The only published and available best-selling 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 Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan (Penguin Random House, $37)

McEwan is rightfully getting a lot of flak for suggesting his novel, about AI, is not sci-fi. As if that would be a bad thing?

2 Identity Crisis by Ben Elton (Penguin Random House, $37)

“It’s nice to get some good bloody reviews again, at last!”: the author.

3 Ordinary People by Diana Evans (Penguin Random House, $26)

“For the two late thirtysomething couples here, existential panic is sparked by dwindling sex lives and the stresses of sharing housework and childcare duties”: the Guardian.

4 Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney (Faber & Faber, $23)

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5 Rich Enough: 8 Steps for the Laid-Back Investor by Mary Holm (HarperCollins, $37)

Holm is beloved of Jesse Mulligan and that’s good enough for us.

6 Normal People by Sally Rooney (Faber & Faber, $33)

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7 Auckland Architecture: A Walking Guide by John Walsh & Patrick Reynolds (Massey University Press, $20)

Suggested companion reading: Fine: But Next Weekend We’re Eating Oven Fries and Bingeing Outlander.

8 Necessary Secrets by Greg McGee (Upstart Press, $38)

The man behind Foreskin’s Lament with a novel touted as “a searing picture of NZ society today”.

9 Red Notice by Bill Browder (Penguin Random House, $26)

Subtitle: How I Became Putin’s No 1 Enemy.

10 The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker (Hamish Hamilton, $37)

Homer’s Iliad takes the form of a novel and the perspective of a concubine.

 

WELLINGTON

1 Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape, $37)

2 Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (HarperCollins, $25)

“If someone asks you how you are, you are meant to say FINE. You are not meant to say that you cried yourself to sleep last night because you hadn’t spoken to another person for two consecutive days. FINE is what you say.”

3 Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney (Faber & Faber, $23)

4 Secret Barrister by Anonymous (Pan, $20)

The junior barrister, who practices criminal law in England and Wales, writes: “We see every day the law’s equivalent of untreated, neglected patients on hospital trolleys. And every day it is met by a wall of silence.”

5 Ake Ake Kia Kaha E! B Company Maori Battalion by Wira Gardiner (Bateman, $50)

The story of what the Second World War meant for Māori in the Bay of Plenty and central North Island, feat hundreds of photographs, many of them never before published.

6 From Strategy to Action: A Guide to Getting Shit Done by Alicia McKay (Alicia McKay, $35)

But what to do if you’re stuck on ‘apathy’?

7 Normal People by Sally Rooney (Faber, $33)

8 The Overstory by Richard Powers (Vintage, $26)

A “majestic redwood of a novel”: the Guardian.

9 Out of Egypt by Andre Aciman (Faber, 25)

The author grew up in a wealthy family of Sephardic Jews in Egypt; Publishers Weekly describes his memoir as possessing “a magical sensibility streaked with antic humour”.

10 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Noah Yuval Harari (Vintage, $30)

Are we there yet?