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Marilyn Monroe reading ‘The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine’. (Photo by Archive Photos/Getty Images)
Marilyn Monroe reading ‘The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine’. (Photo by Archive Photos/Getty Images)

BooksNovember 9, 2018

Unity Books bestseller chart for the week ending November 9

Marilyn Monroe reading ‘The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine’. (Photo by Archive Photos/Getty Images)
Marilyn Monroe reading ‘The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine’. (Photo by Archive Photos/Getty Images)

Only 46 shopping days till Xmas! Get in early and peruse the week’s bestselling books at the Unity stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.

AUCKLAND UNITY

1 Milkman by Anna Burns (Faber & Faber, $33)

“The Man Booker-winning Milkman richly deserves its prize”: New Zealand Listener.

2 Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami (Harvill Secker, $45)

“The narrator is a 36-year-old painter. His wife has just left him. Having sacrificed his early ambitions as an artist to become a master portraitist, he leaves his Tokyo apartment bewildered, before coming to a realization: ‘I wanted to try painting whatever I wanted.’ A friend from art school lends him a remote house in the mountains, and he begins to search anew for the meaning he once found in pure creation….Magical”: Washington Post.

3 The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson (MacMillan, $35)

The invasion of the mind snatchers.

4 Heroes by Stephen Fry (Michael Joseph, $37)

And here is the author giving a reading of it in a studio.

5 Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney (Faber & Faber, $23)

The success of the Irish writer’s 2018 novel Normal People has reignited interest in her previous, widely acclaimed book.

6 Meltdown: Diary of a Wimpy Kid 13 by Jeff Kinney (Puffin, $18)

Diary of a wimpy kid.

7 Pop Up Things That Go! by Ingela Arrhenius (Walker Books, $17)

Pop up things that go!

8 The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (Collectors Library, $15)

The 1943 classic.

9 This is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay (Picador, $23)

“Undoubtedly the funniest book I’ve ever read. It’s pretty disgusting”: Chloe Blades, Unity Books.

10 Flame by Leonard Cohen (Canongate, $45)

Like a drunk in a midnight choir, etc.

 

WELLINGTON UNITY

1 Ko Taranaki Te Maunga by Rachel Buchanan (BWB Texts, $15)

The author, backgrounding her Parihaka book in e-tangata: “On 5 November 1881 the invasion force entered the pā. There was one soldier for every two residents, extra garrisons of men at Pungarehu and Rāhotu, an Armstrong cannon up on the hill. The children skipped and sang, the women carried bread they had baked for the troops…”

2 Birdstories: A History of the Birds of New Zealand by Geoff Norman (Potton & Burton, $60)

Birdland, illustrated.

3 Photos of the Sky by Saradha Koirala (Cuba Press, $25)

Poetry.

4 Past Tense by Lee Child (Bantam, $38)

Jack Reacher goes looking for his father, but finds what he’s always truly, madly, deeply looking for: trouble.

5 Milkman by Anna Burns (Faber, $33)

6 Normal People by Sally Rooney (Faber, $33)

“Lord be with the days when the job of the critic, especially the Irish critic, was to reassure everyone that a recently successful writer was no good, which is to say not as good as Proust. It is time to take a sharp inhale, people. After the success of Conversations With Friends, Sally Rooney has produced a second novel, Normal People which will be just as successful as it deserves to be: it is superb”: Anne Enright, Irish Times.

7 Cuba Street Project: Place, food, people by Beth Brash & Alice Lloyd (Random House, $55)

Photographs of Cuba Street.

8 Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking (John Murray, $35)

“This absorbing posthumous book draws on essays, lectures, speeches and the questions the physicist was so often asked”: Guardian.

9 Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy by Michael Lewis (Allen Lane, $45)

Trump Studies.

10 Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami (Harvill Secker, $45)


The Spinoff Review of Books is proudly brought to you by Unity Books.

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