The week’s best-selling books at the Unity stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND UNITY 1 The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson (MacMillan, $35) Number one for the third consecutive week! Auckland is really mastering the subtle art of not giving a fuck. 2 Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday (Granta, $33) “Initially, … Read more
Huzzah! We announce the winners of New Zealand’s most coveted writers residency in central Auckland. An author who wants to write a book about professional mermaids – there is such a thing, and it’s worryingly kind of huge – is the winner of the 2018 Surrey Hotel Steve Braunias Memorial Writers Residency Award in Association with … Read more
The week’s best-selling books at the Unity stores in Willis St, Wellington, and High St, Auckland. WELLINGTON UNITY 1 Warlight by Michael Ondaatje (Jonathan Cape, $35) Ondaatje’s Facebook page features a photo of himself as a young, really good-looking guy, lying on his side, wearing jeans, looking all soulful and brooding; the caption is a … Read more
Over 80 writers entered New Zealand’s premier literary award – but only 10 have made the shortlist. We’ve sent out emails of regret to the unsuccessful applicants for the 2018 Surrey Hotel Steve Braunias Memorial Writers Residency Award in Association with The Spinoff but right here, right now is the first time that the 10 shortlisted … Read more
The week’s best-selling books at the Unity Books stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND UNITY 1 The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson (MacMillan, $35) “Manson doesn’t go in for the positive thinking school of self-help. He makes a good case for struggle….He writes about the need to hone … Read more
The week’s best-sellers at the Unity Books stores in Willis St, Wellington, and High St, Auckland. WELLINGTON UNITY 1 New Animals by Pip Adam (Victoria University Press, $30) As winner of the Acorn Prize for fiction, at the recent 2018 Ockham New Zealand national book awards, Adam pocketed $50,000; last week, she did a grand better, … Read more
The week’s best-selling books at the Unity stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND UNITY 1 Warlight: A Novel by Michael Ondaatje (Jonathan Cape, $35) “It’s as if WG Sebald wrote a Bond novel”: ludicrous statement, The Guardian. 2 Less by Andrew Sean Greer (Little, Brown and Company, $35) “Arthur Less and Andrew Sean Greer are handsome … Read more
Apply now for the 2018 writers residency award at the Surrey Hotel in Grey Lynn, Auckland. Applications are open RIGHT NOW BRO for the 2018 Surrey Hotel Steve Braunias Memorial Writers Residency In Association With The Spinoff Award. New Zealand literature’s coolest writing residency offers cash, accommodation, and pizza. The singularly appealing Surrey Hotel in Grey Lynn … Read more
This week’s best-selling books at the Unity stores in Willis St, Wellington, and High St, Auckland. WELLINGTON UNITY 1 The New Animals by Pip Adam (Victoria University Press, $30) We actually took out the final, over-egged sentence in Brannavan Gnanalingam’s review on Tuesday but we’ll restore it here: “It’s a masterpiece.” 2 The New Ships … Read more
The week’s best-selling books at the Unity stores in Willis St, Wellington, and High St, Auckland. AUCKLAND UNITY 1 The New Animals by Pip Adam (Victoria University Press, $30) Winner of the Acorn Prize for best novel of the year at last week’s 2018 Ockham New Zealand national book awards. So how come The Spinoff … Read more
Auckland – glassy, dusty, unfinished, trying its best – is captured in a new art book by Wellington photographer Mary Macpherson. Big, vibrant, empty, fucked-up, under-construction Auckland. The city looms and loiters in a beautiful new art book – and exhibition, at The Pah Homestead – by Mary Macpherson, a Wellington photographer. “With its fly-overs, by-passes, and often shambolic orchestration of … Read more
The week’s best-selling books at the Unity stores in Willis St, Wellington, and High St, Auckland. WELLINGTON UNITY 1 New Ships by Kate Duignan (Victoria University Press, $30) New Zealand novel, praised to the skies this week on National Radio; the Spinoff Review of Books looks forward to the forthcoming review by Claire Mabey. 2 … Read more
This week’s Ockham New Zealand national book awards marks the 50th anniversary of book awards in New Zealand. To mark the occasion, we asked 50 experts – authors, publishers, academics, booksellers – to name the very best local books published since 1968. And the winner is Plumb. Maurice Gee’s 1979 novel was almost immediately regarded … Read more
The week’s best-selling books at the Unity stores in High St, Auckland and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND UNITY 1 What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton (Simon & Schuster, $50) “This is a very uncool opinion among journalists, but I actually quite enjoyed Clinton’s book. It’s a cautionary tale about how far even the most accomplished women … Read more
The best-selling books this week at the Unity Books stores in Willis St, Wellington and High St, Auckland. WELLINGTON UNITY 1 No One Home: A Boyhood Memoir in Letters & Poems by Keith Westwater (Makaro Press, $25) Publisher’s blurbology: “No One Home tells the story of Keith Westwater growing up in 1950s New Zealand. At … Read more
The week’s best selling books at the Unity stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND UNITY 1 A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey (Macmillan, $38) From the office of the President, tweet 1: “James Comey is a proven LEAKER & LIAR. Virtually everyone in Washington thought he should be fired for the … Read more
Elizabeth Knox – whose novel The Vintner’s Luck has been named by Spinoff readers as the best New Zealand book of the past 50 years – reaches into her sunhat and plucks out the name of a lucky winner in our amazing book prize. The Spinoff Review of Books recently published the entire list of … Read more
The week’s best-sellers at the Unity Books stores in Willis St, Wellington and High St, Auckland. WELLINGTON UNITY 1 Plundering Beauty: A History of Art Crime During War by Arthur Tompkins (Lund Humphries UK, $70) “There is a surprising amount of art crime in New Zealand,” Tompkins recently said in an interview in Lawtalk, the … Read more
All week this week the Spinoff Review of Books celebrates the rich, fascinating history of New Zealand literature. Today: a photo essay on the graves of famous New Zealand writers. Hone Tuwhare immortalised the tangi of James K Baxter at Jerusalem on October 25, 1972, in his famous poem “Heemi”. It’s a narrative of driving overnight from his … Read more
All week this week the Spinoff Review of Books celebrates the rich, fascinating history of New Zealand literature. Today: win the entire 2018 Ockham New Zealand awards shortlist of 16 books as we present – for the first time in one place – the entire list of every winner since the national book awards were created 50 … Read more
The week’s best-sellers at the Unity Books stores in High St, Auckland and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND UNITY 1 12 Rules for Life by Jordan B Peterson (Allen Lane, $40) “Many people have written to me asking what they should read to properly educate themselves. Here is a list of books that I found particularly influential in … Read more
The week’s best-selling books at the Unity stores in Willis St, Wellington and High St, Auckland. WELLINGTON UNITY 1 Terry’s Dumb Dot Story: Treehouse Tale by Andy Griffiths & Terry Denton (Pan Macmillan, $2) Yes, really: $2! 2 Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (HarperCollins, $25) Yes, really: she’s completely fine! 3 Driving … Read more
The best-selling books this Easter at the two Unity stores in High St, Auckland and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND UNITY 1 Pursuing Peace in Godzone: Christianity and the Peace Tradition in New Zealand by Geoffrey Troughton and Philip Fountain (Victoria University Press, $36) Essays edited by two lecturers in religious studies at Victoria University. Chapters include “Remembering Jesus … Read more
The week’s best-selling books at the Unity stores on Willis St, Wellington, and High St, Auckland. WELLINGTON UNITY 1 Pursuing Peace in Godzone: Christianity and the Peace Tradition in New Zealand edited by Geoffrey Troughton and Philip Fountain (Victoria University Press, $40) Essays edited by two lecturers in religious studies at Victoria University. Chapters include “Remembering Jesus … Read more
The week’s best-selling books at the Unity stores in High St, Auckland and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND UNITY 1 The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson (Pan MacMillian, $35) Number one! How come? 2 12 Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson (Allan Lane, $40) Famous people called Jordan: 1 Jordan B Peterson 2 … Read more
Exclusive: announcing the imminent arrival of hirsute herring-eating huge Norwegian literary superstar Karl Ove Knausgård. Karl Ove Knausgård – widely regarded as the world’s greatest living writer – will appear at the Auckland Writers Festival in May. The announcement is a major coup for the AWF, and the event will surely sell out, pretty fucking quickly. Knausgård, … Read more
The week’s best-selling books at Unity Books stores in Wellington and Auckland. WELLINGTON 1 The Cage by Lloyd Jones (Penguin Books NZ, $38) “Two dishevelled strangers, perhaps fleeing a catastrophe, are given shelter in a hotel in a town in a country near enough to being New Zealand….Unsettling questions are raised by the story. Who watches … Read more
We reveal the shortlist of this year’s national book awards. Magazine writer Diana Wichtel, Wellington novelist Brannavan Gnanalingam and some other authors have made it onto the shortlist of the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. The Spinoff Review of Books names these two authors straight off the bat and ahead of everyone else because we rate their … Read more
This week’s best-selling books at Unity Books in Wellington and Auckland. WELLINGTON UNITY 1 After Alexander: The Legacy of a Son by Jan Pryor (Heddon Publishing, $30) “The prologue in Jan Pryor’s memoir begins exactly 33 years to the day since her son died from cot death…The reader is drawn into the anguish of the … Read more