The week's biggest-selling New Zealand books, as recorded by the Nielsen BookScan New Zealand bestseller list and described by Steve Braunias
FICTION
1 Harbouring by Jenny Pattrick (Penguin Random House, $36)
In a typically excellent profile by Philip Matthews at Stuff, the author of the year's biggest-selling novel said, “This is the first time I’ve written in the voice of a Māori woman, and I felt a bit nervous about doing that, but I thought, heaven’s sake, we’re all human, and we all have those emotions and I should be able to imagine it. If I can imagine a Welsh person, I should be able to imagine a Māori person, and how they might think and speak. I’ve been waiting for someone to take me to task over it, but so far, no problems.”
2 Kurangaituku by Whiti Hereaka (Huia Publishers, $35)
3 Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant by Cristina Sanders (The Cuba Press, $37)
Number three – with, I suspect, a bullet. Sanders' latest historical novel has the potential to sell its socks off. Backgrounding her book in ReadingRoom, she wrote, "The General Grant is a ship that wrecked on the Auckland Islands in 1866 carrying a cargo that included an undetermined amount of gold and 83 passengers. Eighteen months later, 10 survivors were rescued by a whaling brig and taken to Invercargill, where they told their story to an enraptured audience. The wreck has never been found. Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant is my fictional interpretation of what happened to the 14 men and one woman who survived and lived as castaways on a bleak and stormy sub-Antarctic island."
4 Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly (Victoria University Press, $35)
5 The Leonard Girls by Deborah Challinor (HarperCollins, $36.99)
6 How to Loiter In a Turf War by Coco Solid (Penguin Random House, $28)
7 Winter Time by Laurence Fearnley (Penguin Random House, $36)
"As someone who has spent most of my life in the South Island, first in Fairlie, then Christchurch and Dunedin, I feel very drawn to the area," she once said in an interview; her latest novel, about a man who returns to a small town in the Mackenzie Country (clearly based on Tekapo), is one of the year's very best novels and a definite contender for the 2023 Ockham New Zealand national book awards.
8 Auē by Becky Manawatu (Makaro Press, $35)
9 Sheep Truck by Peter Olds (Cold Hub Press, $19.95)
"Perhaps the last true survivor of the 60s school of those writing under the influence in search of inner visions," as David Eggleton once described him, Olds was with Baxter at Jerusalem, blew minds with his classic 1972 collection V-8 Poems, held the 1978 Burns Fellowship, and is regarded by Roger Hickin at Cold Hub Press as Dunedin's "unofficial poet laureate". Sheep Truck includes a poem about a security guard at Dunedin Public Library who looks like Charles Bukowski:
It’s a scream
coming to the library every day
and spotting Bukowski
on the stairs at the point where
two shaky floors meet
–– where on the walls
a Hotere and a McCahon
appear to be the only things
holding the whole joint together
10 Surprised by Hope by John Gibb (Cold Hub Press, $28)
Poems, including one about a man who wakes on a beach and is summoned back to childhood, and to...
something loved,
something full of the promise of salty air, as if
he were a lost and circling seagull, or a lump
of flying paper whirled up in a glassy tide of wind.
NON-FICTION
1 Matariki: The Star of the Year by Rangi Matamua (Huia Publishers, $35)
Professor Rangi Matamua has won the 2019 Prime Minister’s Science Communication Prize, the first Māori scientist to be awarded the prize, in 2020 he was awarded the Callaghan Medal for science communication from Royal Society Te Apārangi, and in 2021 was elected as a Fellow to the Academy of the Royal Society Te Apārangi.
2 Yum by Nadia Lim (Nude Food Inc, $55)
3 The Boy from Gorge River by Chris Long (HarperCollins, $39.99)
4 The Bookseller at the End of the World by Ruth Shaw (Allen & Unwin, $36.99)
The author will appear at a sell-out event at next weekend's Marlborough Books Festival in Blenheim. Events by Sue Orr (author of Loop Tracks) and Colleen Shipley (author of Wrens Under the Radar) are also sold out; and according to the festival site, my event next Saturday, talking about my crime book Missing Persons, is "nearly sold out". O good people of Blenheim and surrounding districts! Move, and move fast; the festival is full of interest and goodness; tickets cost $25-$30; the line-up of authors include Lloyd Jones, Rebecca K Reilly, Paula Morris, Kirsten McDougall, Patricia Grace, and Kate De Goldi. See you there! Does Blenheim have a good bakery?
5 Aroha by Hinemoa Elder (Penguin Random House, $30)
6 Solo by Hazel Phillips (Massey University Press, $ 39.99)
Awesome book in praise of women mountaineers, with awesome cover.
7 A Gentle Radical: The life of Jeanette Fitzsimmons by Gareth Hughes (Allen & Unwin, $39.99)
From my review of Hughes's biography of the late politician who represented the Values Party, and then the Greens: "One of the biggest challenges faced by Values and then the Greens was the peculiar notion shared by both parties that there was no need for a leader. God almighty. Hughes, quite rightly, plays those years in A Gentle Radical as a gentle comedy. There's also a terrific LOL moment when he writes of a Values conference held at Rathkeale College in the Wairarapa at Easter 1979. One of the speakers had laryngitis. But she really needed to get her message across because it was Very Important, probably. Hughes: 'She whispered into the microphone'."
8 I am Autistic by Chanelle Moriah (Allen & Unwin, $29.99)
In a magnificent piece of passionate writing at ReadingRoom earlier this year, the author wrote, "People think that I don’t look or seem autistic because I can talk eloquently, because I can sit in front of a camera or microphone and describe my experiences, because I’m social, because I’m not rocking or flapping my hands in front of you… It begs the question: what do people think autism looks like? Are you expecting a screaming child? Someone who only talks about trains or doesn’t talk at all? Are you expecting a mathematical genius or an individual who can’t comprehend social conversation? Are you expecting Sheldon Cooper? Rain Man? Or even Music Gamble?"
9 Grand by Noelle McCarthy (Penguin Random House, $35)
Half the year is done; and McCarthy's memoir remains the best book of 2022.
10 Simple Wholefoods by Sophie Steevens (Allen & Unwin, $49.99)
