{"id":17016,"date":"2025-09-12T01:04:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T01:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/17016\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T01:04:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T01:04:09","slug":"this-weeks-bestselling-books-september-12","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/17016\/","title":{"rendered":"This week’s bestselling books – September 12"},"content":{"rendered":"

FICTION<\/p>\n

1\u00a0The Vanishing Place\u00a0by Zoe Rankin (Hachette, $37.99)<\/p>\n

There is a certain kind of\u2026 topical resonance to Rankin\u2019s thriller. She told Rotorua Daily Post journalist Annabel Reid that it was partly inspired by following the Tom Phillips case.<\/p>\n

A free copy is available in this week\u2019s giveaway contest. The book has an exciting premise: it\u00a0opens 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.\u00a0\u201cYou can disappear into the bush,\u201d the author said in her Daily Post interview. \u201cNo one will ever find you.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/a> with the subject line in screaming caps IN THE BUSH by midnight on Sunday, September 14.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

2\u00a0Julia Eichardt\u00a0by Lauren Roche (Flying Books Publishing, $36.99)<\/p>\n

3\u00a0The Book of Guilt\u00a0by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38)<\/p>\n

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: \u201cThe promising set-up fails to come to a satisfying fruition. The narrative is plodding and tensionless\u2026.There is also a fair bit of slackening exposition\u2026The attentive reader will have known more or less what is going on from the first sentence. The rest is just details, and explication.\u201d<\/p>\n

But TLS reviewer Christopher Shrimpton allowed that the novel was \u201cenjoyable\u201d.<\/p>\n

4\u00a0Hooked Up\u00a0by Fiona Sussman (David Bateman, $38.99)<\/p>\n

New crime thriller set in Mangawhai. From the opening paragraph of my review in North & South: \u201cThere\u00a0should be no chance of Hooked Up surviving its own quite ridiculous premise \u2013 there is a serial killer on the loose in\u00a0 Auckland, and the police investigation depends on watching an entire series of a TV dating programme \u2014 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\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

5\u00a0Dead Girl Gone\u00a0(The Bookshop Detectives\u00a01)\u00a0by Gareth and Louise Ward (Penguin Random House, $26)<\/p>\n

6\u00a0Tea and Cake and\u00a0Death (The Bookshop Detectives 2)\u00a0by Gareth and Louise Ward (Penguin Random House, $38)<\/p>\n

7\u00a0See How They Fall\u00a0by Rachel Paris (Hachette, $37.99)<\/p>\n

8\u00a0Delirious\u00a0by Damien Wilkins (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38)<\/p>\n

9\u00a0Pakiaka\u00a0by\u00a0Gabrielle Huria\u00a0(Canterbury University Press, $25)<\/p>\n

Debut collection of poems from Huria (Ng\u0101i T\u016b\u0101huriri \/ Ng\u0101i Tahu), a keen practitioner of Ng\u0101i Tahu mahinga kai (traditional food gathering). It includes this particularly excellent opening passage to a quite long poem, \u201cHow to Be a Good Ng\u0101i Tahu\u201d:\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019ve gathered.
Be ready to make a big feed 24\/7 \u2013
there is no such thing as a snack.
Sausages are only for grilling or frying, never in a boil up, that\u2019s
North Island ways.
Never put flour in your whitebait pattie.
Have a vege garden\u2026.<\/p>\n

10\u00a01985\u00a0by Dominic Hoey (Penguin Random House, $38)<\/p>\n

NONFICTION<\/p>\n

1\u00a0Become Unstoppable\u00a0by Gilbert Enoka (Penguin Random House, $40)<\/p>\n

2\u00a0Habits of High Performers\u00a0by James Laughlin (HarperCollins, $39.99)<\/p>\n

A free copy of the business motivational self-helper was up for grabs in last week\u2019s giveaway contest\u2014but a strange thing happened. No one entered. Absolutely no one! No one could be bothered, no one could be fucked. That\u2019s never happened in five years of the weekly book giveaway contest at ReadingRoom. Oh well! It\u2019s a stupid book anyway.<\/p>\n

3\u00a0Leading Under Pressure\u00a0by\u00a0Ian Foster & Gregor Paul (HarperCollins, $39.99)<\/p>\n

4\u00a0Ara\u00a0by Hinemoa Elder (Penguin Random House, $30)<\/p>\n

5\u00a0A Different Kind of Power\u00a0by Jacinda Ardern (Penguin Random House, $59.99)<\/p>\n

6\u00a0Just a Mum\u2019s Kitchen\u00a0by Anna Cameron (Allen & Unwin, $45)<\/p>\n

70 recipes, including Chocolate Weetbix Slice. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

7\u00a0Anything Could Happen\u00a0by Grant Robertson (Allen & Unwin, $39.99)<\/p>\n

8\u00a0Underworld\u00a0by Jared Savage (HarperCollins, $39.99)<\/p>\n

The third book in Savage\u2019s series of investigations into organised crime. His second book Gangster\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

9\u00a0The Unlikely Doctor\u00a0by Timoti Te Moke (Allen & Unwin, $37.99)<\/p>\n

10\u00a0Saving Elli\u00a0by Doug Gold\u00a0(Allen & Unwin, $37.99)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FICTION 1\u00a0The Vanishing Place\u00a0by Zoe Rankin (Hachette, $37.99) There is a certain kind of\u2026 topical resonance to Rankin\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17017,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[489,156,111,139,69,3632],"class_list":{"0":"post-17016","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz","13":"tag-nz-best-sellers"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17016\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}