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 third consecutive week - a miracle for a collection of short stories. I interviewed Beautrais in ReadingRoom this week and asked her if the book was a kind of #metoo text. She replied, “Yes and no. A lot of it was written during the unfolding of #metoo. At the time I was also dealing with some personal trauma. Being an 'elderly millennial' I came of age in one of the troughs of feminism. It was very common for girls to say 'Oh, I'm not a feminist.' I think we were conditioned to make excuses for all kinds of shit behaviour. I remember being taught about STIs but not about intimate partner violence. I hadn't really thought about psychological abuse until a counsellor told me that was what I was describing to him. #Metoo felt like an indicator that things were on the turn and it was no longer mandatory to keep quiet.”
2 Spellbound by Catherine Robertson (Penguin Random House, $36)
3 Auē by Becky Manawatu (Makaro Press, $35)
4 Inside the Black Horse by Ray Berard (David Bateman, $34.99)
5 Both Feet in Paradise by Andy Southall (The Cuba Press, $37)
Blurbology: “After months of researching butterflies in Samoa, Adam is looking forward to returning home to his family. Then his transfer to the airport doesn’t arrive. Worse, a hastily arranged taxi takes him not to departures but an empty field in the middle of nowhere...”
6 Cousins by Patricia Grace (Penguin Random House, $26)
7 Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly (Victoria University Press, $35)
From an interview with the author in the excellent ReadClose site: “ I wrote this book because I didn’t think there were enough books about Māori characters that didn’t have anything to do with gangs or violence, and I didn’t think there were enough books where fashionable things happened in Auckland.”
8 State Highway One by Sam Coley (Hachette, $34.99)
9 Gabriel's Bay by Catherine Robertson (Penguin Random House, $36.00)
10 Back to You by Tammy Robinson (Hachette, $29.99)
NON-FICTION
1 Aroha by Hinemoa Elder (Penguin Random House, $30)
2 To Be Fair by Rosemary Riddell (Upstart Press, $39.99)
Confessions of a Family Court judge. From an extract in ReadingRoom this week: “Children become the unwitting pawns in custody tussles. One of the saddest kinds of disputes involves the child becoming alienated from the other parent, and so they parrot the distasteful things about Mum or Dad to such an extent that the parent–child relationship can be irretrievably destroyed....A sad little girl once told me she didn’t want to live with either parent and asked if she could stay with me instead. She wanted to bring her pet rat. I dearly wanted to gather her up in my arms, take her home and show her a life free from conflict and discord. After all, it’s the very least every child deserves.”
3 The Mirror Book by Charlotte Grimshaw (Penguin Random House, $38)
From a review by Philip Temple at Landfall Online: “How much self-dramatisation is there? Younger sister Margaret has said that a Stead upbringing was nothing like Grimshaw describes and that her parents’ story ‘is theirs to tell as they choose’. But a tell-tale comment here is when Margaret wrote in a recent Listener article that people in the 1970s and 1980s ‘didn’t think about or discuss “parenting”. They had children.’ Really? In the age of Dr Spock, Plunket and Playcentre? In the end, Grimshaw’s story will be different to that of any other Stead family member and what matters is whether, to an outsider, her story rings authentic. It does.”
4 The Forager's Treasury by Johanna Knox (Allen & Unwin, $45)
5 From the Centre by Patricia Grace (Penguin Random House, $40)
From a wonderful profile of the author by Noelle McCarthy, last week at dear old ReadingRoom:"Her house is up a driveway. Her son lives with his family in the big house in front, hers is tall and light with beautiful big windows that look out on her garden and trees. All of this is in From the Centre, a title that describes how she writes - the shifting perspectives of character and non-linear treatment of time she started with her first novel Mutuwhenua, and perfected in the brilliant, dream-like Pōtiki.”
6 A High Country Life by Philippa Cameron (Allen & Unwin, $45)
7 Supergood by Chelsea Winter (Penguin Random House, $50)
8 Helen Kelly: Her Life by Rebecca Macfie (Awa Press, $50)
From Finlay Macdonald’s review at ReadingRoom: “Macfie wears her research lightly, and her ability to distill it all into a tight narrative while still conveying a sense of the prosaic reality of a unionist’s day job is a biographical masterclass. In Macfie’s hands, the struggle is real.”
9 The Abundant Garden by Niva Kay & Yotam Kay (Allen & Unwin, $45)
10 A Coroner for the Dead to Protect the Living by Wallace Bain (D W Bain, $39.99)
From a story by Mike Mathers, at Stuff: “In his 28-year career as a coroner, Bain has made numerous recommendations following his inquests that have led to the enactment of literally life-saving legislation and other changes.
One of these was lowering the alcohol content in RTDs to the currently maximum allowable level of 5 per cent. His urging the Ministry of Health to urgently change the level was spurred by his inquest into the death of Taupo teenager Malcolm Nicoll, who died from intoxication and hypothermia after binge drinking...That case and many others are included in a just-published a book that sheds light on the work he and his now-former colleagues do, the challenges they face, and the circumstances of many of the cases he has presided over.”
