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 The Last Guests by J.P. Pomare (Hachette, $34.99)
A ReadingRoom review of the new thriller by New Zealand's best crime novelist is due from a writer whose beautifully formed sentences and sense of rage used to at once incense, flummox, and impress the hell out of me when I first started reading him on Russell Brown's Public Address blog: the one and only Craig Ranapia.
2 The Author's Cut by Owen Marshall (Penguin Random House, $36)
A ReadingRoom review of the film based on the opening short story of the Timaru author's new collection is due from the best film critic ever published in these islands: Philip Matthews.
3 The Leaning Man by Anne Harre (The Cuba Press, $37)
Publisher's blurbology: "Wellington. It’s Saturday night down on the wharf. Celebrations are in full swing for the Westons’ fortieth wedding anniversary. Their daughter Stella has returned from London to attend…Her best friend Teri is found dead in a lane in the central city. It looks like suicide, but Stella won’t believe it. She’s not above taking big risks to find the truth about her friend and the shady world she appears to have been dragged into."
4 Auē by Becky Manawatu (Makaro Press, $35)
The author wrote a kind of half-term report on her Burns Fellowship at Otago University for ReadingRoom this week, and reported, "For the last two, maybe three weeks, I haven’t progressed on the novel I am using the fellowship to write. We went to Westport for the school holidays and there was a flood while we were there. It’s a terrible situation in Westport. So many people displaced in a town already struggling under a housing shortage. There are people who had no insurance and lost everything. A few days before coming back to Dunedin I walked my dog along Derby Street and looked at all the red and yellow stickers on the houses. I saw an old woman moving slowly about inside one house with a yellow sticker on it. My friend had told me that he was volunteering, and he arrived at a house that was flooded, and two elderly people were sitting in chairs aggressively smoking cigarettes. Their hands were trembling, and they said: the phones are still out, the phones are still not working. They probably didn’t have cell phones."
5 Last Guard: Book 5 by Nalini Singh (Hachette, $34.99)
Review on GoodReads of the Auckland author's latest paranormal romance: "Throughout my sixteen years of reading this series the thing that blows me away the most is how Nalini Singh can continuously expand this world and our understanding of it."
6 Bug Week by Airini Beautrais (Victoria University Press, $30)
From her incredible short story "Psycho Ex", included in the author's award-winning collection of short stories: "A light’s on in your lounge, and there’s her head, in the big picture window. She’s on the couch, reading or something. Checking her Twitter. No face visible, just her golden head. Your golden girl. You married her after about five minutes, but it still makes perfect sense to me, that she was the one you’d been looking for all along. She’s naturally blonde with enormous boobs. I have no boobs, like literally an AA cup. It’s useful for running – I don’t even really need a bra. I just wear one because I feel like that’s what one ought to do. No boobs, and I always hoped you were an arse man, because my arse is alright, running is good for the gluteus, but I always knew deep down you were a boob man. When we were fucking I used to imagine myself as someone else, a big-boobed woman. Probably younger than I am, with fantastic melons that had sprouted out of my chest and not yet felt the effects of gravity. The way they’d bounce. The way they’d fly, wildly, as you hammered me like crazy from behind. The way they’d rock as I rode you. Whenever I came, I came to myself. I hadn’t been me, and then I was again. It was like you had never actually fucked me."
7 Meeting Rita by Jenny Powell (Cold Hub Press, $27.50)
47 poems inspired by good old Rita Angus.
8 Loop Tracks by Sue Orr (Victoria University Press, $35)
"A remarkable novel, beautifully and sensitively written, which demonstrates how the secrecy of the past may so unfairly encroach on the present": from a review by Paddy Richardson at ReadingRoom.
9 The Telling Time by P. J. McKay (Polako Press, $34.95)
"P.J. McKay’s debut novel opens in 1958, in a sardine factory in Yugoslavia – a scene so confident and immersive that U.K. author Sebastian Faulks selected The Telling Time as the winner of this year’s international First Pages Prize": from a rave review by Rosetta Allan, at the Academy of New Zealand Literature.
10 Cousins by Patricia Grace (Penguin Random House, $26)
1992 novel, reprinted to coincide with the film of the book.
NON-FICTION
1 She is Not Your Rehab by Matt Brown (Penguin Random House, $35)
There's really nothing much to say about any of the titles in the non-fiction chart this week, but that provides an excellent opportunity to declare that the winner of the Elsie Locke Award for Non-Fiction, announced on Tuesday night at the 2021 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults, was Egg and Spoon: An Illustrated Cookbook (Gecko Press, $40), written by Alexandra Tylee and illustrated by Giselle Clarkson. I love everything Giselle draws. A page from the book, as below:
2 Steve Hansen: The Legacy by Gregor Paul (HarperCollins, $49.99)
3 Aroha by Hinemoa Elder (Penguin Random House, $30)
4 138 Dates by Rebekah Campbell (Allen & Unwin, $32.99)
5 The Abundant Garden by Niva Kay & Yotam Kay (Allen & Unwin, $45)
6 Eat Well for Less New Zealand by Michael Van de Elzen & Ganesh Raj (Penguin Random House, $35)
7 The Forager's Treasury by Johanna Knox (Allen & Unwin, $45)
8 Tikanga by Francis Tipene & Kaiora Tipene (HarperCollins, $39.99)
9 Vegful by Nadia Lim (Nude Food, $55)
10 Supergood by Chelsea Winter (Penguin Random House, $50)
