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 Episodes by Alex Scott (Earth’s End Publishing, $40)
Always a great week when Earth’s End – New Zealand’s best publisher of graphic novels – puts out a new book. Here’s the blurb for this latest masterpiece: “A smart-mouthed kid provokes the wrong flatmate, a misguided teen gets schooled by her crush and a former child star struggles to escape his past.
Seductive advertising fantasies collide headfirst with everyday life in this delicately interwoven tale of identity, desire and coming of age even in adulthood. Episodes is a thrillingly observed critique of our media-obsessed society.”
And here’s what creator, Alex Scott, says of their book: “This is an epic tale told on a personal level. Episodes is for an audience who grew up on a diet of scheduled TV programming and now feeds off a 24-hour cycle of social-media updates and sponsored content.”
2 Atua Wahine: The Ancient Wisdom of Māori Goddesses by Hana Apiata (Harper Collins, $37)
For the psychos who start thinking about Christmas in October, this book should be on the ideas list. It’s all gold and aquamarine and is very giftable. Here’s the blurb: “Drawing on whakatauki (proverbs) and purakau (stories), Hana Tapiata shares her experience of living by feminine Indigenous wisdom. With guided steps, these atua will inspire you to embrace creativity, acknowledge cycles of change, and discover self-determination.”
3 Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (Faber & Faber, $37)
Soon we’ll be able to start playing Intermezzo merch bingo with the totes, T-shirts, pins, and stickers now disseminated about the country’s Rooneyites.
4 Kataraina by Becky Manawatu (Makaro Press, $37)
“Less plot driven than Auē, Kataraina is enriched with frames of reference to the past, with a majority of the chapters time-marked to the shooting. The jump in maturity of Manawatu’s writing is immediately apparent: there is a marked growth in style and confidence. Manawatu aimed for the tihi of the mauka and hit it. The narrative is confident and assured in its structure, as is the precious matauraka of our iwi: the hard k of our Kāi Tahu dialect is unmissable, our karakia, our whenua, our rauemi.” Read more of Jenna Todd’s review on The Spinoff.
And if you’re in Nelson this weekend then don’t miss Manawatu’s event on October 26 (with Talia Marshall); and Wellingtonians can see Manawatu at Verb Readers & Writers Festival on November 10.
5 Fight For Freshwater by Mike Joy (Bateman, $40)
Mike Joy is a renowned and tireless advocate for the environment and his memoir is an exhausting account of everything he’s done to try and preserve and edify the lifeblood of the world: our water. Read a compelling excerpt from the book on The Spinoff.
6 Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout (Viking Penguin, $38)
More magic from one of the best in the business. Here’s the blurb: “It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer, Lucy Barton, who lives nearby in a house next to the sea. Together, Lucy and Bob talk about their lives, their hopes and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, befriends one of Crosby’s longest inhabitants, Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known – ‘unrecorded lives’, Olive calls them – reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.”
7 We Solve Murders by Richard Osman (Viking Penguin, $38)
Osman is one of those celebrities turned novelists, which can go either way. Fortunately for Osman he’s exceptionally good at cosy crime. Predicting we’ll be seeing this latest in the series for in the top 10s for a while.
8 Butter by Asako Yuzuki (Fourth Estate, $35)
Translated into English by Polly Barton, who also wrote a book about porn.
9 Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq (Picador, $38)
A chic new dystopia from France (translated by Shaun Whiteside). Here’s what it’s about:
“It is 2027. France is in a state of economic decline and moral decay.
As the country plunges into a closely-fought presidential campaign, the French state falls victim to a series of mysterious and unsettling cyberattacks. The sophisticated nature of the attacks leaves the best computer scientists at the DGSI – the French counter-terrorism agency – scrambling for answers.
An advisor to the country’s Finance Minister, Paul Raison is close to the heart of government. His wife Prudence is a Treasury official, while his father Édouard, now retired, has spent his career working for the DGSI. When Édouard has a stroke, his children have an opportunity to repair their strained relationships, as they determine to free their father from the medical centre where he is wasting away.”
10 Juice by Tim Winton (Hamish Hamilton, $55)
“Ray Bradbury said that when he wrote Fahrenheit 451 that he combined something he hated (book burning in Nazi Germany) with something he loved (libraries). Winton has simultaneously written a definitive love letter to his country and hate mail to those who lay waste to the Earth.” Read more from The Guardian review, here.
WELLINGTON
1 Jewish, Not Zionist by Marilyn Garson (Left of the Equator, $30)
Garson wrote a powerful op ed on why she wrote this book, right here on The Spinoff.
2 Delirious by Damien Wilkins (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38)
This masterful novel from Damien Wilkins is Elizabeth Knox’s new favourite New Zealand novel. Read why, here.
3 Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (Faber & Faber, $37)
4 Kataraina by Becky Manawatu (Makaro Press, $37)
5 Kawai: Tree of Nourishment by Monty Soutar (Bateman, $40)
The second in a series of three historical novels from historian Monty Soutar. Here’s the blurb: “It’s 1818 on the East Coast of Te Ika-a-Maui, New Zealand. Hine-aute, granddaughter of the legendary warrior Kaitanga, is fleeing through the bush, a precious yet gruesome memento contained in her fishing net. What follows is a gripping tale of a people on the cusp of profound change that is destined to reverberate through many generations to come. The Europeans have arrived, and they’ve brought guns and foreign diseases, ushering in a whole new world of terror and trouble.”
6 Juice by Tim Winton (Hamish Hamilton, $55)
7 The Odyssey by Stephen Fry (Michael Joseph, $40)
Fans must be swotting up ahead of Fry’s visit to our shores in November.
8 Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday, $38)
Good Readers are torn over this one, with some devotees declaring Atkinson can do no wrong, and others admitting disappointment. The Spinoff readers (focus group of one so far) enjoyed the Agatha Christie style whodunnit immensely, and especially the luxurious slow build, and the linguistic jokes.
9 He Kupu na te maia: He Kohinga ruri na Maya Angelou by Maya Angelou (Auckland University Press, $35)
Maya Angelou poems translated into te reo Māori by 34 women across Aotearoa.
10 War by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster, $60)
Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Bob Woodward looks behind the curtain of the war on the Ukraine, war in the Middle East, and the struggle for the American presidency. Terribly timely.