This week's biggest-selling New Zealand books, as recorded by the Nielsen BookScan New Zealand bestseller list and described by Steve Braunias
FICTION
1 Bug Week by Airini Beautrais (Victoria University Press, $30)
Number one for the fifth consecutive week - a miracle for a collection of short stories.
2 Auē by Becky Manawatu (Makaro Press, $35)
3 Rangikura by Tayi Tibble (Victoria University Press, $25)
From an interview with the author of the year's most dazzling collection of poems: "I started realising I had another book on my hands during lockdown. I was doing heaps of weird shit during lockdown, and it reminded me of being a teenager, just stuck in my room and not up to much. As a teenager, I had this overwhelming sense of waiting for my real life to start and lockdown reminded me of the intense boredom I used to feel having all this free time but not really feeling free. Waiting is a recurring theme in this book. I was also thinking about the crazy fire in Australia. There was a zoomed-out photo of earth and Australia was being burnt off the map and that really freaked me out and got into my psyche and got into the book. I was thinking a lot about climate change when writing this book. I felt like we were so focussed on climate change in 2019 but then everyone sort of forgot about it when the pandemic started, and it gave me productive anxiety."
4 Loop Tracks by Sue Orr (Victoria University Press, $35)
From a review by Paddy Richardson, at good old ReadingRoom: "It's a novel rich in reflection and debate over issues such as addiction, ageing, autism, abortion and euthanasia; should men have a say over abortion; should the government control how we should end our lives? Should we trust logic or emotions?...Loop Tracks is a remarkable novel, beautifully and sensitively written."
5 Cousins by Patricia Grace (Penguin Random House, $26)
6 Inside the Black Horse by Ray Berard (David Bateman, $34.99)
7 Back to You by Tammy Robinson (Hachette, $29.99)
8 Quiet in Her Bones by Nalini Singh (Hachette, $34.99)
9 Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly (Victoria University Press, $35)
Last year VUP published an online excerpt from the manuscript of Reilly's novel, signalling a work of comic brilliance: "I’m walking through the aisles of the university library, running my hands over the spines of all the books, because I’m so happy. I think maybe I hate the university as an institution and question my involvement with it as both a staff member and a student, but nothing matters when I’m on the fifth floor of the library, touching all the books and looking out at the harbour and the islands in the Hauraki Gulf. I like looking in the backs of the books and seeing how long they’ve been sitting on these shelves for, sometimes fifty years. Everything that’s happened in the world in the last fifty years, and these books were right here. Except maybe a few sojourns to someone’s flat somewhere, someone’s holiday to the Motueka Top 10 Holiday Park where they didn’t even read the book because they were, like, too busy kayaking on Tasman Bay or whatever. The reason why I’m so happy is because I’m in love. I think about whispering this to a copy of Anton Chekhov, the voice of twilight Russia but I don’t want to embarrass myself. I’m in love with a fellow English tutor. I only refer to her as my co-worker, so that my feelings remain a mystery…."
10 Blood on Vines by Madeleine Eskedahl (Squabbling Sparrows Press, $34.95)
NON-FICTION
1 Aroha by Hinemoa Elder (Penguin Random House, $30)
2 Supergood by Chelsea Winter (Penguin Random House, $50)
3 Tikanga by Francis Tipene & Kaiora Tipene (HarperCollins, $39.99)
Publisher's blurbology: "Following on from their bestseller, Life as a Casketeer, Francis and Kaiora Tipene share how they bring the traditional values of tikanga Māori into day-to-day living, what they know about whanau, mahi and manaakitanga, and how they live a life rich with the concepts of te ao Maori."
4 A Clear Dawn by Paula Morris & Alison Wong (Auckland University Press, $49.99)
Fantastic anthology featrurng work by established and emerging Asian New Zealand writers, including three terrific short stories – by Emma Sidnam, Wai Ho, and Mikee Sto Domingo – which will appear soon at ReadingRoom. The introduction pays tribute to "Asian New Zealand authors who have achieved prominence or forged new paths", such as Gu Cheng and Yang Lian, who were visiting scholars at the University of Auckland during the Tiananmen Square protests, and Stephen Chan, described as an "influential publisher and political radical in 1970s Auckland". They quote from a poem he wrote, published in Landfall in 1975:
watch how the Chinese walk
out of kung fu movies
every six foot 200 pound pakeha
keeps respectful distance
5 The Forager's Treasury by Johanna Knox (Allen & Unwin, $45)
6 Mental Fitness by Paul Wood (HarperCollins, $36.99)
Self-helper, which promises to: increase your mental fitness, just as you would increase your physical fitness; experience the right level of stress; and cope effectively for longer before you get fatigued.
7 From the Centre by Patricia Grace (Penguin Random House, $40)
From a superb profile of the writer by Noelle McCarthy: "Patricia Grace is of Ngāti Toa descent, with equal connections to Ngāti Raukawa and Te Āti Awa. She says in her memoir From the Centre that she based the landscape of her classic 1986 novel Pōtiki, about the attempt to force a Māori community to sell their land, on this place. Passing the carved red and white sign for the Marae, watching the tar seal run out and the road turn to gravel up ahead, the sense of being in a story is dizzying here in Hongoeka, the last remnant of three Ngāti Toa reserves still in Ngāti Toa hands."
8 The Mirror Book by Charlotte Grimshaw (Penguin Random House, $38)
In a spectacular year for non-fiction, Grimshaw's family memoir remains the most artful, the most compelling, the most challenging: is it true, is it accurate, is it fair? Certainly it's a brilliant piece of writing.
9 Matariki by Rangi Matamua (Huia Publishers, $35)
A 2017 classic of Māori astronomy.
10 To Be Fair by Rosemary Riddell (Upstart Press, $39.99)
