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.
The slight, superb winner of the Booker Prize 2024. Here’s a snippet from this review in The Guardian: “Orbital is a hopeful book and it studies people who act on their hope. It’s an Anthropocene book resistant to doom. We might miss the restless anger that tossed about in The Shapeless Unease, and the acerbic, downright forms of expression it found for itself. But Orbital offers vehement appreciation of the world in a range of tones and situations.”
It is bolstering to see Kang’s work resurfacing in bestsellers since the genius Korean writer was honoured with the Nobel Prize in Literature this year. Human Acts is an extraordinary, sobering and solidifying read that follows the impact of the Gwangju Uprising in 1980 to the present day.
“This is not a manual for how to ‘get well’,” says the blurb for this collection of personal essays. “It’s for the many people in careers like Daniel, the high-fliers and the driven who don’t stop to smell the flowers, then hit the wall and wonder how to get over that wall.”
Sounds like an ideal gift from a local writer for the high flier in your life.
The latest in Boyne’s elemental series has a steady 4.4 rating on Good Reads and is cementing his very productive and successful run of late. Here’s the blurb: “On the face of it, Freya lives a gilded existence, dancing solely to her own tune. She has all the trappings of wealth and privilege, a responsible job as a surgeon specialising in skin grafts, a beautiful flat in a sought-after development, and a flash car. But it wasn’t always like this. Hers is a life founded on darkness.
Did what happened to Freya as a child one fateful summer influence the adult she would become – or was she always destined to be that person? Was she born with cruelty in her heart or did something force it into being?
In Fire, John Boyne takes the reader on a chilling, uncomfortable but utterly compelling psychological journey to the epicentre of the human condition, asking the age-old question: nurture – or nature?”
The breadth of opinion on Good Reads never fails to thrill. Rather enjoyed this three-star review from Baba Yaga Reads:
“Four hundred and forty-eight pages of men taking zero accountability for their actions and using women as their emotional crutches. So I guess you could say it’s realistic?”
Once upon a time a new Murakami would have come out to as much fanfare as a new Rooney, or almost. But the noise around the release of City and its Uncertain Walls is more like a subtle hum. The question is, once you’ve read two or three Murakamis, have you read them all?
Alderton did a sell-out event at the Michael Fowler Centre in Wellington this week which explains the Alderton ambush of the list (see items 2, 4 and also 8).
Everything I Know About Love is the 2018 memoir that launched a thousand Alderton fans.
Maddie Ballard is a brilliant Aotearoa writer and this essay collection is her first of what we are predicting will be many excellent books. Here’s the blurb: “Bound: A Memoir of Making and Remaking is a collection of essays about sewing and knowing who you are. Each chapter in this sewist’s diary charts the crafting of a different garment: from a lining embroidered with the names of her female ancestors to a dressing gown holding the body of a beloved friend, Maddie Ballard navigates love, personal connections, and self-care, drafting her own patterns for ways of living.”
Wrap one up and slip it under the tree for me, please.