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  EM-PA-THY: The Human Side of Leadership by Harold Hillman (Bateman, $30)

Merry corporate Christmas …

2  Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do and How to Change by Charles Duhigg (Random House, $28)

… and happy corporate New Year!

Two perfect gifts from CEO Santa. These are apparently in high demand, even in October, because people who read about empathetic leadership and positive habits are organised.

3  The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (Bloomsbury, $25)

Phew! Back to familiar ground: fiction set in Ancient Greece, complete with adventure, romance, and just a hint of erotica. 

4  Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr (Simon & Schuster, $35)

The Washington Post (via Stuff) provides context, hydration advice, and condemnation:

“Librarians and bookworms throughout time are the heroes of Anthony Doerr’s exceedingly busy new novel Cloud Cuckoo Land. Think of it as a triptych love letter to the millions of readers who made his previous novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning All the Light We Cannot See, a phenomenal bestseller.

“Once again, Doerr presents young people caught in the fires of war, but his stage this time around is far vaster than the plight of two children during World War II. Cloud Cuckoo Land struts across millennia. Wear comfortable shoes and remember to stay hydrated … Yes, libraries are awesome, and we all love books. But the artificial convolutedness of Cloud Cuckoo Land is not enough to confer any additional depth on Doerr’s simple, belaboured theme, a theme that thumps through the novel insisting that every character kneel in reverent submission.” Ouch. We vehemently disagree, and equally vehemently endorse, this wonderful novel.

5  Circe by Madeline Miller (Bloomsbury, $22)

If you’ve already read The Song of Achilles and are hunting around for more, lucky for you Miller has written a second novel. Circe, the infamous witch from the Odyssey, is recast as “a fierce goddess who, yes, turns men into pigs, but only because they deserve it”. Thanks, NPR.

6  Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (Faber, $33)

If you’re thinking “Sally Rooney! Number Six? This wasn’t the madness I was promised!” Well, just take a sneak preview peak at Wellington.

7  Ottolenghi Test Kitchen: Shelf Love by Yotam Ottolenghi and Noor Murad (Ebury Press, $55)

We hope you have freekeh, pomegranate molasses, sumac, and za’atar lining your pantry shelves, because the new Ottolenghi has arrived to make your cooking at least 116% more time-intensive and 400% more exciting. 

8  The Raffles Affair: A Victoria West Mystery by Vicki Virtue (Penguin Random House, $37)

New mystery novel by a local writer, inspired by the glamorous Raffles Hotel in Singapore. The novel has in turn inspired the Raffles to concoct specialty cocktails in its honour. Once you have your own alcoholic drink, is there any further corner of success to explore?

Look out for a review next week.

9  The Magician by Colm Tóibín (Picador, $38)

A novel about the life of German writer Thomas Mann, from the writer of Brooklyn, The Master, and Nora Webster.

10  Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead (Fleet, $35)

An entertaining heist novel set in 1960s Harlem, from the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes. The narrator is a furniture salesman who’s pulled into the world of underground crime.

WELLINGTON

1  Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (Faber, $33)

2  Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr (Simon & Schuster, $35)

3  Imagining Decolonisation by Rebecca Kiddle, Bianca Elkington, Moana Jackson, Ocean Ripeka Mercier, Mike Ross, Jennie Smeaton and Amanda Thomas (Bridget Williams Books, $15)

We used to joke, “How is it that Imagining Decolonisation is still selling like hot cakes? Every Wellingtonian must own at least three copies now!” At this stage, we are dead serious.

4  Ottolenghi Test Kitchen: Shelf Love by Yotam Ottolenghi and Noor Murad (Ebury Press, $55)

5  The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles (Hutchinson, $37)

From NPR: “Amor Towles’ new book is quite the joyride — The Lincoln Highway follows four kids in a 1948 Studebaker who set out along the real-life Lincoln Highway, the first highway to cross the [United States]. Two of them are trying to head for San Francisco to find their mother — the other two want to go the other way, looking for a promised inheritance.”

6  Things I Learned at Art School by Megan Dunn (Penguin, $35)

A local memoir crafted from essays that combine wicked comedy, banality, and tragedy. You can read an excerpt here, but be warned – these essays are like a packet of chips. Once you start, it will be hard to stop. 

7  The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris (Tinder Press, $35)

A new novel set at the end of the American Civil War. Over 10,000 Goodreads ratings give it a score of 4.3 stars, and one reviewer says: “Magnificent … an instant classic! Really extraordinary! … Engrossing storytelling … Heartbreaking cruelty, loss, grief, racial and sexual bigotry … yet also full of promise, courage, and humanity … Incredible debut!”

Maybe all of those ellipses will make you doubt this reviewer’s credibility, so to ease your mind: the Guardian liked it, too.

8  Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury, $23)

Newly-crowned winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, by the author of the wonderful Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. The smaller, more wallet-friendly edition of Piranesi has just been released, bumping it back into the bestsellers. From the Guardian: “Far from seeming burdened by her legacy, the Susanna Clarke we encounter here might be an unusually gifted newcomer unacquainted with her namesake’s work. If there is a strand of continuity in this elegant and singular novel, it is in its central preoccupation with the nature of fantasy itself. It remains a potent force, but one that can leave us – like Goethe among the ruins – forever disappointed by what is real.”

9  A Queer Existence: The Lives of Young Gay Men in Aotearoa New Zealand by Mark Beehre (Massey University Press, $45)

The experience of 27 young gay men in Aoteroa, told through photography and oral history. They are living in a new era: all of these men were born after the Homosexual Law Reform Act was passed in 1986, and in their lifetimes workplace discrimination was outlawed, same-sex relationships were legally recognised, and marriage equality was granted. Sam Brooks reviewed it for us, here, later tweeting it was one of his favourite pieces he’d written.

10  She’s a Killer by Kirsten McDougall (Victoria University Press, $30)

An exceptional new novel featuring one of the best scenes in a New Zealand novel this year: supermarket shopping during an inexorable apocalypse. (We’re publishing that scene, and a note from the author, next week.)

Here’s a potted review we included in our most recent Spinoff Book Report:

“The protagonist, a woman in her 30s, is clever and blisteringly self-centred and odd, as you would be. She is one IQ point off being a genius and also quite possibly a sociopath. But that’s far from the centre of the book – I think the message here is more that humanity as a whole is pretty sociopathic.

The plot involves ‘wealthugees’ – the elite who can afford to flee their own ruined countries – and eco-terrorism, and a mysterious teenager who comes to live with the protagonist for a bit. The whole book has a feeling of edges and fractures and knife-edges, precariousness, and how close we are to it all. And also, how when it comes it will feel so normal.”

Catherine Robertson reviews Sue Orr’s latest book, billed as a ‘major New Zealand novel’. 

In Sue Orr’s last novel, The Party Line (Vintage, 2015), a rural community in the 1970s conspires to ignore that a fellow farmer is beating his wife. When she is finally free of him, the men close ranks to prevent her selling the farm to an outsider. Women cannot be allowed control of anything, not even their own bodies. 

Orr returns to that theme in Loop Tracks, which opens in 1978 with 16-year-old Charlie on a Pan Am flight that will take her to Australia for an abortion. As Charlie tells us, May 1978 is not an ideal time for an unwanted pregnancy. New Zealand’s only abortion clinic, the Auckland Medical Aid Clinic, shut its doors the previous December, after the passing into law of the Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion Act. Women now had to be assessed by two certifying consultants, who would only approve the procedure if they were convinced there’d be physical or psychological harm from continuing with the pregnancy. Foetal abnormality was not a ground on its own. Nor was rape. 

The Auckland clinic did open again but not until August 1979. For 20 months in between, only women who had the means and time to travel to Australia could legally procure an abortion. A satirical song, written by the late Dr Erich Geiringer (and sung by him on the radio) ended with this verse: It’s a good old Kiwi custom, if you’ve missed your period, for the poor a knitting needle, for the rich a trip abroad. The 1978 Pan Am flight was real and remained stuck on the tarmac with everyone on board, for hours. During that wait, fictional Charlie makes a decision with “a brain yet to develop the parts that tether her to reality” and forfeits all say over the next part of her life.

When we meet her again in 2019, Charlie is cautious and restrained, her home not quite a safe space. She’s been made to share it, first with her son, Jim, who tracks down his birth mother when he’s eighteen. And then with Tommy, her grandson, whom Jim leaves with her when the boy is four years old. Jim’s brief time with Charlie is fraught. He is, in her words, a swaggering narcissist. A drug dealer, untrustworthy, intimidating. Charlie cannot know if adoption has damaged him or if he was born broken. She’ll never know whether they might, in another version of their lives, have been close. 

Tommy is a second chance of sorts, but not without his own challenges. He’s probably on the autism spectrum, academically bright but socially awkward. In 2019, he is 18 and on the brink of both independence and his first relationship, with Jenna. Jenna has questions, about Tommy, his father, and Charlie. She is gentle but relentless. “This is about power, this conversation,” Charlie says. “We are poised, Jenna and I, on a playground seesaw … I hold my ground, refuse to let her bounce me high.”

But bounced Charlie is, jarred off the track she’s been on since Tommy’s arrival in her life, their familiar two-person groove. She’s forced to make room for Jenna and also, once again, Jim. Forced to reassess the story of her past, “the one I’ve been attached to my whole adult life”. And, as 2020 arrives, forced to deal with the added tensions provided by a global virus, a lock-down and a general election. 

Loop tracks are short sections of sound, set to continuously repeat. In this novel, Orr explores the patterns we generate and perpetuate through our own choices, and the tunes we are forced to dance to, the larger political and environmental factors outside our control. This is where Orr’s genius lies – the novel provokes us, the readers, as well as the characters. These are subjects that polarise: abortion, adoption, women’s rights, crime, disease, governmental control. They trigger our most primal responses, fight, flight, freeze. This novel is a mirror as well as a lens, and how we judge Orr’s characters will say more about us than it does about them. 

Charlie’s life has been an exercise in ceding control and attempting to wrest it back, by reducing the scope of her life until it feels manageable and safe, and by never looking too closely at her past. We might fault adult Charlie for her lack of courage, but Orr shows us that to do so would mean ignoring the vulnerable young girl, bearing sole responsibility for a situation created by male lawmakers who believed they knew best when it came to women’s reproductive rights. It would mean ignoring the traumatic effects of adoption, only now being acknowledged. It would mean ignoring that our children aren’t always who we hope they’ll be, and that we can’t always be the parents they need. Every relationship, every life, contains compromise and accommodation, mistakes and regret. 

If there’s any message to take from this wonderful, complex and poignant novel, it’s that having the freedom to make choices isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But we can make peace with our missteps and shortcomings, and not lay all the blame at our own feet.

Loop Tracks, by Sue Orr (Victoria University Press, $35) is available from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington. 

Sue Orr will be in conversation with Catherine Robertson at Verb Wellington next month.