FICTION

1 The Vanishing Place by Zoe Rankin (Hachette, $37.99)

There is a certain kind of… topical resonance to Rankin’s thriller. She told Rotorua Daily Post journalist Annabel Reid that it was partly inspired by following the Tom Phillips case.

A free copy is available in this week’s giveaway contest. The book has an exciting premise: it opens with a bloodied young girl staggering out of the bush and collapsing in a small-town store. A policeman recognises her face. She looks exactly like a girl who vanished 20 years ago. “You can disappear into the bush,” the author said in her Daily Post interview. “No one will ever find you.”

To enter the contest, share a story about vanishing or lying low in the New Zealand wilderness, and email it to stephen11@xtra.co.nz with the subject line in screaming caps IN THE BUSH by midnight on Sunday, September 14.

2 Julia Eichardt by Lauren Roche (Flying Books Publishing, $36.99)

3 The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38)

Reviews of the best New Zealand novel of 2025 have generally been pretty admiring, but it got a thorough beating in the Times Literary Supplement: “The promising set-up fails to come to a satisfying fruition. The narrative is plodding and tensionless….There is also a fair bit of slackening exposition…The attentive reader will have known more or less what is going on from the first sentence. The rest is just details, and explication.”

But TLS reviewer Christopher Shrimpton allowed that the novel was “enjoyable”.

4 Hooked Up by Fiona Sussman (David Bateman, $38.99)

New crime thriller set in Mangawhai. From the opening paragraph of my review in North & South: “There should be no chance of Hooked Up surviving its own quite ridiculous premise – there is a serial killer on the loose in  Auckland, and the police investigation depends on watching an entire series of a TV dating programme — but Fiona Sussman does so many things right, brings you closer and closer to the page until you cannot let go, that she gets away with a kind of murder. It’s a very strange literary feat. Her ideas are terrible but her story telling is world-class, and it qualifies Hooked Up as one of the best novels of any kind in 2025.”

5 Dead Girl Gone (The Bookshop Detectives 1) by Gareth and Louise Ward (Penguin Random House, $26)

6 Tea and Cake and Death (The Bookshop Detectives 2) by Gareth and Louise Ward (Penguin Random House, $38)

7 See How They Fall by Rachel Paris (Hachette, $37.99)

8 Delirious by Damien Wilkins (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38)

9 Pakiaka by Gabrielle Huria (Canterbury University Press, $25)

Debut collection of poems from Huria (Ngāi Tūāhuriri / Ngāi Tahu), a keen practitioner of Ngāi Tahu mahinga kai (traditional food gathering). It includes this particularly excellent opening passage to a quite long poem, “How to Be a Good Ngāi Tahu”: 

Eat everything with eyes.
Eat eels.
Eat eels without eyes.
Have a good knife.
Know how to work the drains.
Know how to salt and roll eels.
Know your kai, how to get it, where to get it, how to work it, how
to store it and how to cook it.
Have a freezer packed with kai.
Have much more kai than you need just in case a relation calls,
in which case over-feed them with everything you’ve gathered.
Be ready to make a big feed 24/7 –
there is no such thing as a snack.
Sausages are only for grilling or frying, never in a boil up, that’s
North Island ways.
Never put flour in your whitebait pattie.
Have a vege garden….

10 1985 by Dominic Hoey (Penguin Random House, $38)

NONFICTION

1 Become Unstoppable by Gilbert Enoka (Penguin Random House, $40)

2 Habits of High Performers by James Laughlin (HarperCollins, $39.99)

A free copy of the business motivational self-helper was up for grabs in last week’s giveaway contest—but a strange thing happened. No one entered. Absolutely no one! No one could be bothered, no one could be fucked. That’s never happened in five years of the weekly book giveaway contest at ReadingRoom. Oh well! It’s a stupid book anyway.

3 Leading Under Pressure by Ian Foster & Gregor Paul (HarperCollins, $39.99)

4 Ara by Hinemoa Elder (Penguin Random House, $30)

5 A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern (Penguin Random House, $59.99)

6 Just a Mum’s Kitchen by Anna Cameron (Allen & Unwin, $45)

70 recipes, including Chocolate Weetbix Slice.

7 Anything Could Happen by Grant Robertson (Allen & Unwin, $39.99)

8 Underworld by Jared Savage (HarperCollins, $39.99)

The third book in Savage’s series of investigations into organised crime. His second book Gangster’s Paradise competes with my book The Survivors and other finalists in the 2025 Ngaio Marsh award for best book of nonfiction crime; the winner is announced in Christchurch on September 25. I will be attending the ceremony alongside Sav. It could get ugly.

9 The Unlikely Doctor by Timoti Te Moke (Allen & Unwin, $37.99)

10 Saving Elli by Doug Gold (Allen & Unwin, $37.99)