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 Tom Lake by Anne Patchett (Bloomsbury, $35)
The always fabulous Ann Patchett has a new novel, and according to the Guardian, it’s a quiet wonder. “While I can’t help but hanker for the wilder, more gorgeously outlandish Patchett of Bel Canto and State of Wonder, I also see that in this – a later, quieter book – she is pulling off a trick at least as daring, which is to take the temperature of a whole life, and by doing so, to prioritise happiness over misery, an emotion on which the novel often struggles to thrive. I would tell you there is something epiphanic about Tom Lake, only that adjective won’t do at all, for the understanding comes, not in some soaring climax, but cumulatively, across many moments, each one brimful of the half glimpsed, the almost understood.”
2 One of Them by Shaneel Lal (Allen & Unwin, $37)
The new memoir of 23-year-old Shaneel Lal explores being outcast as a queer teenager in Fiji, undergoing conversion therapy, and becoming a proponent for the recently passed Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Bill. Sam Brooks’ review gives you a taster, right here on The Spinoff.
3 Lioness by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury, $35)
One of the country’s greats has a new novel out and about, 11 years since The Forrests graced our shelves. Books editor Claire Mabey firmly entices a read in her enthusiastic review.
4 Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Faber & Faber, $28)
A modern retelling of David Copperfield, by an author brilliant enough to do the job justice.
5 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (Vintage, $26)
Gabrielle Zevin’s gaming romance will remain on the bestsellers list tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow… and probably the day after that, too.
6 Bunny by Mona Awad (Head of Zeus, $25)
A #BookTok cult favourite.
7 Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead (Fleet, $38)
Yet another great read from the two-time Pulitzer winner Colson Whitehead. Crook Manifesto follows Ray Carney from the bestselling Harlem Shuffle; we’re still in Harlem, but it’s a decade later in the seedy 1970s, and New York is under siege, heading toward bankruptcy. The New York Times Book Review reckons he’s done a good job: “He has it right: the music, the energy, the painful calculus of loss. Structured into three time periods — 1971, 1973 and finally the year of America’s bicentennial celebration, 1976 — Crook Manifesto gleefully detonates its satire upon this world while getting to the heart of the place and its people.”
8 Wager by David Grann (Simon & Schuster, $40)
Ahoy, mateys! The votes have been cast, and David Grann’s narrative nonfiction about mutiny aboard a Royal Navy ship in 1741 has won the prize of being loved by all – as well as a bonus prize: having the movie rights scooped up by Leo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese. We might just have to snag a copy to horde for Father’s Day.
Here are forementioned votes:
“A genre-defying literary naval-history thriller, part Master and Commander, part Lord of the Flies” — Vanity Fair
“The most gripping sea-yarn I’ve read in years….A tour de force of narrative nonfiction.” — Wall Street Journal
“Propulsive….finely-detailed…a ripping yarn…remarkable.” — The Boston Globe
“…The Wager is one of the finest nonfiction books I’ve ever read. I can only offer the highest praise a writer can give: endless envy, as deep and salty as the sea.” — The Guardian
9 Yellowface by Rebecca Kuang (Borough Press, $35)
A tale of jealousy, lies, cultural appropriation, and generally very bad friend behaviour. Struggling white writer June witnesses the death of her far more successful author friend, Athena, and promptly claims Athena’s manuscript as her own, taking on a false Asian identity to seal the deal.
The Goodreads reviews are hilarious and searing: “It was very heavy-handed, and pretty self-indulgent, but I love three things in this life and those are mean girls, and b*tching with my friends, and books, and this was all three of them in one. it was a mess. But I liked it anyway.”
10 My Husband by Maud Ventura (Hutchinson, $35)
A darkly amusing debut novel about a sophisticated French woman’s obsession with her husband, and winner of France’s First Novel Prize in 2021.
WELLINGTON
1 Labour of Love: A Personal History of Midwifery in Aotearoa by Joan Skinner (Massey University Press, $40)
A midwife since 1976, Joan Skinner has combined her personal experiences with a history of how midwifery has changed in our fair land over the past 50 years. Unity Wellington hosted Joan’s book launch this week, and it was (clearly) a smash success.
2 Middle Youth by Morgan Bach (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $25)
A brand spanking new poetry collection, from the author of Some of Us Eat the Seeds. Fellow poet Rebecca Hawkes gives an emphatic thumbs up: “Who wants to be hot / on a doomed planet? Morgan Bach bathes the ending generations in forest fire radiance, partying contagiously on the edge of the extinction event where we become brittle stars unable to tell the quaking earth from our shaky hearts. Middle Youth looks out from this faded blue dot and its leaky seed banks to other love-struck planets, and inward to birthdays nobody quite expected to celebrate as the years stretch and flee in every direction.”
3 Saga by Hannah Mettner (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $25)
A second new, local poetry collection sitting up top! In fact, Rebecca Hawkes has also given Saga a totally juicy review, and we just can’t help ourselves from delivering her words once again: “Mettner’s witchy new work summons ghosts through a bloody heredity of mothers and daughters; menageries of lost and found lovers; spectres raised in twists of lipstick. Saga haunts like a mother’s perfume, or an ex’s sweat still somehow on your skin – whichever woman hurt you best, whoever’s stolen make-up you now touch to your lips.”
4 Dice by Claire Baylis (Allen & Unwin, $37)
An aside: It’s fabulous seeing local books absolutely dominate the bestsellers.
Now onto the book. Dice is a debut novel and courtroom drama, told from the perspective of 12 jurors who must decide whether sexual offences were committed by four teenage boys against three teenage girls. A hair-tingling fragment from the publisher’s blurb whispers, “Will the verdict deliver justice or punish the innocent? Where does the truth lie?”
5 Blood & Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand by Jared Davidson (Bridget Williams Books, $50)
Jared Davidson’s new nonfiction uncovers how much of New Zealand’s infrastructure from the nineteenth century was created using prison labour, from railway tracks and roads to ports, buildings and Crown forests.
6 Lioness by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury, $35)
7 Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder (Hamish Hamilton, $40)
Anna Funder, author of Stasiland, read all of George Orwell’s work and six of his biographies. Then she read six letters written by Orwell’s wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, and realised that Eileen was largely absent from everything she had read – so she wrote it herself. We highly recommend taking a look at Anna Funder’s Guardian essay, where she describes her rediscovery of Eileen.
An excerpt: “For a long time, I felt queasy about delving into their intimate life. It felt like an invasion of privacy that he would have hated – anyone would. But history has relegated Eileen to the private realm where she lived – and has remained. The more I felt I was invading his privacy by looking for her, the more I realised that to not go there would be to accept, when weighing up the right to privacy against the right to decent treatment, that male animals are more equal than others.”
8 Fungi by Liv Sisson (Penguin NZ, $45)
Stay curious, all ye fungi foragers.
9 Tom Lake by Anne Pattchett (Bloomsbury, $35)
10 Yellowface by Rebecca Kuang (Borough Press, $35)