The top 10 sales lists recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.
AUCKLAND
1 Invisible Intelligence: Why Your Child Might Not Be Failing by Welby Ings (Otago University Press, $45)
A fascinating and useful book that explores the ways in which the education system struggles to embrace children who don’t fit into the narrow definitions of success defined for them.
2 The Safe Keep by Yael van der Wouden (Penguin, $26)
Beautiful historical fiction set in The Hague in the 1960s.
3 Become Unstoppable by Gilbert Enoka (Penguin, $40)
The acclaimed sports psychologist how he got the All Blacks ship shape.
4 Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton (Canongate, $28)
Hear, hear, hare – here!
6 No Good by Sophie van Waardenberg (Auckland University Press, $25)
Happy Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day one and all! Why not celebrate by trotting to your local bookshop and purchasing a fresh collection? You can’t go wrong with van Waardenberg’s debut: full of surprise, relatable and raw emotion, and warmth.
7 The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38)
Catherine Chidgey is one of four Aotearoa writers at the Edinburgh International Book Festival right now and is giving a workshop on how she created the child narrators in this latest, smashing novel. Hopefully she’ll get a chance to repeat the workshop back at home!
8 Passengers on the Hankyu Line by Hiro Arikawa (Doubleday, $38)
The latest healing novel with cats.
9 Butter by Asako Yuzuki (4th Estate, $35)
Vivid, unsettling, thrilling.
10 Eurotrash by Christian Kracht (Serpents Tail, $30)
For the uninitiated, here’s the blurb: “Realising he and she are the very worst kind of people, our unnamed middle-aged narrator embarks on a highly dubious road trip through Switzerland with his terminally ill and terminally drunken mother. They try unsuccessfully to give away or squander the fortune she has amassed from investing in armament industry shares. Along the journey they bicker endlessly over the past, throw handfuls of francs into a ravine and exasperate the living daylights out of their long-suffering taxi driver. The crimes of the twentieth century are never far behind, but neither is the need for more vodka.”
WELLINGTON
1 Anything Could Happen by Grant Robertson (Allen & Unwin, $40)
2 chrysalis (d[i]s)section by o(l[i]ve)(*) (bly(th)) (5Ever Press, $25)
“chrysalis (d[i]s)section takes a scalpel to poetic form(s), making a collage of neo-[n]ietzschean rhyme, jazz-inspired intonation, & second-wave feminist calls for male castration / in three sections, the ‘caterpillar to butterfly’ cliché of personal metamorphosis is rewritten, while exoskeletal references are both irreverently & deferentially effaced / silly, serious, & {self-}referential: rhythmically-punctuated wordplay toys with the notion of authorship, across time //”
3 Oceans Between Us: Pacific Peoples and Racism in Aotearoa edited by Sereana Naepi (Auckland University Press, $40)
A powerful collection of essays that tackles the deep scars of racism.
4 Bird of the Year by Forest and Bird (Penguin, $45)
All the birds, and one bat, from 80 years of the Bird of the Year competition.
5 A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern (Penguin, $60)
Pipped by Robertson for once.
6 Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Penguin, $26)
We love a slim novel.
7 Butter by Asako Yuzuki (4th Estate, $35)
8 The Safe Keep by Yael van der Wouden (Penguin, $26)
9 Jewish, Not Zionist by Marilyn Garson (Left of the Equator Press, $32)
“Israel’s advocates have tried for years to cram Jewishness into Zionism.” Read an opinion piece by Garson on The Spinoff, here.
10 The Names by Florence Knapp (Phoenix, $38)
The dystopian future we can’t put down.
