The week’s best selling books at the Unity stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.
AUCKLAND UNITY
1 A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey (Macmillan, $38)
From the office of the President, tweet 1: “James Comey is a proven LEAKER & LIAR. Virtually everyone in Washington thought he should be fired for the terrible job he did-until he was, in fact, fired. He leaked CLASSIFIED information, for which he should be prosecuted. He lied to Congress under OATH. He is a weak and……” Tweet 2: ” …untruthful slime ball who was, as time has proven, a terrible Director of the FBI. His handling of the Crooked Hillary Clinton case, and the events surrounding it, will go down as one of the worst ‘botch jobs’ of history. It was my great honor to fire James Comey!”
2 Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (HarperCollins, $25)
Smash-hit debut novel from a Scottish writer who has become an overnight sensation at the age of 40something. Her editor at HarperCollins, Martha Ashby, told the Guardian about sitting down to read the unsolicited manuscript: “I went into a side office and started reading it on my Kindle and it was one of those books that you could just immediately tell was really special.” Her colleagues shared her enthusiasm – as did seven other publishers who joined a hastily convened auction, which soared to six figures in four rounds of bidding. The book is to be made into a film produced by Reese Witherspoon.
3 Stories for Boys Who Dare to be Different by Ben Brooks (Hachette, $40)
Bedtime stories.
4 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (Vintage, $30)
Popular science.
5 A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (Windmill Books, $26)
Popular trash.
6 Mazarine by Charlotte Grimshaw (Penguin Random House, $38)
“Masterful….By flinging her Auckland characters onto the world stage, she forces them into confrontation with our current preoccupations: tyrants around the dinner table and in parliament, fake news inside our heads and out – trying to figure out who we should be in a world where truth and reality seem less certain than ever before”: Charlotte Graham-McLay, The Spinoff Review of Books.
7 The Power by Naomi Alderman (Penguin Random House, $26)
Popular vision of a future where women have the power to shoot bolts of lightning.
8 Pamper Me to Hell & Back by Hera Lindsay Bird (Smith|Doorstop Books, $17)
Limited edition chapbook by a popular Wellington poet.
9 The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell (Profile Books, $35)
Popular memoir by the owner of Scotland’s largest second-hand bookstore.
10 Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari (Bloomsbury, $30)
Hari’s next project is a biography of Noam Chomsky.
WELLINGTON UNITY
1 Realising The Potential For Driverless Vehicles: Recommendations for Law Reform by Michael Cameron (NZ Law Foundation, $25)
Law Foundation blurbology: “This report explains the history and likely near future of driverless technology, analyses the issues and provides a suggested blueprint for the immediate reforms that are required.”
2 No One Home: A Boyhood Memoir in Letters & Poems by Keith Westwater (Makaro Press, $25)
By a Lower Hutt poet.
3 Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, & Leadership by James Comey (MacMillan, $38)
4 Temptation of Forgiveness by Donna Leon (William Heinemann, $35)
A Guido Brunetti mystery.
5 Greeks Bearing Gifts by Philip Kerr (Quercus, $38)
A Bernie Gunther thriller.
6 Slow Art of Fast Running by David McGuinness (David McGuinness, $30)
A fat dad loses weight.
7 Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (HarperCollins, $25)
8 Go Girl: A Storybook of Epic New Zealand Women by Barbara Else (Puffin, $45)
Bedtime stories.
9 The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson (Macmillan, $35)
Advice.
10 Song for Rosaleen by Pip Desmond (Massey University Press, $30)
Dementia memoir.
The Spinoff Review of Books is proudly brought to you by Unity Books.