From readable romances to thoughtful collections and turbulent journeys of meaning, these are the new release books and contemporary classics that captured our attention this year.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Seascraper by Benjamin Wood<\/p>\n
\n Longlisted for the Booker Prize, Seascraper, the story of a working-class shrimp farmer in northern England who dreams of becoming
\n a folk singer, might appear slightly twee, but the descriptive power of Woods\u2019 language is a revelation. Much of the action takes place at a tidal estuary on a foggy night and the imagery of the sea, bitter cold and fog are given life in the way only the very best writing can achieve. \u2013 Nate Carroll, Time Out Bookstore\n <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy <\/p>\n
Wild Dark Shore made the Top 100 [as voted for by the Bookety Book Books community<\/a>], which is an impressive feat considering the list is predominantly filled with backlist titles published in previous years. Set on remote Shearwater Island, the novel follows Dominic Salt and his three children, the last four people remaining as they prepare to abandon their home and pack up the island\u2019s seed vault before the climate-changed coastline swallows what\u2019s left. But when a mysterious woman washes ashore, everything shifts. Who she is and why she\u2019s there become questions that unravel with breathtaking tension. This is a beautifully written, deeply atmospheric, utterly gripping read, and I expect it will hold its place in the Top 100 for a long time. \u2013 Mandy Myles, Bookety Book Books <\/p>\n Cyrus Shams, a freshly sober Iranian-American poet, is stalled in the shadow of his father\u2019s recent passing and his mother\u2019s nonsensical death on Iran Air Flight 655 (the US shot the passenger plane down in 1988). The writer has long struggled to find a sense of meaning for his days, but finds momentum in pursuit of a new project \u2013 Cyrus plans to write a book about martyrdom, eulogising various martyrs and contemplating the meaning of their deaths (and his). He flies from Indiana to New York to meet an artist exhibiting a unique \u201cwork\u201d called Death-Speak and encounters a recent history that shifts the world under his feet. Among it all, there is poetry, dream sequences and experimental ambiguity. This novel, Akbar\u2019s first, is tender, discontent and provoking, and builds to a transcendent ending. \u2013 Madeleine Crutchley, journalist<\/p>\n We Do Not Part by Han Kang<\/p>\n The first novel of Kang\u2019s to be released in English since being awarded the Nobel Prize last year, We Do Not Part might be Kang\u2019s best work yet. A writer, struggling with vivid and disturbing dreams, races, during a severe snow storm, to a hospitalised friend\u2019s remote house on Jeju island to save her pet budgie. As night closes in, and the snow falls heavier and heavier, she veers into unreality, as the ghosts of Korea\u2019s past rise to the surface. In this landmark novel, Kang explores how historical traumas are never fully buried, with writing as smooth and delicate as a single flake of snow. \u2013 Nate Carroll<\/p>\n What a wonder this novel is! Tracy Farr makes a brilliant leap of imagination, bringing Marie Curie to New Zealand, through her connection with Sir Ernest Rutherford, for rest and recuperation with a joyous, loving family. They run a real amusement park on Miramar Peninsula in Wellington and have bouncing, brainy triplet girls who are such a joy, I wanted to leap into the novel and hug them. Utterly original and life-affirming, this novel shines, like Curie\u2019s radium. \u2013 Carole Beu, The Women\u2019s Bookshop<\/p>\n How To Loiter In A Turf War by Coco Solid (first released 2022)<\/p>\n This pukapuka is known to us girlies as \u201cthee one sit read\u201d. I\u2019ve read this book three times this year, all in one sitting, and every time I take away something new. It\u2019s giving resistance, brown dynamic realities, katas and a reminder of our softness and strength. Coco\u2019s storytelling offers space to cackle, cry and feel moved to stay fighting the systems that go against all you are, no matter how \u201csmall\u201d that retaliation may be. \u2013 Katherine Atafu-Mayo, Auckland Pride<\/p>\n The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden<\/p>\n Netherlands, 1961. An isolated Isabel lives alone in a house deep in the Dutch countryside (a house which she, an unmarried young woman, has no claim to, no stability in). Her days are spent cleaning, taking stock of her valuables and ruminating over her mother\u2019s death. One night, she travels to Amsterdam to meet her brothers for dinner \u2013 they have moved out with the greater economic and social mobility afforded to them. Joining the siblings at dinner is a new girlfriend, Eva. Her charm and sugar-sweet tone puts Isabel off immediately, but she is forced into shared residence with Eva after her brother drops her off at the house ahead of his own travels. Their relationship intensifies, leading to world-shaking revelations. Though the world of The Safekeep is small, domestic, the explorations are vast \u2013 Isabel and Eva navigate complicity, revenge, theft and desire in a post-war world eager to erase. A timely story with real grounding. \u2013 Madeleine Crutchley <\/p>\n Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li<\/p>\n Li wrote this memoir after the death of both her sons to suicide, in 2017 and 2024 respectively. It is an attempt at writing \u201cwithin an abyss\u201d, of reckoning with loss and accepting life as it is, not as we wish it to be. Told in prose that is almost unbearably intimate this is a brave and courageous book \u2013 a reading experience that reframes your understanding of life and death. \u2013 Nate Carroll<\/p>\n The Vanishing Place by Zoe Rankin <\/p>\n This is a book for wide open, sunny and well-populated spaces. Do not, under any circumstances, read it before going bush. Set on the South Island\u2019s West Coast, it\u2019s a debut novel that has invoked comparisons with Jane Harper and Kristin Hannah. Creepy, twisty and turny, the damp will settle in your bones and the unsettling plot directions will make you see things in the shadows. It starts when a young girl walks out of the bush with blood on her hands \u2013 and doesn\u2019t really let up from there. \u2013 Kim Knight, journalist<\/p>\n Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, Mai\u2019a Williams (first released 2016)<\/p>\n Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines is an anthology by and from mothers of colour that maps collectivised and communal caregiving as a foundational tool for liberation. Loretta J. Ross writes in the preface that \u201cmothering \u2013 like gender \u2013 is not biologically determined but socially constructed\u201d, queering the practice and placing readers as receivers of love that sustains and builds movements. This book reminds us that, as descendants, we must be active practitioners of mothering for a world transformed. \u2013 Bunty Bou, digital producer for Auckland Pride <\/p>\n Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025 edited by Tracey Slaughter<\/p>\n A mega-collection to meet the moment. This book gathers poets from across Aotearoa who explore wide and far \u2013 though editor Tracey Slaughter does note a shared interest in breath among the writers. The yearbook also spotlights poets who have also released excellent pieces this year \u2013 including Cadence Chung, whose book Mad Diva is a passionate and epic we highlighted earlier in the year<\/a>. A time capsule for some of the most exciting poetry in Aotearoa for 2025. \u2013 Madeleine Crutchley<\/p>\n When The Going Was Good: An Editor\u2019s Adventures During The Golden Age of Magazines by Graydon Carter<\/p>\n If you work in media, this might not be the book to reach for while on your hard-earned holiday \u2013 reading about Vanity Fair\u2019s unlimited budgets, office perks such as on-site bars and beauty treatments, company-funded houses and holidays, will have you crying into your leftover Christmas ham. But for anyone even mildly interested in celebrities, glossy magazines, Hollywood, political figures and royals, this memoir is full of juice, gossip, snark and dirt-dishing. Graydon Carter came from humble beginnings yet rose through the ranks of publications like Time, The Canadian Review, and Life, before being appointed editor of Vanity Fair in 1992, stepping into the super successful shoes of Tina Brown. Within these pages, Carter drops names like they\u2019re going out of fashion \u2013 Anna Wintour, Donald Trump, Tom Cruise, Michael Jackson, Harvey Weinstein, Gwyneth Paltrow, Megan Markle, Princess Diana and many more. His tone is conspiratorial and it\u2019s easy to imagine you\u2019re sat next to Carter while he holds court at a Manhattan dinner party. \u2013 Stephanie Holmes, editor<\/p>\n Case Studies: A Story Of Plant Travel by Felicity Jones & Mark Smith<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n