This week’s best-sellers at the two best bookstores in the Western world.
WELLINGTON UNITY
1 Norse Mythology (Bloomsbury, $30) by Neil Gaiman
Kvasir, the god of knowledge and diplomacy, was killed by two dwarves.
2 Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family & Culture in Crisis (HarperCollins, $35) by J D Vance
Any minute now Joshua Hetherington will file his Spinoff review of one of the best non-fiction books of the past 12 months.
3 Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, $38) by Bettany Hughes
Turkey.
4 Hidden Life of Trees (Black Ink, $37) by Peter Wohlleben
Trees.
5 Pachinko (Head of Zeus, $37) by Min Jin Lee
Publisher’s blurbology: “Yeongdo, Korea 1911. In a small fishing village on the banks of the East Sea, a club-footed, cleft-lipped man marries a fifteen-year-old girl…Through eight decades and four generations, Pachinko is an epic tale of family, identity, love, death and survival.”
6 Wish Child (Victoria University Press, $30) by Catherine Chidgey
“Your new novel is an incredible piece of writing”: puff piece, the Listener.
7 The Sellout (Oneworld, $28) by Paul Beatty
Amazon customers who bought this novel also bought The Vegetarian.
8 The Vegetarian (Portobello, $23) by Han Kang
Amazon customers who bought this novel also bought The Sellout.
9 Goneville: A Memoir (Awa Press, $39) by Nick Bollinger
They smoked pot and went looking for New Zealand.
10 Hera Lindsay Bird (Victoria University Press, $25) by Hera Lindsay Bird
“Bravo!”: Landfall.
AUCKLAND STORE
1 Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Famly and Culture in Crisis (William Collins, $25) by JD Vance
2 Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the American Circus (WH Allen, $40) by Matt Taibbi
We look forward to the forthcoming review by Toby Morris.
3 The Refugees (Corsair, $35) by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Short stories by the author of The Sympathizer.
4 Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $38)) by Bettany Hughes
5 Commonwealth (Bloomsbury, $33) by Anne Patchett
It’s actually pretty lame.
6 Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury, $33) by George Saunders
“A great American work of art”, remarked Max Porter, author of the amazing Grief is a Thing with Feathers, in a DM conversation on Twitter this week.
7 Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers (Vermillion, $38) by Timothy Ferris
Includes advice on food supplements, and exercises to perform in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber.
8 Lines in the Sand: Collected Journalism (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $38) by AA Gill
“Gill has never revealed a first-rate mind; he expresses something more interesting, an original mind”: The Spinoff Review of Books, in a 2015 interview with the author, who died last year.
9 Fates and Furies (Windmill Books, $26) by Lauren Groff
Novel about a marriage; Barack Obama liked it.
10 A Manual For Cleaning Women (Picador, $25) by Lucia Berlin
Short stories taken from the life of the late American author, who by the age of 32 had been married three times and was battling a chronic alcohol addiction.