The Unity Books bestseller chart for the week ending May 23
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.
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.
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.
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.
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1News
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Country music resurges as Gold Guitars strikes golden milestone
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The Spinoff
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The Unity Books bestseller chart for the week ending May 30
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 Air by John Boyne (Doubleday, $35) The conclusion to Boyne's four-part Elements Series and so far, so good over on Good Reads where 2402 ratings give it an average of 4.47 stars. 2 Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape, $26) Last year's Booker Prize winner. This year's Booker longlist is due on 29 July. 3 Delirious by Damien Wilkins (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) The 2025 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction winner! My heart is still pumping after that hair-raising ceremony in which Wilkins was delayed until the very last moment when he literally ran onto the stage to make his acceptance speech. Read a day-after-the-night-before interview with Wilkins right here on The Spinoff. 4 Is A River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane (Penguin Random House, $65) The people love Macfarlane and his nature writing. 5 M urriyang: Song of Time by Stan Grant (Simon and Schuster, $47) Remember when Stan Grant took the stage at Auckland Writers Festival's gala night and was simply outstanding? Grant is an indigenous Australian writer and journalist and an astonishing, moving storyteller. 6 1985 by Dominic Hoey (Penguin, $38) 'Reading it was just like being back in Auckland, growing up on the streets of Grey Lynn and hoping you might be able to scab some money off your mates and hit up the 562 Takeaway (made famous by appearing on the cover of Hoey's poetry collection 'I Thought We'd Be Famous'). OK, yeah, Hoey and I grew up in Auckland a few decades apart, but reading this felt like looking back on a childhood diary that myself or any one of my friends could have written.' Read more of The Spinoff's Lyric Waiwiri-Smith and Claire Mabey's thoughts on this propulsive new novel, here. 7 James by Percival Everett (Picador, $38) One of the bestselling books of 2024 looks to do the same this 2025. 8 Girl On Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Woman Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert (John Murray, $40) Here's the publisher's explanation: 'What happened to feminism in the twenty-first century? This question feels increasingly urgent in a moment of cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement's power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress. Sophie Gilbert identifies an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the energy of third-wave and 'riot grrrl' feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. Mining the darker side of nostalgia, Gilbert trains her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era, across music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more. What she recounts is harrowing, from the leering gaze of the paparazzi to the gleeful cruelty of early reality TV and a burgeoning internet culture vicious toward women in the spotlight and damaging for those who weren't. Gilbert tracks many of the period's dominant themes back to the rise of internet porn, which gained widespread influence as it began to pervade our collective consciousness. The result is a devastating portrait of a time when a distinctly American blend of excess, materialism, and power worship collided with the culture's reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic currents. Amid a collective reconsideration of the way women are treated in public, Girl on Girl is a blistering indictment of the matrix of misogyny that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century, and continues to shape our world today.' 9 Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art by Deidre Brown & Ngarino Ellis with Jonathan Mane-Wheoki (Auckland University Press, $100) Winner of the Bookhub Award for Illustrated Nonfiction at this year's Ockham New Zealand Book Awards! Read about how the writers approached this ground-breaking book, here. 10 Slags by Emma Jane Unsworth (HarperCollins, $35) 'On the first morning of their holiday together in a remote part of Scotland, 42-year-old Sarah convinces her younger sister, Juliette, to clamber on to the roof of their mobile home for a better phone signal,' writes Shahidha Bari on The Guardian. 'Juliette has three layers of tinfoil wrapped around her limbs and a tinfoil cone hat plonked on her head before she clocks that she's fallen for a prank. It's a pleasing bit of sibling slapstick in Slags, the new novel from Emma Jane Unsworth about desire, dissatisfaction and the ferocious loyalty of sisters. And sisterhood, as Unsworth writes it here, is an unbreakable connection for which no prank antenna is needed.' WELLINGTON 1 Slowing the Sun | Essays by Nadine Hura (Bridget Williams Books, $40) Spinoff readers may well be familiar with Nadine Hura's insightful essays. This is an outstanding collection, a long time in the making. Here's what the publisher says: '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.' 2 This Compulsion In Us by Tina Makereti (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $40) What a week for Aotearoa books! Tina Makereti's long-awaited collection of nonfiction is exquisite. Read an excerpt from This Compulsion In Us on The Spinoff, here. 3 Delirious by Damien Wilkins (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) 4 The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) The Auckland Writers Festival's bestselling book and the first in New Zealand to reach 1000 sales in 2025 (are you surprised by that number?). It's a stonkingly good tale about an alternate England of the 1970s. Sinister, thought-provoking and gripping. Read books editor Claire Mabey's review right here. 5 Wonderland by Tracy Farr (Cuba Press, $38) Tracy Farr fans rejoice! We've another compelling novel from the author of The Lives and Loves of Lena Gaunt, and The Hope Fault. Here's the blurb for Wonderland: 'Te Motu Kairangi Miramar Peninsula, Wellington 1912. Doctor Matti Loverock spends her days and nights bringing babies into the world, which means her daughters – seven-year-old triplets Ada, Oona and Hanna – have grown up at Wonderland, the once-thriving amusement park owned by their father, Charlie. Then a grieving woman arrives to stay from the other side of the world, in pain and incognito, fleeing scandal. She ignites the triplets' curiosity and brings work for Matti, diverting them all from what is really happening at Wonderland. In a bold reimagining, Marie Curie – famous for her work on radioactivity – comes to Aotearoa and discovers both solace and wonder.' 6 Tackling the Hens by Mary McCallum (Cuba Press, $25) Local hero Mary McCallum's latest poetry book tackles hens … 'Hens can be fun visitors, when they gossip and sunbathe and pop inside for a chat, but they can outstay their welcome and tackling them to send them home isn't easy,' reads the charming blurb. 'They aren't the only creatures in the pages of this book— there's Ursula the golden-eyed cat, a leporine emperor, singing mice and all the swallows! Then there are the people who interact with them: an entomologist in love with the spiders he observes, a builder who releases a trapped mouse, a woman who attracts bees as a flower does—and Mary and the hens, of course.' 7 The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Jonathan Cape, $38) Vuong is unstoppable. This latest work is already a TikTok sensation and massive bestseller. Here's the blurb: 'One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to alter Hai's relationship to himself, his family, and a community at the brink.'
