The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.
AUCKLAND
1 Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Faber & Faber, $23)
This small and wonderful thing has climbed steadily into the top Auckland spot, and we’re as happy as a bunch of clams to see it nestling here.
2 Mindset: Changing The Way You Think to Fulfil Your Potential by Dr Carol S. Dweck (Hachette, $28)
People are clearly getting a head start on their New Year’s resolutions. You know what’s absolutely mad, though? It feels like just two lists ago that we were gently mocking people for continuing to buy Atomic Habits so long after last New Years.
A little something about the book: Carol Dweck is a Stanford psychologist, and Mindset focuses on how the way we think can foster or destroy motivation and success. Classic beach read.
3 Straight Up by Ruby Tui (Allen & Unwin, $37)
Humans of Goodreads repeatedly use the words “inspirational”, “raw”, “heartwarming”, “riveting” and “honest” to describe Ruby Tui’s bestselling memoir. Lynda hopefully writes, “Perhaps a sequel will follow?”
4 Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink (Canongate, $31)
OK, Aucklanders are seriously getting ahead on their resolutions. Drive is a bestseller from 2010, also about mindset, motivation and success, but with a thumbs up from Malcolm Gladwell: “Provocative and fascinating.”
Also, this lol review from Dave of Goodreads: “This gives me hope that I too can write a whole book on one chapter of information.”
5 The Romantic by William Boyd (Viking, $37)
William Boyd’s Any Human Heart is one of the great “cradle to grave” novels (that’s not opinion, it’s fact), and this new novel is his sixth cut from that same cloth. The Romantic follows a man’s turbulent life through the 19th century, as he occupies himself as a soldier, farmer, prisoner, writer, gigolo, and minor diplomat. He fights in the Battle of Waterloo, plays billiards with Lord Byron, and watches Percy Shelley’s body burn.
In 2018, Boyd wrote about the appeal of the whole-life novel for the Guardian (and his predilection for writing them): “I think that one of the greatest appeals of the whole-life novel is that we can see in a fictional alter ego’s journey from the cradle to the grave a paradigm or model of our own journey in all its aleatory and fascinating nature. As we read we can construct, if you like, the parallel novel of our own complete existence or, if we’re young, at least postulate and prefigure how such a story might unspool and be recorded. It gives the total life novel a powerful extra-literary frisson.”
6 Bunny by Mona Awad (Head of Zeus, $32)
A bizarre and rather entertaining 2019 novel about a cultish group of American college girls. It’s back to haunt the bestsellers after striking a cord with TikTokers.
7 The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (Sort of Books, $37)
This year’s winner of the Booker, and a rollicking good read about the Sri Lankan Civil War.
8 Lessons by Ian McEwan (Jonathon Cape, $37)
Another “cradle to grave” novel – unsurprisingly, McEwan’s longest work of fiction. There’s a lot of life to fit in.
9 Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (Doubleday, $37)
Think fiction, 1950s, female chemist turned single mother and cooking show host. The Guardian writes that Lessons in Chemistry is “that rare beast; a polished, funny, thought-provoking story, wearing its research lightly but confidently, and with sentences so stylishly turned it’s hard to believe it’s a debut.”
10 Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Faber & Faber UK, $37)
David Copperfield, but set in contemporary rural America, where poverty and opiate addiction is rife. Redoing Dickens is a tall order – the New York Times writes: “Credit where due: It’s hard to think of another living novelist who could take a stab at Dickens and rise above the level of catastrophe.” Also from the Times: “Of course Barbara Kingsolver would retell Dickens. He has always been her ancestor. Like Dickens, she is unblushingly political and works on a sprawling scale, animating her pages with the presence of seemingly every creeping thing that has ever crept upon the earth. Exhuming him is a way for her to make a claim of inheritance explicit at a time when teeming, boisterous, activist novels are unfashionable. It is an argument that this loss of prestige is unwarranted, impermanent, even benighted, and it is a rebuttal of the notion that ideologues can’t make great novelists, or that novels are no longer plausible vehicles for social change.”
WELLINGTON
1 Straight Up by Ruby Tui (Allen & Unwin, $37)
2 Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday, $37)
The newest Atkinson novel, set in dark and glitzy Soho between the world wars.
3 Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (Doubleday, $37)
4 Imagining Decolonisation by Rebecca Kiddle, Bianca Elkington, Moana Jackson, Ocean Ripeka Mercier, Mike Ross, Jennie Smeaton and Amanda Thomas (Bridget Williams Books, $15)
We would like someone (not us, thanks) to trawl back over the past two years since Imagining Decolonisation was published, and check how many times it’s been on the Wellington bestsellers list. Just putting that out into the universe, along with a guess: 93% of weeks.
5 Aroha: Māori Wisdom for a Contented Life Lived in Harmony with our Planet by Hinemoa Elder (Penguin Random House, $30)
It’s wonderful to see Aroha back on the list during the festive season! After all, it’s the perfect Secret Santa gift.
6 Empire City: Wellington Becomes the Capital of New Zealand by John E. Martin (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $70)
Get ready, local history buffs. There’s a treat in store.
This from the publisher’s blurb: “Empire City brings the story of Wellington to life, from the invasions of iwi from further north in the early 1800s and uneasy coexistence of different iwi to the purchase of land by the New Zealand Company and the beginnings of Pākehā settlement. Whaling was replaced by pastoralism, the mercantile community rose to prominence, and a viable town with a polyglot population was established. The tales are wide-ranging and compelling, from politicians butting heads, to merchants prospering and others going bankrupt, to earthquakes and shipwrecks, Māori endeavouring to keep the peace or resisting the depredations of Pākehā settlement, the impact of the military in town, the citizenry’s establishment of a variety of social institutions and their enjoyment of diverse entertainments and sports, tales of the distressed and unfortunate underclass as exposed in court, and prisoners escaping from gaol.”
7 Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Faber & Faber UK, $37)
8 Wawata – Moon Dreaming: Daily Wisdom Guided by Hina, the Māori Moon by Hinemoa Elder (Penguin, $30)
After Aroha came the Māori moon. Jessica Hinerangi Thompson-Carr wrote a review for the Spinoff: “Wawata encourages us to seek new knowledge about Te Ao and ourselves. From the repetition of the cycle above, we are ever changing below, developing in our bodies, our sexualities, and our wisdoms. Elder reminds us that we are unmistakably connected to nature, no matter how far away some of us feel from it. There is no escaping the effects of the moon.”
9 How to Loiter in a Turf War by Coco Solid (Penguin, $28)
May Coco Solid’s novel loiter on in the bestsellers for many another moon.
10 The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (Sort of Books, $37)