The best-seller chart at Unity Books for the week just ended: August 26
AUCKLAND STORE
1 White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World (Text, $37) Geoff Dyer
Reliably unreliable narratives.
2 Things That Matter: Stories of Life & Death from an Intensive Care Specialist (Allen & Unwin, $37) by Dr David Galler
Op lit.
3 The Girls (Chatto & Windus, $37) by Emma Cline
4 Tide: The Science and Lore of the Greatest Force on Earth (Viking, $40) by Hugh Aldersey-Williams
Tales from the topographic oceans.
5 Hera Lindsay Bird (Victoria University Press, $50) by Hera Lindsay Bird
6 Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Granta, $33) by Madeleine Thien
Longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker prize for fiction. Opening sentences: “In a single year, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life.”
7 Bright Edge of the World (Tinder Press, $38) by Eowyn Ivey
Alaskan rhapsodic fiction.
8 Can you Tolerate This? (Victoria Univesity Press, $30) by Ashleigh Young
Essays by New Zealand’s best writer of prose.
9 Tail of the Taniwha: A Collection of Short Stories (Beatnik Publishing) by Courtney Sina Meredith
Short stories much praised by Lloyd Jones and Paula Morris.
10 The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (Canongate, $40) by Olivia Laing
New Zealand’s best writer of prose has promised to write an essay about it.
WELLINGTON STORE
1 Hera Lindsay Bird (Victoria University Press, $25) by Hera Lindsay Bird
2 Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts I and II (Little Brown, $50) by JK Rowling, Jack Thorne and John Tiffany
Try, try, try to understand; he’s a magic man.
3 The 78-Storey Treehouse (Pan Macmillan, $18) by Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton
Delightful.
4 Complacent Nation (Bridget Williams Books, $15) by Gavin Ellis
Ben Thomas read it, and felt ill.
5 Can You Tolerate This? (Victoria University Press, $30) by Ashleigh Young
6 Silk Roads: A New History of the World (Bloomsbury, $28) by Peter Frankopan
Goodbye yellow silk road.
7 The Sympathizer (Piatkus, $28) by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The year’s best novel?
8 Barkskins (Fourth Estate, $37) by Annie Proulx
9 Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (Penguin, $16) by Carlo Rovelli
Lesson four, on particles: “Even if we observe an empty region of space, in which there are no atoms, we still detect a minute swarming of these particles. There is no such thing as a real void, one that is completely empty.”
10 Labour: The New Zealand Labour Party 1916-2016 (Victoria University Press, $50) by Peter Franks & Jim McAloon
Loving them is red.