The only published and available best-selling indie 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 Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Fourth Estate, $38)
Dream Count is the first novel in 10 years from the author of Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah, and Why We Should All Be Feminists. It tells the story of four migrant women (Chiamaka (“Chia”), Zikora, Omelogor and Kadiatou) and, writes one Guardian reviewer, explores how their relationships assert the power of female solidarity.
Here’s a snippet from the review: “This novel is ultimately wider-ranging than Americanah, with a collage of womanhood assembled around this incident, but threading together childbirth and pregnancy loss, abortions and hysterectomies, fibroids and female genital mutilation, sexual assault and sexual harassment, as if nothing less than the whole of female experience is within its scope. Yet at the same time it is painfully introspective, not only because it is set against the backdrop of the Covid pandemic, a built-in reminder of “how breakable we all are”, but also because it includes many moments – such as when, pondering one of her breakups, Chia muses about “how quickly mystery dissolves to dust” – in which one senses the subliminal gesture towards deeper traumas, the feeling of unbearable confinement alongside floating alienation, the hermetic numbness with which many of us experience grief.”
PS: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is set to appear in a virtual event at Auckland Writers Festival in May.
2 Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape, $26)
Last year’s Booker Prize winner and one of this year’s Auckland Writers Festival headliners.
3 The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (Hay House, $32)
Everyone is talking about this book that shows you how to not react to behaviours that disturb you and let go of controlling behaviours.
4 How To Be Wrong by Rowan Simpson (Electric Fence, $40)
“Drawing on two decades at the heart of New Zealand’s most successful technology companies – Trade Me, Xero, Vend, and Timely – Rowan Simpson unravels the messy reality behind familiar glossy success stories. Combining raw honesty and sharp analysis, he challenges conventional wisdom by sharing compelling firsthand lessons about focused execution, team building, and genuine ecosystem growth.
This myth-busting guide is essential reading for founders, investors, and policymakers alike. Simpson demonstrates that embracing uncertainty, recognising patterns, and learning quickly from mistakes are not just steps on the path to success – they are the path itself.”
5 Butter by Asako Yuzuki (Fourth Estate, $35)
Read the book, go and see the author live at Auckland Writers Festival where she will be speaking to Jean Teng and eating food made on stage by the one and only Sam Low.
6 Amma by Saraid De Silva (Hachette, $38)
Longlisted for the Women’s Prize along with the author of book number 1, above!
The retelling of Cook’s last journey.
9 The Vegetarian by Han Kang (Portobello Books, $28)
Stunning, strange, small novel about female resistance.
10 Twist by Colum McCann (Bloomsbury UK, $37)
The latest novel from Ireland. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:
“Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth.
Fennell’s journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own literary adventure to London.
When the ship is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. At sea, they are forced to confront the most elemental questions of life, love, absence, belonging, and the perils of our severed connections. Can we, in our fractured world, reweave ourselves out of the thin, broken threads of our pasts? Can the ruptured things awaken us from our despair?”
WELLINGTON
1 Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape, $26)
2 Butter by Asako Yuzuki (Fourth Estate, $35)
3 Delirious by Damian Wilkins (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38)
4 Amma by Saraid De Silva (Hachette, $38)
5 Understanding Te Tiriti by Roimata Smail (Wai Ako Press, $25)
The go-to guide to getting your facts straight around Te Tiriti.
6 Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Fourth Estate, $38)
7 How To Be Wrong by Rowan Simpson (Electric Fence, $40)
8 Route 52: A Big Lump of Country Unknown by Simon Burt (Ugly Hill, $40)
Observational writing from the roads between the Masterton and Waipukuarau.
9 The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (Hay House, $32)
10 Three Days in June Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus, $36)
More comforting, perfectly told fiction from Queen Tyler. Here’s a nugget from a glowing review in The Guardian: “There’s a scene near the end of Anne Tyler’s new novel, Three Days in June, where the two main characters, a divorced middle-aged couple named Gail and Max, compare their lives to the movie Groundhog Day, ‘where people live through the same day over and over until they get it right’, Gail reminds him. ‘Wouldn’t it be great if the world worked that way?’ says Max. Instead, Tyler’s novels are records of the numerous ways people get things wrong and learn to live with it, and how the wrong things have a sneaky habit, eventually, of turning out to be right.”