The top 10 sales lists recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.
AUCKLAND
1 Be Brave: Life of a Pacific Correspondent by Barbara Dreaver (Awa Press, $45)
Dreaver’s career story reads like a thriller. Read just one snippet of it on The Spinoff, here.
2 Eyes of Kings (Flash & False Gods #3) by Chloe Gong (Hodder Press, $38)
Gong is an NY Times bestselling author from Aotearoa whose breakout book was a take on Romeo and Juliet called These Violent Delights back in 2020. Eyes of Kings is the third book in her trilogy inspired by Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.
3 The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (Michael Joseph, $28)
The book that will maybe make you want to get a penpal.
4 London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe (Picador, $40)
Mightily compelling true crime.
5 Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke (Fourth Estate, $37)
Looking forward to the film tbh. Picking it might actually be better than the book.
6 Facing Up to Our Future edited by Peter Davis (Dunmore Press, $35)
A collection of policy thinkers offer solutions to our problems.
7 Sophie, Standing There by Meg Mason (Fourth Estate, $33)
Do you ever have imagined conversations with authors you love? Sophie does. Then the author of her dreams arrives and what happens next is unputdownable. Read The Spinoff’s review, here.
8 The Valley: Crime and Punishment in a New Zealand City by Asher Emanuel (Bridget Williams Books, $40)
“It’s late 2020. Rikihana Wallace, a prolific shoplifter of no fixed abode, is back in prison with little chance of bail. Nathan Morley, unemployed, is facing burglary charges and hoping his other, as yet undetected, offences don’t catch up with him. Lewis Skerrett, their overstretched legal aid lawyer, is trying to do right by them both.
The culmination of over two years of field research and hundreds of hours of interviews, The Valley follows these three Hutt Valley men through courtrooms, prison, hospital, rehab, boarding houses and welfare offices. Told largely in verbatim dialogue, this up-close and personal account brings the realities of the New Zealand criminal justice system to life through the voices of those who experience it first-hand.”
9 Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout (Viking Penguin, $38)
Fiction at its finest.
10 Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck (Vintage, $28)
“Soren Johansson has always believed he’ll be reunited with his loved ones after death in an eternal hereafter. Then, he dies.
An ordinary family man, geologist, and Mormon, Soren wakes to find himself cast by a God he has never heard of into a Hell whose dimensions he can barely grasp – a vast library he can only escape from by finding the book that contains the story of his life. As his attempt to leave begins, he comes face to face with the absurdity of existence.”
WELLINGTON
1 kluge by pip adam (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38)
“At the heart of it was this opportunity to write a character that has no body,” says adam in this throughly invigorating conversation with Hera Lindsay Bird. “I’m always trying to escape my body. And yeah, the idea of inhabiting this consciousness that has never known the disgust of being in a body was just intoxicating. What is it to only know pain in the abstract? What is it to be able to write an essay on envy but never to have felt it? So yeah, I read quite a few articles about the linguistics of LLMs and some of those traits I used but I wasn’t rigid about it. In a lot of ways the voice is a lot like my own internal experience. I guess in some ways I too could write an essay on envy and understand in an abstract way how it feels but it’s not something I understand in a bodily or intuitive sense.”
2 The Valley: Crime and Punishment in a New Zealand City by Asher Emanuel (Bridget Williams Books, $40)
3 Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke (Fourth Estate, $37)
4 London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe (Picador, $40)
5 Stakes: A Memoir by Noelle McCarthy (Penguin, $40)
“In Stakes Noelle McCarthy writes her heart out to the thrum of Dracula in her veins and I am obsessed.” Read the rest of The Spinoff’s books editor Claire Mabey’s review, right here.
6 The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (Michael Joseph, $28)
7 Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout (Viking Penguin, $38)
8 Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman (Michael Joseph, $38)
“For the uninitiated, a dungeon crawler is a game in which the player progresses through a series of contained and increasingly difficult levels by defeating enemies, solving puzzles, and gathering loot. Carl, the narrator of Dinniman’s series, finds himself plunged into a real-life version of such a game after aliens wipe out most of Earth’s population and repurpose the planet into a massive game dungeon, forcing the survivors to fight their way through it for the amusement of an intergalactic television audience of trillions. At the time of the invasion, Carl, a U.S. Coast Guard veteran, was standing outside his Seattle home in the middle of the night, trying to coax his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, out of a tree, and wearing only heart-patterned boxer shorts and a leather jacket. Over the course of the series, Donut will acquire the ability to talk, reason, and shoot deadly laser missiles from her eyes, but Carl will never get shoes or trousers.” Read the rest of Laura Miller’s review on Slate, here.
9 Ōtepoti Dunedin Architecture: A Walking Guide by John Walsh and Patrick Reynolds (Massey University Press, $40)
Gorgeous guide reviewed on The Spinoff, here.
10 Sophie, Standing There by Meg Mason (Fourth Estate, $33)
