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)
Roarrrr! Perkins’ brilliant, award-winning, Marian-Keyes anointed, darkly funny, long form interrogation of capitalism and wellness and personal accountability continues to captivate readers.
2 Kia Mau: Resisting Colonial Fiction by Tina Ngata (Kia Mau Campaign, $15)
An essential collection of essays written in response to the New Zealand government’s decision to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Cook’s arrival to Aotearoa. Ngata goes back to Medieval Rome and the creation of the Doctrine of Discovery to follow the imperial and religious motivations that drove Cook to these lands and fuelled the Colonial project that came after. An intelligent, insightful and clear-thinking argument for ethical remembering.
3 Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East by Robert Fisk (4th estate, $50)
“Searing, passionate and immensely authoritative, the final opus from the revered journalist and author of The Great War for Civilisation delivers a trenchant critique of Western interference in the Middle East,” said Waterstones.
4 The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin (Canongate, $55)
Old cloth-bound boob is back! Delighted, charmed. Here’s a snippet from a Sam Brooks’ review of Rubin’s thoughts: “I felt good after reading The Creative Act. There are a lot of good sentences in the book. It also feels good to read The Creative Act, because the book’s cover is a soft blue linen-type fabric and it is a hefty weight. The Creative Act is split up into 78 chapters or “areas of thought”, as Rubin calls them (the man has many phrases that complicate the meaning of otherwise simple words throughout). These areas of thoughts have chapters like ‘Everyone is a Creator’, ‘Ending to Start Anew (Regeneration)’, ‘The Sincerity Dilemma’ and ‘Why Make Art?'”
5 All That We Know by Shilo Kino (Moa Press, $38)
From Damien Levi’s astute review over on Kete Books: “With Tāmaki Makaurau as its background, Māreikura’s journey is one that will echo in the hearts and spirits of many young urban Māori—those who have grown up away from their tūrangawaewae, denied the birthright of their reo and who carry the unseen scars of intergenerational trauma.
Māreikura is joined by a fantastic ensemble cast who often challenge our strong-willed protagonist in the same way our friends tell us all the things we know are true but never want to hear.”
6 All Fours by Miranda July (Canongate, $37)
“This tender, strange treatise on getting out from the ‘prefab structures’ of a conventional life is quintessentially July.” More over at Kirkus Reviews.
7 Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (Granta, $28)
The beloved International Booker Prize winner 2024.
8 The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry (Canongate, $37)
An outstanding, rip-roaring love story set in the Wild West, featuring sentences as magical as this: “The horse stilled herself utterly and fixed the lashes of the long stare on his and he was bound.”. And this: “the last winter days went by like weary brokedown soldiers at the end of a war”. And this: “Tom Rourke salted the eggs unambiguously”. Highly recommend.
9 Bird Child and Other Stories by Patricia Grace (Penguin, $37)
Rangimarie Sophie Jolley has done a wonderful close read of this “refreshing and revolutionary” collection of stories from the great Patricia Grace, on The Spinoff, here.
10 Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson (Allen & Unwin, $37)
New historic fiction. Here’s the publisher’s blurb: “It is the summer of 1919 and Constance Haverhill is without prospects. Now that all the men have returned from the front, she has been asked to give up her cottage and her job at the estate she helped run during the war. While she looks for a position as a bookkeeper or—horror—a governess, she’s sent as a lady’s companion to an old family friend who is convalescing at a seaside hotel. Despite having only weeks to find a permanent home, Constance is swept up in the social whirl of Hazelbourne-on-Sea after she rescues the local baronet’s daughter, Poppy Wirrall, from a social faux pas.
Poppy wears trousers, operates a taxi and delivery service to employ local women, and runs a ladies’ motorcycle club (to which she plans to add flying lessons). She and her friends enthusiastically welcome Constance into their circle. And then there is Harris, Poppy’s recalcitrant but handsome brother—a fighter pilot recently wounded in battle—who warms in Constance’s presence. But things are more complicated than they seem in this sunny pocket of English high society. As the country prepares to celebrate its hard-won peace, Constance and the women of the club are forced to confront the fact that the freedoms they gained during the war are being revoked.”
WELLINGTON
1 Bad Archive by Flora Feltham (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35)
This brilliant debut collection of essays has been flying off the shelves since it launched. Watch out for our review of Bad Archive coming up on The Spinoff this weekend.
2 Lioness by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury, $25)
3 Power to Win by Lyndy McIntyre (Otago University Press, $45)
“McIntyre’s book Power to Win details the history of the movement in New Zealand. It’s more than just a modern history, it’s a political manifesto, an instruction manual on how to harness the dormant power of the worker.” Read Oliver Clifton’s full review of McIntyre’s memoir on The Spinoff, here.
4 Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors (4th Estate, $38)
A snippet from a very thorough appraisal of this novel by The Fiction Fox: “Blue Sisters has an eerily similar set-up to another recently released novel I read, and gave a similar rating. That being The Alternatives. Both follow the lives of 4 sisters, each highly accomplished and successful when judged by our ‘typical societal standards’ (attractive, wealthy, with exceptional careers), yet each struggling with complex emotional troubles. In each story, these siblings reconnect after one of them has vanished from their lives, and old dynamics resurface. Whilst I love the family-dynamic aspect of both these novels, reading them made me realize something vital: I’m so tired of this subgenre of ‘the woes of the wealthy women’s fiction’. Sally Rooney, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and yes, the authors previous work Cleopatra and Frankenstein: to me, they all started to feel like a dime a dozen.”
5 The Fight for Freshwater: A Memoir by Mike Joy (Bridget Williams Books, $40)
Mike Joy’s efforts to try and get councils and governments and the public to give a shit instead of shitting in our beautiful waters is heroic. An excerpt that reveals how Joy first got entangled in freshwater activism is published right here on The Spinoff.
6 Corkscrew You by Catherine Robertson (HarperCollins, $27)
Bestselling author Catherine Robertson has turned her pen to four-chilli level romances and they’re already hot here and in the UK where they’re also published. At Robertson’s launch she revealed in an interview with herself that her yearning to be a romance writer started at school thanks to an illicit Mills & Boon but just took 31 years to make good. And hoo boy is it good.
7 All That We Know by Shilo Kino (Moa Press, $38)
8 Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing (Picador, $56)
Laing is a reliably excellent and surprising writer. This latest book is part memoir of making a garden and part inquiry into the nature of gardens themselves: why we make them, what they mean, their literary histories, and the fact that many famous ones (in the UK where she lives) were created with wealth derived from slavery. The book is beautiful, political, personal and curious.
9 All Fours by Miranda July (Canongate, $37)
10 Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (Granta, $28)