The Unity Books bestseller chart for the week ending June 6

The Spinoff

06-06-2025

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)
From Oprah to Colbert, Insta reels to #booktok, former prime minister Jacinda Ardern has joined the ranks of hard-working celebrity memoirist who must engage in a hefty and relentless media campaign to shift that stock. Ardern's book and its message of kindness as a governing value for politics is a timely amulet for global market in a fraught political environment: publishers have banked on the fact that readers will snatch up her story to wave in the face of rising fascism, inequality and xenophobia.
But what does the memoir genre really offer a former politician? The best memoirs are exposing, probing, and lend their readers a way to interrogate their own life decisions through the lens of another. The Spinoff's editor Mad Chapman reviewed A Different Kind of Power and addressed the tightrope that Ardern's attempt was always going to have to tread: 'I figured A Different Kind of Power would either veer political and therefore be cloaked in Ardern's usual restraint as a prime minister or it would veer celebrity and reveal the full emotion and drama behind the politician while conveniently brushing over policy and legacy,' wrote Chapman. 'Somehow it did neither.'
2 Air by John Boyne (Doubleday, $35)
The final in Boyne's bestselling elements quartet.
3 Delirious by Damien Wilkins (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38)
The 2025 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction winner. Wilkins' novel is the story of Mary and Pete, their great loves, their great losses. Beautiful, funny, and somehow both complex and refreshing like a walk through the New Zealand bush.
4 Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape, $26)
The poetic Booker Prize winner of 2024.
5 James by Percival Everett (Picador, $38)
'With James, Everett goes back to Twain's novel on a rescue mission to restore Jim's humanity. He reconceives the novel and its world, trying to reconcile the characters and the plot with what now seems obvious to us about the institution of slavery. The result is funny, entertaining and deeply thought-provoking – part critique and part celebration of the original.' Read more of Marcel Theroux's review of James on The Guardian, here.
6 Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art by Deidre Brown & Ngarino Ellis with Jonathan Mane-Wheoki (Auckland University Press, $100)
The winner of the illustrated nonfiction category in this year's Ockhams and a major publication for Aotearoa for a long time to come.
7 Butter by Asako Yuzuki (Fourth Estate, $35)
Hugely popular novel that is, curiously, not particularly popular in Yuzuki's home country of Japan.
8 Murriyang: Song of Time by Stan Grant (Simon and Schuster, $47)
Here's the publisher's blurb for beloved Australian journalist and broadcaster, Stan Grant's latest book: 'Murriyang, in part Grant's response to the Voice referendum, eschews politics for love. In this gorgeous, grace-filled book, he zooms out to reflect on the biggest questions, ranging across the history, literature, theology, music and art that has shaped him. Setting aside anger for kindness, he reaches past the secular to the sacred and transcendent.
Informed by spiritual thinkers from around the world, Murriyang is a Wiradjuri prayer in one long uninterrupted breath, challenging Western notions of linear time in favour of a time beyond time – the Dreaming.
Murriyang is also very personal, each meditation interleaved with a memory of Grant's father, a Wiradjuri cultural leader. It asks how any of us can say goodbye to those we love.'
9 The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Random House, $38)
Here's a lively snippet from Andrea Long Chu's review of Vuong's second novel:
'It is a sweet, charming, conventional novel whose ambition does not outstrip its ability. The young Hai is a suicidal college dropout stuck in the economically depressed but whimsically named town of East Gladness, Connecticut. 'If you aim for Gladness and miss, you'll find us,' the narrator says before directing our attention to Hai, who is about to jump off a bridge. But before he takes the plunge, the boy is flagged down by Grazina, a zany Lithuanian immigrant with dementia. Still unable to face his mother, who believes he is off at medical school, Hai moves in with Grazina, effectively becoming her live-in nurse, and seeks employment at the local HomeMarket (a thinly disguised Boston Market). Hai's co-workers are quirky, Wes Anderson–esque eccentrics who prove just as batty as Grazina: the manager, an amateur pro wrestler; the cashier, a Hollow Earther; Hai's cousin Sony, an autistic Civil War buff in denial about his father's death. Yet the delusions of others, instead of isolating Hai, end up pulling him out of his grief and into a provisional world of shared experience that, at least for a while, makes life worth living.
What a pleasure to be given characters and a plot!'
10 The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38)
Sinister and magnificent. Catherine Chidgey's latest novel is an absorbing, gripping alternate history. Read The Spinoff's review, right here.
WELLINGTON
1 A Different Kind Of Power by Jacinda Ardern (Penguin Random House, $60)
2 The Midnight Plane: New and Selected Poems by Dame Fiona Kidman (Otago University Press, $40)
A gorgeous new collection of Kidman's poetry beautifully published in hardback and with an arresting cover image taken from the documentary about Kidman that premiered last year and was reviewed by The Spinoff, here.
3 The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38)
4 Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic, $30)
Haymitch's time to shine in The Hunger Games.
5 Delirious by Damien Wilkins (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38)
6 James by Percival Everett (Picador, $38)
7 Māori Made Easy: Workbook Kete 1 by Scotty Morrison (Penguin, $25)
The indomitable Scotty Morrison is back with another brilliant aid for learning te reo Māori.
8 Abundance by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson (Profile Books, $55)
Klein and Thompson's highly anticipated roadmap for fixing housing, healthcare, infrastructure and innovation.
9 Slowing the Sun | Essays by Nadine Hura (Bridget Williams Books, $40)
A stunning series of essays. Here's the publisher's blurb: 'Overwhelmed by the complexity of climate change, Nadine­ Hura sets out to find a language that connects more­ deeply with the environmental crisis. But what begins as a journalistic quest to understand the science takes an abrupt and introspective turn following the death of her brother.
In the midst of grief, Hura works through science, pūrākau, poetry and back again. Seeking to understand climate change in relation to whenua and people, she asks: how should we respond to what has been lost? Her many-sided essays explore environmental degradation, social disconnection and Indigenous reclamation, insisting that any meaningful response must be grounded in Te Tiriti and anti-colonialism.
Slowing the Sun is a karanga to those who have passed on, as well as to the living, to hold on to ancestral knowledge for future generations.'
10 Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane (Penguin, $65)
Wonderful to see that Aotearoa poet Hana Pera Aoake wrote about rivers from a te ao Māori perspective for The Serpentine gallery in London. Widely beloved nature writer Macfarlane comes at rivers from a very different perspective in this latest, already bestselling book.