
2 Becoming by Michelle Obama (Viking, $55)
3 Normal People by Sally Rooney (Faber, $33)
4 Milkman by Anna Burns (Faber, $33)
5 Simple by Yotam Ottolenghi (Ebury Press, $60)
The cookbook to get in 2018.
6 Cuba Street Project: Place, food, people by Beth Brash & Alice Lloyd (Random, $55)
The mall, etc.
7 Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking (John Murray, $35)
A brief answer to everything.
8 Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver (Faber, $37)
9 Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve (Scholastic, $20)
Fantasy fiction, set in post-apocalyptic London, where the class system has the wealthy at the top of the city, literally, in towers and such, and the poorest at ground level, working the huge Satanic engines which power everything.
10 Less by Andrew Sean Greer (Little, Brown, $25)
Love story, one of the novels to get in 2018.
The Spinoff Review of Books is brought to you by Unity Books.