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 The Jacaranda House by Deborah Challinor (HarperCollins, $36.99)
Lydia Wevers’s review of Challinor’s best-seller set in seedy King’s Cross in 1964 will appear soon at ReadingRoom.
2 Auē by Becky Manawatu (Makaro Press, $35.00)
3 The Tally Stick by Carl Nixon (Penguin Random House, $36.00)
4 Tiny Pieces of Us by Nicky Pellegrino (Hachette, $34.99)
5 The Silence of Snow by Eileen Merriman (Penguin Random House, $36.00)
6 The Telling Time by P. J. McKay (Polako Press, $34.95)
The author, in an interview with the Booklovers site: “Gabrijela, a young Croatian immigrant from Korčula, is at the story’s heart. Gabrijela is exiled to New Zealand in the late 1950’s holding close a secret. Thirty years later, her daughter, Luisa, sets off on her own covert adventure, determined to visit Yugoslavia and unpick the family’s past.”
7 State Highway One by Sam Coley (Hachette, $34.99)
8 The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera (Penguin Random House, $26.00)
9 Once Were Warriors by Alan Duff (Penguin Random House, $30.00)
Duffy! They tried to cancel him but he wrote better than any of them. Good to see the return of his 1990 book, a classic from its opening sentences: “Bastard, she’d think, looking out her back kitchen window. Lucky white bastard…”
10 Fake Baby by Amy McDaid (Penguin Random House, $36.00)
Three books, perhaps, are in leading contention to win best first novel at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand national book awards – The Swimmers by Chloe Lane, 200ft Above Worry Level by Eamonn Marra, and McDaid’s romp set in Auckland.
NZ Non-Fiction
1 Searching for Charlie by Tom Scott (Upstart Press, $49.99)
Number one for the sixth consecutive week; the only upcoming book likely to replace it at the top of the chart before Xmas is a cookbook by good old Chelsea Winter.
2 Raw & Free by Sophie Steevens (Allen & Unwin, $45.00)
Cookbook.
3 Māori Made Easy by Scotty Morrison (Penguin Random House, $38.00)
4 Māori Made Easy Workbook 1/Kete 1 by Scotty Morrison (Penguin Random House, $25.00)
5 Vegful by Nadia Lim (Nude Food, $55.00)
Cookbook.
6 Māori Made Fun by Scotty Morrison & Stacey Morrison (Penguin Random House, $25.00)
7 The Book of Overthinking by Gwendoline Smith (Allen & Unwin, $24.99)
8 Hiakai by Monique Fiso (Penguin Random House, $65.00)
Sort of a cookbook.
9 Dark Side of the Brain by Lance Burdett (David Bateman, $39.99)
Reverend Frank Ritchie wondered why his review of Burdett’s book about mental health didn’t appear at ReadingRoom during mental health week and I said every week is mental health week and he said that was true enough.
10 Tree of Strangers by Barbara Sumner (Massey University Press, $35.00)
An interview with the author will appear soon at ReadingRoom.
