The top 10 sales lists recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.
AUCKLAND
1 London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe (Picador, $40)
Once you’ve read this you could move onto the podcast Wind of Change, in which PRK investigates the rumour that the Scorpions song of the same name was in fact written by the CIA.
2 The Valley: Crime and Punishment in a New Zealand City by Asher Emanuel (Bridget Williams Books, $40)
PSA for Ōtautahi residents! Make sure you get your tickets to see Emanuel with Rebecca Macfie on September 6 at WORD Christchurch.
3 Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout (Viking Penguin, $38)
Longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize!
4 Facing Up to Our Future edited by Peter Davis (Dunmore Press, $35)
Pre-election reading.
5 Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump by Maggie Haberman & Jonathan Swan (Simon & Schuster, $43)
Pre-midterms reading.
6 Cool Machine #3 The Harlem Trilogy by Colson Whitehead (Fleet, $38)
“1981. New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Reagan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, successful business owner/master fence Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furniture’s Dealer of the Month. When the banks won’t give his beloved wife, Elizabeth, a loan for her new travel agency, however, Carney gambles on one last heist, and finds himself entangled with a legendary criminal mastermind.
1983. To some, Carney’s friend and partner in crime Pepper is a stone-cold sociopath. To others, a top thief with questionable people skills. Either way, he’s feeling his age in his troubled gut and his aching bones. When he takes on a bodyguard gig as a favor to Elizabeth, he’s plunged into the alien territory of the East Village art and club scene. Luckily for him, whether you’re uptown or down, everyone speaks the same language of violence – Pepper is a native speaker.
1986. Carney has always been haunted by his inability to save his cousin Freddie. Now, twenty years after Freddie’s death, he has a chance to rescue Freddie’s son from the violent forces of the city. But coming out of retirement and teaming up with Pepper again will mean risking the safety and security he’s spent decades building for his family, with only one shot to get it right.”
7 Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke (Fourth Estate, $37)
Rambly tradwifery.
8 Transcription by Ben Lerner (Granta, $33)
From Sukhdev Sandhu’s insightful review: “Transcription, for all its riffs on the limits of historiography or of cochlear listening, its invocation of Kafka, its bracing intelligence is at its most gripping when it addresses a seemingly simple issue: how to get a teenage girl to eat. Max’s account of trying to understand why his daughter has FTT (Failure to Thrive) reads like a horror story, a Covid-era variant of the environmental illness suffered by Julianne Moore’s character in the Todd Haynes film Safe. He and his wife lunge for answers: ‘to see your child starve herself, to see her – this is how it felt – refuse life, the life you have offered: is it because the life on offer is a lie?'”
9 Whistler by Ann Patchett (Bloomsbury, $39)
One of the more polarising of Patchett’s novels.
10 Sophie, Standing There by Meg Mason (Fourth Estate, $33)
“Parasocial relationships are at the heart of Mason’s absorbing new novel Sophie, Standing There: a gentle, intimate portrait of a kind, stoic and heartbroken person who becomes obsessed with a famous writer. For all its simplicity – a deliberate choice for Mason, who doesn’t want her readers to have to do more work than is necessary – Sophie’s story is a layered exploration of life’s most profound relationships both real and imagined.” Read the rest of The Spinoff’s Claire Mabey’s review, right here.
WELLINGTON
1 The Odyssey by Homer, Emily Wilson translation (W W Norton, $36)
Wilson did not have a good time in Nolan’s The Odyssey (unlike The Spinoff’s Alex Casey and Claire Mabey who thought they’d hate it but were so wrong).
2 The Valley: Crime and Punishment in a New Zealand City by Asher Emanuel (Bridget Williams Books, $40)
3 Ringside: A Political Memoir by Mike Munro (White Cloud Books, $40)
Go on a deep dive into this book and its author with Toby Manhire’s new podcast At Large, right here.
4 Facing Up to Our Future edited by Peter Davis (Dunmore Press, $35)
5 London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe (Picador, $40)
6 All Her Lives by Ingrid Horrocks (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35)
Brilliant to see this wondrous collection of award-winning short stories back on the charts!
7 Land by Maggie O’Farrell (Headline Press, $38)
Great discussion about Land over on the ABC’s podcast, The Bookshelf.
8 London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe (Picador, $40)
9 Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences by Anton Jäger (Verso Books, $30)
“[Jäger’s] thinking runs as follows (don’t get hung up on the dates, though some, like 1989, are non-negotiable). The years 1914 to 1989 mark the age of mass politics, when politicisation was high and institutionalisation was also high – so people engaged with politics electorally and on the streets. They were joiners – of political parties, unions, congregations, working men’s clubs, reading groups; they participated in multiple interlacing institutions. Not by coincidence, this was also a time when political struggle resulted in concrete gains. Then, 1989 to the financial crash in 2008 (the years often called the “long 90s”) was the age of post-politics, when institutionalisation was low (we emphatically did not join clubs then, we went to clubs), and politicisation was through the floor. It was a time when technocrats took care of business while everyone else went to a rave, and we said history was over. From the crash through to about 2020 (sometimes earlier, this boundary is the most fluid) was the age of anti-politics – a resurgent Tea Party in the US, Beppe Grillo and anti-establishment protests in Italy, the Arab spring, the Occupy movement. Politicisation in this period came back with a vengeance, and even while institutionalisation hasn’t recovered, these movements still have institutional ambitions. Protest movements in Spain and Greece bore political parties, Podemos and Syriza; protest candidates in the US, France and the UK, had their eyes on retaking traditional parties from which the revolutionary intent had long been stripped away. Hyperpolitics is what came next: intense politicisation, with neither institutional roots nor ambitions.” Read the rest of Zoe Williams’ article in The Guardian, here.
10 Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (Scribe, $38)
Beautiful but comes with a warning: will cause the reader to grow increasingly ravenous.
