1 What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape, $38)

McEwan’s entry into cli-fi. Here’s a snippet from Kevin Power’s review on The Guardian: “The novel is set a century hence, in 2119. Part one is narrated by Tom Metcalfe, who teaches literature at the University of the South Downs, an institution largely focused on science and maths, located on a 38-mile-wide island in the “sleepy ahistorical” republican archipelago that is all that remains of the UK. (To say who narrates part two would constitute a spoiler.) The world is post-catastrophe. The 21st century has unfolded as we all fear it will. The US is now run by rival “warlords”; Nigeria is the hegemonic power. But this is all offstage stuff. As the novel begins, Tom catches various boats to the Bodleian Library, now occupying a Snowdonian peak and accessible by “water-and-gravity-powered funicular”. Here, he trawls the archive of Francis Blundy, a poet of our own time, and allegedly the equal of Seamus Heaney (whose papers at the National Library of Ireland must now be soggy beyond use).”

2 The Safe Keep by Yael van der Wouden (Penguin, $26) 

Chef’s kiss historical fiction.

3 Strange Pictures by Uketsu (Pushkin Press, $37)

The latest crime sensation from Japan.

4 Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy (Hamish Hamilton, $40)

Roy’s memoir of her complicated relationship with her mother.

5 House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk (Text Publishing, $38)

A new novel from Tokarczuk is a thing to celebrate! This latest sounds like it’s for fans of Flights, and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Here’s the blurb: “A woman settles in a remote Polish village. It has few inhabitants, now, but it teems with the stories of its living and its dead. There’s the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There’s the man whose death-with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech-was an international incident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history but a cosmology.”

6 Impossible Fortune: Thursday Murder Club #5 by Richard Osman (Viking Penguin, $38) 

Anyone else put off the books by the Netflix movie?

7 The Predicament by William Boyd (Viking Penguin, $38)

M16, spy stuff. Sounds thrilling.

8 Ghost Cities by Siang Lu (University of Queensland Press, $38) 

“Ghost Cities is as beautiful as it is honest as it is funny as it is silly, absurd and satirical,” writes Tara June Winch in The Guardian. “It also feels true: the Chinese economy is held together by “ghost real estate” – over a fifth of China’s GDP is supported by more than 20m properties that remain empty. The boom of construction in the past two decades has often been a shoddy one; “tofu” bridges connect, and also crumble, from province to province. Ghost Cities may be a biting critique of modern China, but it is a sweeping, populated, devoted and generous story first.”

9 Noho Tahi by Wain Etienne & Ye Jess Eta Al (Rebel Press, $30)

This book is the outcome of the inaugural Chan Family Residency at Wai-te-ata Press. The project is led by 黃義天 Etienne Wain and 葉家琪 Jess Ye, and in collaboration with Lincoln Dam and 張曉軒 Ballerina Chong. “It focuses on ‘peaceful co-existence’ between cultures: an emerging invitation for Hainamana to reorient towards relationships with Tangata Whenua—in ways that honour both Te Tiriti o Waitangi and Hainamanatanga/Chinese ways of being and recognise the complicated histories of Old and New Chinese.”

10 Alchemised by SenLinYu (Michael Joseph, $40)

A fantasy/dystopia with red riding hood/handmaid vibes on the cover.

WELLINGTON

1 Everything but the Medicine: A Doctor’s Tale by Lucy O’Hagan (Massey University Press, $40)

Come on back to The Spinoff this weekend for a review of O’Hagan’s memoir.

2 How to Save Democracy in Aotearoa New Zealand by Sir Geoffrey Palmer (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30)

“It’s [Palmer’s book] equal parts brainy and anxiety-inducing,” writes The Spinoff’s Lyric Waiwiri-Smith, “but Palmer isn’t the sort who lets himself get tied up in existential dread: it’s more productive to write tens of thousands of words about it all. So, how do we fix this mess? According to Palmer, it can be as easy as introducing civics education in schools, as hard as lowering the voting age to 16 or overhauling the entire damn parliamentary system. In a country with legislators who historically haven’t wanted to mess with how our parliament operates, Palmer knows that the latter will be the hardest sell. Although, if we don’t do something soon, Palmer worries it’ll be too late.”

3 What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape, $38)

4 South by South by Charles Ferrall (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $50)

All about New Zealand’s “heroic age” of Antarctic exploration.

5 The Predicament by William Boyd (Viking Penguin, $38)

6 Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy (Hamish Hamilton, $40)

7 Whenua: Māori Pūrākau of Aotearoa by Isobel Te Aho-White (Little Moa, $40)

This year has been a banger for picture books. Te Aho-White’s beautiful collection of pūrākau feels like a classic – a book to be gifted and treasured over and over again.

8 Northbound: Four Seasons of Solitude Walking on Te Araroa by Naomi Arnold (HarperCollins, $40)

In excellent timing, Arnold just this week entered the hallowed halls of The Spinoff Books Confessional.

9 Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton (Canongate, $28)

What it would be like to save the life of a baby hare? What might you learn? This much-acclaimed memoir answers both questions and some.

10 Folk Remedy by Jem Yoshioka (Andrews McMeel Publishing, $40)

A graphic novel starring Maple, an apprentice apothecary.