The Unity Books bestseller chart for the week ending June 19

The top 10 sales lists recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.

AUCKLAND

An ideal book for winter: warm, entertaining and all’s well that ends well.

3 Land by Maggie O’Farrell (Headline Press, $38)

4 Degrees of Happy by Philippa Werry (The Cuba Press, $25)

A brand new young adult novel from award-winning writer Philippa Werry. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

“Tess’s parents have dropped a bombshell. The family’s moving back to the place everyone wants to leave, the place Tess calls Toytown. She doesn’t want to go and not just because it’s small and nothing ever happens there – moving means leaving Chloe behind, her sister who died.

What she doesn’t expect is how much happens in Toytown, especially with a half-brother and half-sister moving in, the promise of chickens and a frenetic dog called Milo. And school isn’t any less busy. Tess accidentally gets caught up in the annual Shakespeare festival, playing a tree in the Scottish play, and prompting for The Tempest, directed by a boy in a patchwork waistcoat who seems to think she knows what she’s doing.

Happiness, she has begun to realise, has gradations, like steps, or rungs on a ladder, and she’s not at the bottom anymore. And then it’s Chloe’s birthday, and with the voices of Miranda and Prospero in her head, Tess leaves her new life behind and goes to find her sister.”

5 Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout (Viking Penguin, $38)

What we will say is you can’t really go wrong with Strout.

6 The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (Michael Joseph, $38)

Winner of the Women’s Prize for fiction!

7 London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe (Picador, $40)

8 Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke (Fourth Estate, $37)

9 Te Tiriti, Equality & the Future of NZ Democracy by Dominic O’Sullivan (Auckland University Press, $40)

“In this major work, the leading Māori political scientist Dominic O’Sullivan draws on theories of republicanism and the commonwealth to challenge understandings of Te Tiriti as a partnership between races, or between Māori people and the Crown.

O’Sullivan also critiques the idea that Te Tiriti created one people, assimilating Māori into colonial ways of governing.

Instead, he proposes a new politics where Māori self-determination and liberal democracy, rangatiratanga and kawanatanga, complement one another to promote meaningful and culturally grounded political equality.”

10 Whistler by Ann Patchett (Bloomsbury UK, $39)