The week’s best-selling books at the Unity stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.
AUCKLAND UNITY
1 Warlight: A Novel by Michael Ondaatje (Jonathan Cape, $35)
“It’s as if WG Sebald wrote a Bond novel”: ludicrous statement, The Guardian.
2 Less by Andrew Sean Greer (Little, Brown and Company, $35)
“Arthur Less and Andrew Sean Greer are handsome gay novelists in their late forties living in San Francisco. Less is the lovelorn hero of Greer’s latest novel, another quirky modern romance from the well-regarded author of The Story of a Marriage…Expectations are high…However Less is sub-Woodhouse, sub-Wilde, sub-chuckle”: The Times.
3 Calypso by David Sedaris (Little, Brown and Company, $35)
21 essays by the master of the form.
4 Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester (William Collins, $37)
Things, explained.
5 Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance & the Art of Living by Ryan Holiday & Steve Hanselman (Profile Books, $28)
Cliches, packaged.
6 The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson (MacMillan, $35)
Wairarapa writer John Summers, a winner of the 2017 Surrey Hotel writers residency award, is currently preparing an essay for the Spinoff Review of Bo0oks which addresses this book and its popular advice.
7 Language of Kindness: A Nurse’s Story by Christie Watson (Chatto & Windus, $35)
“Nurses are often underappreciated. There are laughter and tears in this remarkable account that immerses the reader in their world”: The Guardian.
8 Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944 by Antony Beevor (Penguin Random House, $40)
“In the meticulous narrative style he first employed in Stalingrad, Sir Antony Beevor recreates the operation from the dropping of the first troops on September 17th to the evacuation of the remnants of the British 1st Airborne Division eight days later. Tragically, heroism and incompetence are inseparable”: The Economist.
9 Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday (Granta, $33)
“A literary phenomenon”: The New Yorker.
10 Tinkering: The Complete Book of John Clarke by John Clarke (Text Publishing, $40)
Wit, collected.
WELLINGTON UNITY
1 The New Animals by Pip Adam (Victoria University Press, $30)
Winner of the Acorn Prize for best novel at the 2018 Ockham New Zealand national book awards; the book everyone is talking about. Well, everyone in Wellington, anyway.
2 Warlight by Michael Ondaatje (Jonathan Cape, $35)
3 The Idiot by Elif Batuman (Vintage, $26)
“A witty debut novel that skewers the absurdities of academic life”: Financial Times.
4 The New Ships by Kate Duignan (Victoria University Press, $30)
“The heartbreak at the centre of The New Ships is hard to shake. The death of a baby is a trauma that Duignan never lets come loose – for the reader, or the central protagonist…It’s a heartbreaking novel. It’s full of the trials of being a parent. Doing your best, loving your best, but making mistakes and missing things”: Claire Mabey, the Spinoff Review of Books.
5 The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald (Fourth Estate, $25)
“A little gem, a vintage narrative — first published in 1978 — of parochial English life in the late 1950s, a classic whose force as a piece of physical and moral map-making has not merely lasted but has actually improved with the passage of years”: The New York Times.
6 Less by Andrew Sean Greer (LittleBrown, $25)
7 Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester (HarperCollins, $37)
8 Priestdaddy: A Memoir by Patricia Lockwood (Penguin, $28)
Tweet, May 26, fairly typical of the author’s wit: “I will fuck Chewbacca and I will die that way”.
9 Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat (Canongate, $55)
Food, cooked.
10 Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (HarperCollins, $25)
Popular fiction.
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