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.
This week we are publishing Unity Auckland’s bestsellers only, but will resume usual service and include Wellington next week.
AUCKLAND
1 The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38)
Thanks to an epic Auckland Writers Festival in which Chidgey appeared, The Book of Guilt is the first Aotearoa book to hit 1,000 book sales this year (according to NielsenIQ Bookdata).
The Spinoff’s books editor Claire Mabey gave Chidgey’s latest novel a rave: read the review here.
2 Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Wynn-Williams (Pan UK, $40)
New Zealander Wynn-Williams on her time working for Meta.
3 Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape, $26)
Last year’s Booker Prize winner set in space over one day, and the subject of a headline event at the Auckland Writers Festival last weekend.
4 Delirious by Damien Wilkins (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38)
This year’s Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction offered one of the most memorable nights in Ockham New Zealand Book Awards lore: Wilkins arrived only just in time to give his acceptance speech after a day of flight delays and other hi-jinks. Read an interview with Wilkins on The Spinoff, here.
5 You Are Here by David Nicholls (Hachette, $28)
Absolutely charming story of walking and thinking and romance.
6 When the Going Was Good by Graydon Carter (Grove Press, $40)
The memoir of a magazine editor.
7 Is A River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane (Penguin Random House, $65)
Extremely curious to know whether Macfarlane discusses the Whanganui River here in Aotearoa …
8 The Emperor Of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Random House, $38)
Poet and memoirist Ocean Vuong’s long-awaited novel is finally here and has arrived to rave reviews.
“Ocean Vuong’s second novel is a 416‑page tour of the edgeland between aspirational fantasy and self-deception. It opens with a long slow pan over the fictional small town of East Gladness, Connecticut, beginning with ghosts that rise “as mist over the rye across the tracks” and ending on a bridge where the camera finds a young man called Hai –“19, in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light” – preparing to drown himself. There’s an almost lazy richness to the picture: the late afternoon sun, the “moss so lush between the wooden rail ties that, at a certain angle of thick, verdant light, it looks like algae”, the junkyard “packed with school buses in various stages of amnesia”.” Read the rest of The Guardian’s review, here.
9 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia by Phillipe Sands (Weidenfeld & Nicholson $40)
“In 38 Londres Street, Philippe Sands blends personal memoir, historical detective work and gripping courtroom drama to probe a secret double story of mass murder, one that reveals a shocking thread that links the horrors of the 1940s with those of our own times.” Sounds like … a lot.
10 Air by John Boyne (Doubleday UK, $35)
For those who have been following Boyne’s bestselling elements series this is the book that brings them all together.
