Announcing the top 10 books of the the year at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.
AUCKLAND
1 Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (Faber & Faber, $37)
The phenomenal Irish writer is the unsurprising chart topper for 2024 with her fourth novel that, much like her first three, probes the conditions of desire, loss, love and identity. Rooney’s project is a quest to articulate a human condition through, in part, what Hera Lindsay Bird describes as “forensic attention to the music of conversation.” Rooney’s characters live and think and say. You can’t take your eyes off them, so compelling is the question of what might happen when x is put with y in a room.
Bravo, Sally Rooney, even if Intermezzo didn’t fully convince everyone, your midnight-mad Aotearoa fans have purchased you to the very top.
2 Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape, $26)
“A novel propelled by the beauty of sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets,” wrote the Booker Prize judges who awarded Orbital this year’s Prize. “All year we have celebrated fiction that inhabits ideas rather than declaiming on issues, not finding answers but changing the question of what we wanted to explore. Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share.”
The spine tingles just reading that.
3 The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin (Canongate, $55)
The only non-fiction title on the Auckland list is an old friend to these charts: Rick Rubin’s chunky guide to nurturing your creative side had a long-running stint in the charts – so much so that the very creative Sam Brooks decided to test it out. Read his findings on The Spinoff, here.
4 James by Percival Everett (Mantle, $38)
The people have well and truly spoken out about their love for this Huck Finn retelling. Our member’s survey revealed that James was the second favourite international fiction read of the year. It’s gripping, it’s funny, it’s everything a novel ought to be, in fact.
5 Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Faber & Faber, $25)
In 2024 Keegan was interviewed by both Oprah and books editor Claire Mabey! Small Things Like These is an exquisite book set at Christmas time in Ireland in 1985. Short and unsettling it is an example of Keegan’s acuity and her ability to commit acts of walloping emotional heft. Not the traditional cosy Christmas tale but an unforgettable one.
6 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (Vintage, $26)
Surely one of the biggest novels of the decade at this point? Gabrielle Zevin’s 10th novel, published in 2022, is the one that made her a global sensation. Kirkus Reviews says the book is “sure to enchant even those who have never played a video game in their lives, with instant cult status for those who have.”
7 Lioness by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury Circus, $25)
What a superb year for New Zealand writer Emily Perkins. Lioness won the Jann Medlicott Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, and Perkins was one of the writers behind the brilliantly successful TV show, After the Party. Both tales feature middle-aged women as their protagonists making Perkins, along with Miranda July, a leading proponent of stories that explore the lives of older women.
8 Butter by Asako Yuzuki (Fourth Estate, $35)
The English translation of Yuzuki’s novel went gangbusters this year and has featured on bestsellers lists all over the globe. The central premise of a murderer who lures men in with her delicious cooking is inspired the story of real-life killer, Kanae Kijima, who became known as a “marriage hunter” for her habit of going after men, murdering and swindling money. Butter explores the psychology of a murderer through the lens of a journalist and the relationship she forms with the subject of her inquiry.
9 Amma by Saraid De Silva (Hachette, $38)
Spinoff members put this debut novel by Aotearoa writer Saraid De Silva right up top, not only as the best NZ fiction read of the year but the best read overall. Here’s a snippet from Brannavan Gnanalingam’s review on The Spinoff:
“One of the most baffling things for children who move to a new country is what their parents’ (or grandparents’) lives were like prior to moving – for kids in particular, they’re too busy trying to fit in in their new country to care all that much. And, as is often the case, by the time such kids are interested in their parents’ stories, it’s too late to ask those stories. It’s almost an unknowable gap for immigrant kids; that, on top of the shock of realising that our parents are human (which most kids have to go through) it’s the realisation that our parents had distinct lives in places we would never understand. In short, our parents contain multitudes, as well.
Saraid de Silva’s AMMA uses this unknowability as a starting point in her tale of three generations of Indian and Sri Lankan women.”
10 Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (Granta, $28)
German writer Erpenbeck’s novel about analysing a past relationship won this year’s International Booker Prize and has lingered long in the collective library. Here’s the compelling start of Natasha Walter’s review in The Guardian:
“Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos is one of the bleakest and most beautiful novels I have ever read. On one level, it is a love story, or rather a story about the loss of love. It begins with a woman, Katharina, hearing about the death of her former lover. Boxes of his papers are delivered to her apartment, and when she finally sits down to open them the past rises before her like a pack of playing cards thrown into the air.
The book then moves back to their first meeting, tracing step by step the contours of a relationship that is not only intellectually and emotionally complicated in itself, but whose difficulties are compounded through its relationship to the collapse of East Germany. Katharina and Hans meet in East Berlin in 1986, and they live out the disintegration of all their hopes and dreams, personally and politically, throughout the course of the novel.
Although Kairos is focused on a romantic relationship, it is not really romantic; disillusion seems baked in from the start. When the couple meet, Katharina is 19 years old, with her life ahead of her. Hans is married with a son, an apparently successful writer and broadcaster, and 34 years her senior.”
WELLINGTON
1 Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (Faber & Faber, $37)
2 Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape, $26)
3 Lioness by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury Circus, $25)
4 Understanding Te Tiriti by Roimata Smail (Wai Ako Press, $25)
This year of 2024 saw an unprecedented march upon parliament to protest the Treaty principles bill, as well as the removal of Treaty clauses from a clutch of legislation. Smail’s book is a brilliantly timed guide to Te Tiriti: at only 32 pages it is an essential item for home, work and school.
5 Butter by Asako Yuzuki (Fourth Estate, $35)
6 All Fours by Miranda July (Canongate, $37)
“The first great perimenopause novel”, proclaimed the NY Times. And they are not wrong. July is a startling artist: experimental, unpredictable. All Fours is a riotous experiment in life and art: July’s use of autofiction (taking elements of your own life to weave into the fictional form of the novel) is a performance that has resonated with women, particularly, all over the world.
“There was a question, in me, and in many of the conversations I was having with other women. We were wondering: Is this how it should feel? Is this sense of sacrifice on a soul level an indication of the profundity and goodness of the enterprise that is motherhood in the context of domestic life?” said July in an interview with the Yale Review. “Or, I began to wonder, is the problem too vague and insidious and we’re too tired and guilty, moment to moment, to question the whole premise? I mean of course it has been questioned, women’s lib and all that, but nonetheless everyone seemed pretty cozily tucked into the traditional concepts. From the outside, at least.”
7 Amma by Saraid De Silva (Hachette, $38)
8 Kataraina by Becky Manawatu (Makaro Press, $37)
“Less plot driven than Auē, Kataraina is enriched with frames of reference to the past, with a majority of the chapters time-marked to the shooting. The jump in maturity of Manawatu’s writing is immediately apparent: there is a marked growth in style and confidence. Manawatu aimed for the tihi of the mauka and hit it. The narrative is confident and assured in its structure, as is the precious matauraka of our iwi: the hard k of our Kāi Tahu dialect is unmissable, our karakia, our whenua, our rauemi.” Read more of Jenna Todd’s moving and personal review of Manawatu’s sequel to Auē.
9 Bird Child and Other Stories by Patricia Grace (Penguin, $37)
Patricia Grace is frequently cited by contributors to The Spinoff’s Books Confessional as New Zealand’s greatest writer. “It’s hard to have idols. For many of us, Patricia Grace sits at the peak of our literary maunga, shrouded by a misty horizon and a standard of excellence to her pen that many seek to emulate,” wrote Rangimarie Sophie Jolley in her review of Bird Child and Other Stories.
10 Long Island by Colm Tóibín (Picador, $38)
This sequel surprised everyone, including Tóibín himself. But the continuation of Eilis’s story set 20 years on from where Brooklyn left off has proved a wise decision by the Irish master. “Long Island often reads like a masterclass in everything Tóibín can do,” wrote John Self. “Minor characters are as well drawn as the main players: an irascible woman selling a plot of land (“she likes a fuss”, the estate agent warns the purchaser) only gets two pages but is a vivid highlight. There is subtle comedy – a man at a wedding directs Nancy around the floor “like a man driving a tractor” – and an eye for detail, as Nancy gets excited about the prospect of introducing the toasted cheese sandwich to Ireland’s pubs.”