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 Lioness by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury, $25)
Earlier this month Deadline reported that Emily Perkins’ Wellington novel about negotiating personal responsibility against a background of late capitalism and the seductive qualities of wellness culture is going to be turned into a TV show by Made Up Stories (the same company behind the smash hit Big Little Lies). We can’t wait to see how they adapt Therese’s story and whether it will be set in Wellington…
2 Long Island by Colm Toibin (Picador, $38)
The sequel to Brooklyn.
3 Becoming Tangata Tiriti: Working with Maori, Honouring the Treaty by Avril Bell (Auckland Uni Press, $30)
Never been a better time to self-educate on how to enact Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
4 All Fours by Miranda July (Canongate, $37)
This from Emily Gould at The Cut pretty much sums this one up: “Before reading All Fours, I was a Miranda July agnostic. I liked her quirky, character-driven movies fine. Her previous books, the story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You and novel The Last Bad Man, with their casts of lonely, idiosyncratic personalities, left me feeling respectful but essentially unmoved, like, ‘Okay, here’s another thing July has proved she can do.’ But All Fours possessed me. I picked it up and neglected my life until the last page, and then I started begging every woman I know to read it as soon as possible.”
5 Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl (Oneworld Publications, $25)
A lady goes to Paris, buys a Dior dress, encounters a Manet and goes to Shakespeare & Co. Enough said?
6 There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak (Viking Press, $37)
The prolific, passionate Turkish novelist is back with another stunning story. Here’s the blurb: “In the ruins of Nineveh, that ancient city of Mesopotamia, there lies hidden in the sand fragments of a long-forgotten poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh.
In Victorian London, an extraordinary child is born at the edge of the dirt-black Thames. Arthur’s only chance of escaping poverty is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a printing press, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, with one book soon sending him across the seas: Nineveh and Its Remains.
In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a Yazidi girl living by the River Tigris, waits to be baptised with water brought from the holy sit of Lalish in Iraq. The ceremony is cruelly interrupted, and soon Narin and her grandmother must journey across war-torn lands in the hope of reaching the sacred valley of their people.
In 2018 London, broken-hearted Zaleekhah, a hydrologist, moves to a houseboat on the Thames to escape the wreckage of her marriage. Zaleekhah foresees a life drained of all love and meaning – until an unexpected connection to her homeland changes everything.
A dazzling feat of storytelling from one of the greatest writers of our time, Elif Shafak’s There are Rivers in the Sky is a rich, sweeping novel that spans centuries, continents and cultures, entwined by rivers, rains, and waterdrops:
‘Water remembers. It is humans who forget.'”
7 All That We Own Know by Shilo Kino (Moa Press, $38)
From Natasha Lampard’s review on The Spinoff: “There’s a lot going on fo’ sure but it’s far from too much: the story is sometimes fraught, but it’s not totally didactic, it’s no drag. The author has given us people and situations in whom and in which we can see parts of ourselves: complex, contradictory, messy – depictions we surely should be afforded and afford ourselves, for we are no monolith. The book is funny, and refreshing, and a courageous contribution to the wider kōrero that will open up spaces for other untold stories.”
8 The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin (Canongate, $55)
The cloth-bound gift that keeps on giving.
9 Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (Granta UK, $28
“An intimate and devastating story of the path of two lovers through the ruins of a relationship, set against the backdrop of a seismic period in European history.” More on the Booker Prize website’s handy reading guide to this year’s International Booker winner.
10 Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors (Fourth Estate, $38)
Hard not to love the pithy one-liner from the Kirkus Review: “One does come to agree with the characters that the most likable of the group has been killed off.”
WELLINGTON
1 Forms of Freedom: Marxist Essays in New Zealand & Australian Literature by Dougal McNeill (University of Otago Press, $45)
A book about how the imaginative powers of literature can influence progressive social change! This is a marvellous contribution from Prof McNeill, a passionate advocate of the humanities and of Aotearoa literature. A must-read for our times that highlights the writing of authors such as Pip Adam, Mary Gilmore, Patricia Grace, Dorothy Hewett, Harry Holland, Eve Langley, Henry Lawson, Amanda Lohrey, Elsie Locke, Emily Perkins, Alice Tawhai, Hone Tuwhare, Ellen van Neerven and Albert Wendt.
2 Becoming Tangata Tiriti: Working with Maori, Honouring the Treaty by Avril Bell (Auckland Uni Press, $30)
3 There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak (Viking Press, $37)
4 The Bookshop Detectives: Dead Girl Gone by Gareth & Louise Ward (Penguin, $38)
A charming and gripping book from two of the country’s most beloved booksellers. Read all about them in the latest Books Confessional, here on The Spinoff.
5 Whaea Blue by Talia Marshall ((Te Herenga Waka University Press, $40)
A stunning book from a totally original voice: read an excerpt from Marshall’s memoir on The Spinoff, here.
6 Bad Archive by Flora Feltham (Te Herenga Waka, $35)
From Maddie Ballard’s excellent analysis of this debut collection of essays: “Amazingly for an essay collection, I felt there were no duds in Bad Archive. I was there for the essay on worms; I was there for the world of Meccano enthusiasts; I was unbelievably there for an imagining of the life of Julian of Norwich. None of these were subjects I’d have guessed I’d find enthralling. I found each essay to be illuminated and complicated by another one, giving the book a shapely balance. As a result, Bad Archive really feels like a collection, rather than a miscellany. It enacts something Feltham herself asserts in ‘On Archiving’: “the more you look at something […] the more it starts to change shape and bleed into its surroundings”.”
7 The Mercy Of Gods: Book One of the Captive’s War by James S A Corey (Orbit, $38)
An epic intergalactic start of a new series.
8 The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (Penguin, $26)
Welcome back! Here’s a reminder of what this huge book is about: “The Barnes family are in trouble. Until recently they ran the biggest business in town, now they’re teetering on the brink of bankruptcy – and that’s just the start of their problems. Dickie and Imelda’s marriage is hanging by a thread; straight-A student Cass is careening off the rails; PJ is hopelessly in debt to the school bully. Meanwhile the ghosts of old mistakes are rising out of the past to meet them, but everyone’s too wrapped up in the present to see the danger looming . . .”
9 Butter by Asako Yuzuki (4th Estate, $35)
Still the murders and the food.
10 Lioness by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury, $25)