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Credit: Pixabay
Credit: Pixabay

BooksSeptember 29, 2017

Unity Books best-seller chart for the week ending September 29

Credit: Pixabay
Credit: Pixabay

The best-selling books at the two best book stores above ground.

WELLINGTON UNITY

1 Out of the Woods: Journey Through Depression & Anxiety by Brent Williams, illustrated by Öztekin Korkut (Educational Resources, $40)

A memoir of surviving family violence by the son of a Wellington philanthropist.

2 Cities In NZ: Preferences Patterns & Possibilities edited by Philippa Howden Chapman, Lisa Early & Jenny Ombler (Steele Roberts, $35)

Chapman says,This book focuses on improving the well-being of the 86 per cent of New Zealanders who live in towns and cities…Our cities are complex, and shaping sustainable urban policy at local and central government level requires far-sighted thinking about how land use, housing, planning and transport systems interact, as policies have subtle and long-lasting effects.”

3 Unity Books at 50: excerpts by author-booksellers over half a century of trading edited by Jane Parkin (Unity Books Wellington, $8)

The book of the shop.

4 The Power by Naomi Alderman (Penguin, $26)

Seldom out of the top 10 chart for the past six months.

5 The Choice by Edith Eger (Rider, $35)

The Choice is a gift to humanity. One of those rare and eternal stories that you don’t want to end and that leaves you forever changed. Dr Eger’s life reveals our capacity to transcend even the greatest of horrors and to use that suffering for the benefit of others. She has found true freedom and forgiveness and shows us how we can as well”: Desmond Tutu.

6 Legacy of Spies by John Le Carre (Penguin, $37)

Smiley.

7 Autumn by Ali Smith (Penguin, $26)

Shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize.

8 Baby by Annaleese Jochems (Victoria University Press, $30)

“Baby is a funny, taut, relentless fever-dream of a novel. Buy it and read it now, and you can brag about it one day the way people who bought and read Emily Perkins’ Not Her Real Name in 1996 do today”: Louisa Kasza, The Spinoff Review of Books.

9 Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington 1888-1903 by Redmer Yska (Otago University Press, $40)

“Yska haunts the terrain, an enigmatic presence, occasionally veering into stories of his own childhood in Karori, and detailing long walks where he traces Mansfield’s route to school, mapping the streets, attempting in some sense to ‘live’ her experience as well as to compare it to his own”: Charlotte Grimshaw, The Spinoff Review of Books.

10 Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong by Angela Saini (Fourth Estate, $33)

“Saini’s scrutiny of the stereotype of men as hunters, leaving women to tend hearth and home, is eye-opening…Likewise, the notion that females are the demure, chaste sex while men are naturally promiscuous gets short shrift”: The Guardian.

 

AUCKLAND UNITY

1 Legacy of Spies by John le Carré (Penguin, $37)

2 What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton (Simon & Schuster, $50)

We look forward to the forthcoming review by Danyl McLauchlan.

3 Think Like a Lawyer Don’t Act Like One by Bourdrez Aernoud (Bis Publications, $33)

Bullshit.

4 Solar Bones by Mike McCormack (Canongate, $23)

This is that novel written in a single motherfucking sentence.

5 Autumn by Ali Smith (Penguin, $26)

6 The Choice by Edith Eger (Rider Books, $35)

7 Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari (Vintage, $30)

Popular science.

8 Girl in Snow by Danya Kukafka (Picador, $35)

When 15-year-old Lucinda Hayes is murdered on a playground in a placid Colorado town, the prime suspect is one of her classmates; literary thriller.

9 The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye by David Lagercrantz (MacLehose Press, $38)

The ongoing franchise of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series.

10 Dog Zen: Everything you Need to Know to Transform your Dog by Mark Vette (Random House, $45)

Oh FFS.


The Spinoff review of books is brought to you by Unity Books.

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