Top 10 bestselling books: June 7
1. (1) The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
Heading all the local charts for the third week running is Catherine Chidgey's latest novel, which tells the mysterious, ominous story of three boys in an alternative 1970s Britain.
It's a 'tense, 'There is the hint of submerged identity; of aspiration and prosperity, rubbing skins with disappointment and neglect; a preoccupation with what is authentic and what is fraudulent; the self and truth only dimly visible … Calling on the deeply rooted psychological power of the storytelling rule of three, the novel is divided into The Book of Dreams, The Book of Knowledge and The Book of Guilt. Three women, Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night, care for a set of 13-year-old triplets in an all-boy's orphanage. There are three main narrative perspectives: Vincent, one of the triplets; the Minister of Loneliness, a government minister in charge of national care institutions known as the Sycamore Homes; and Nancy, a young girl kept in seclusion by fastidious older parents. This attention to pattern also coolly embodies the quest for order and control, the troubling obsession at the core of the fictional investigation.'
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Newsroom
23-07-2025
- Newsroom
Book of the Week: How to kill everyone in Scotland
It just so happens that the two best New Zealand novels of the year so far are both set in Britain, with Cambridge writer Catherine Chidgey imagining sinister goings-on in a village in England in her novel The Book of Guilt, and now Dunedin writer Liam McIlvanney happily killing off characters in a pretty seaside town in Scotland in his very, very good crime thriller, The Good Father. I suppose the accumulated bodycount in Chidgey's book is greater than in McIlvanney's novel but she sets her novel over 40 years, giving her a long time to send her characters to their deaths, and The Good Father is restricted to seven years. Even so, he gives it a good lash. You want murders, you've come to the right place. McIlvanney is chair of Scottish studies at the University of Otago. Right now he is on a book tour of Scotland, celebrating the very welcome news last week that The Good Father will be made into a TV drama series in Britain. Aye, I'll be wanting to watch that. I may already know how the story develops and what happens in the bloody end but I'll want to see the ways actors take on their roles—particularly Rory, a little boy who goes missing—and I'll really want to see what the town looks like. The book is set in Fairlie. Not our Fairlie, in the Mackenzie Basin of the South Island, which I am guessing is named after Fairlie in Scotland. It's got a beach. It's got peculiar houses lining the shore. McIlvanney describes it with a kind of atmospheric dread in The Good Father. It's a book of two halves. Almost nothing happens in the first half which is to say a family is left with nothing after their son, Rory, goes missing. There are very few clues. There are even fewer suspects. The story is narrated by Rory's dad, Gordon, an English professor. He and his wife Sarah are shattered and helpless and inert. 'People talk of grief as a numbness. With me it was more like vertigo. I felt permanently dizzy…Who took him? Where has he gone? Is he safe? Is he still alive? The questions wheeled like vultures in the sun.' Grief is like a sickness, and McIlvanney leans close towards the suffering. He writes of Rory's disappearance without sentiment, and it's heartbreaking. I suppose it makes sense that Gordon, because of his academic profession, would connect with great literature as he tries to make sense of Rory being there one minute and spirited away the next. 'Of all things, I thought about 'The Purloined Letter', Poe's short story where the massed ranks of the gendarme dismantle the minister's Paris apartment, searching for the stolen letter…Maybe, I thought, the police haven't exhausted every angle, chased down every lead.' That was fair, and I also accepted Gordon telling his university class, 'The challenge, then, for crime writers is to represent the gravity – in both senses of the word – of murder. The seriousness. The weight. What it really means to kill someone.' But McIlvanney doesn't leave it at that, and things get kind of meta as he expands on the tricks and methods of crime fiction. The Good Father is about the story of a missing boy. You want the tension and awfulness of the situation as it unfolds in Fairlie; you don't want the author intruding, and getting in the way. You want to read about Fairlie. 'White triangles of sail on the darkening firth.' McIlvanney is so good at place; the setting is visible, you can feel it and smell it. His dialogue is sharp and well-formed, and he's alert to patterns of speech. 'Hell mend him,' says one character; another describes a hard drinker, 'He was putting it away like a man with three arms.' There's a visit to Aberdeen and a visit to a town in Cork. But the plot doesn't actually thicken; McIlvanney keeps a tight rein on things, never overplays his hand. There is no body, and a strong possibility that Rory was abducted, but his continued absence means the plot keeps thinning out, leaves Gordon and Sarah empty-handed, chasing shadows and phantoms. All of Part 1 of The Good Father is expertly told. Part 2 is where the violence finally erupts. Something amazing happens, and things get even worse. The book takes on a darker tone and Gordon faces a stern moral test. He fails that test. There are four deaths. The first two are a misfortune but the others are more like a carelessness. Crime fiction depends on a final hurdle, and I'm not sure whether The Good Father takes it in its stride or crashes into it. McIlvanney seems to share the same credo as Eleanor Catton, when she approached the final hurdle of her novel Birnam Wood: kill everyone in sight. Still, the deaths are efficient, and skilful, especially the last murder: 'The knife slithered crisply through the meat of him. The hilt clipped a rib…His mouth yawed open; blood poured brilliantly out.' The victim died 'like a dog'. I'd feel sorry for a dog. I didn't feel much for this guy but neither did I obtain any kind of satisfaction from his death. Things had gone too far. McIlvanney is adept at killing the most precious thing in our lives—hope—but perhaps got a bit too enthusiastic at the prospect of an all-out slaughter. It gave improbability to The Good Father. It's one thing to build the tension but it's another challenge to release it. But the heart of the novel beats strong and clear. 'You think that families are held together by love,' Gordon tells us. 'That's not true. They're held together by secrets.' There is actually a fifth death in The Good Father. It's not a violent death. It takes place almost at the edges of this very good read, with its captivating scenery of Fairlie and its little note to the author's adopted country (New Zealand is pointed out on a globe as a 'long, slim country, italic-shaped'). It sends a message: good riddance to bad fathers. The Good Father by Liam McIlvanney (Zaffre, $36.99) is available in bookstores nationwide
The Spinoff
11-07-2025
- The Spinoff
The Unity Books bestseller chart for the week ending July 11
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. AUCKLAND 1 A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern (Penguin Random House, $60) Still going strong. 2 Abundance: How We Build a Better Future by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (Profile, $40) If books could rule the world. 3 There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak (Penguin Random House, $26) A moving, generous intergenerational novel that shows how water connects us. 4 Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Vintage, $26) The kind of novel you can read in one day and then think about for months. 5 Butter by Asako Yuzuki (Fourth Estate, $35) Could make some comparisons to a certain mushroom trial over the ditch but it might be too soon. 6 No Words for This by Ali Mau (HarperCollins, $40) The Spinoff's Alex Casey and Claire Mabey had a lot of thoughts and feelings about this memoir. 7 Eurotrash by Christian Kracht (Serpent's Tail, $30) The road trip novel that's really about intergenerational trauma. 8 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (Vintage, $24) The predecessor to number nine on the Wellington list. 9 The Safe Keep by Yael van der Wouden (Penguin, $26) One of life's perfect novels. 10 The River is Waiting by Wally Lamb (Simon & Schuster, $40) A new father, freshly addicted, struggles with his relationships. WELLINGTON 1 A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern (Penguin, $60) 2 Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Vintage, $26) 3 James by Percival Everett (Picador, $38) Terrific novel that Taika Waititi just might be getting his fingers into for the film adaptation. 4 Delirious by Damien Wilkins (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) Another terrific novel that would make a beautiful film, also. 5 The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) 6 Pūkeko Who-Keko by Toby Morris (Puffin, $21) Dad jokes for the win! A terrific and terrifically fun new picture book by beloved Toby Morris who has taken the humble Pūkeko and given him a witty, adventurous book that will delight all ages. The genius is that the question and answer format makes a read aloud experience interactive and funny while also helping children (and adults) stretch their vocabulary and think inventively about language. Bravo! 7 A Voice for the Silenced by Harry Walker ($35) Harry Walker gave a fascinating interview over on RNZ's Saturday morning show about this book which gives voice to people in prisons. 8 M ātauranga Māori by Hirini Moko Mead (Huia, $45) If you're unaware of Professor Mead's work, here's a bit about him: Distinguished Professor Tā Hirini Moko Mead Mead (Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāi Tūhoe, Ngāti Manawa and Tūhourangi) is the author of over seventy books, papers and articles. He was foundation professor of Māori Studies at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington and was an inspired founder of Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi in Whakatāne. A scholar of Māori language and culture, Tā Hirini was made a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2006 and received a knighthood in 2009 for his services to Māori and to education. 9 The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Jonathan Cape, $38) In the Times Literary Supplement, Claire Lowdon writes: 'The Emperor of Gladness shares much with its predecessor [On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous]. The protagonist, Hai, is the gay Vietnamese American son of a refugee mother who works in a nail salon. He has fond memories of a schizophrenic grandmother. Once again, he is a teenager – just. 'He was nineteen, in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light.' In both books, the opioid crisis haunts the narrative and claims the life of a young man beloved of the protagonist. Above all, the two novels have a common poetic telos: to discover beauty in lives lived on the margins of society. 'My dream was to write a novel that held everything I loved', says Hai, 'including unlovable things. Like a little cabinet.'' A post-apocalyptic tale of women and friendship. The Spinoff Books section is proudly brought to you by Unity Books and Creative New Zealand. Visit Unity Books online today.
Newsroom
06-07-2025
- Newsroom
The Sunday Poem, by Brian Turner
Note from ReadingRoom literary editor Steve Braunias: Victor Billot is taking a leave of absence from his Sunday Ode to pursue his political destiny at the local body elections. In his place, for the next three months, ReadingRoom invites new and established poems to email their work for consideration to stephen11@ Brian Turner begins the series with an epic poem. New Zealanders, a Definition Born here, buggered it up Taken with kind permission from Brian Turner: Selected Poems (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35), available in bookstores nationwide.
