The top 10 sales lists recorded every week at Unity Books\u2019 stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.<\/p>\n
2 T<\/a>he Safe Keep<\/a> by Yael van der Wouden (Penguin, $26)\u00a0<\/p>\n Chef\u2019s kiss historical fiction.<\/p>\n 3 Strange Pictures<\/a>\u00a0by Uketsu (Pushkin Press, $37)<\/p>\n The latest crime sensation from Japan.<\/p>\n 4 Mother Mary Comes To Me<\/a> by Arundhati Roy (Hamish Hamilton, $40)<\/p>\n Roy\u2019s memoir of her complicated relationship with her mother.<\/p>\n 5 House of Day, House of Night<\/a>\u00a0by Olga Tokarczuk (Text Publishing, $38)<\/p>\n A new novel from Tokarczuk is a thing to celebrate! This latest sounds like it\u2019s for fans of Flights, and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Here\u2019s the blurb: \u201cA woman settles in a remote Polish village. It has few inhabitants, now, but it teems with the stories of its living and its dead. There\u2019s the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There\u2019s the man whose death-with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech-was an international incident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history but a cosmology.\u201d<\/p>\n 6 I<\/a>mpossible Fortune: Thursday Murder Club #5<\/a>\u00a0by Richard Osman (Viking Penguin, $38)\u00a0<\/p>\n Anyone else put off the books by the Netflix movie?<\/p>\n 7 The Predicament<\/a>\u00a0by William Boyd (Viking Penguin, $38)<\/p>\n M16, spy stuff. Sounds thrilling.<\/p>\n 8 Ghost Cities<\/a> by Siang Lu (University of Queensland Press, $38)\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cGhost Cities is as beautiful as it is honest as it is funny as it is silly, absurd and satirical,\u201d writes Tara June Winch in The Guardian<\/a>. \u201cIt also feels true: the Chinese economy is held together by \u201cghost real estate\u201d \u2013 over a fifth of China\u2019s GDP is supported by more than 20m properties that remain empty. The boom of construction in the past two decades has often been a shoddy one; \u201ctofu\u201d bridges connect, and also crumble, from province to province. Ghost Cities may be a biting critique of modern China, but it is a sweeping, populated, devoted and generous story first.\u201d<\/p>\n 9 Noho Tahi\u00a0<\/a>by Wain Etienne & Ye Jess Eta Al (Rebel Press, $30)<\/p>\n This book is the outcome of the inaugural Chan Family Residency at Wai-te-ata Press.<\/a> The project is led by \u9ec3\u7fa9\u5929 Etienne Wain and \u8449\u5bb6\u742a Jess Ye, and in collaboration with Lincoln Dam and \u5f35\u66c9\u8ed2 Ballerina Chong. \u201cIt focuses on \u2018peaceful co-existence\u2019 between cultures: an emerging invitation for Hainamana to reorient towards relationships with Tangata Whenua\u2014in ways that honour both Te Tiriti o Waitangi and Hainamanatanga\/Chinese ways of being and recognise the complicated histories of Old and New Chinese.\u201d<\/p>\n 10 Alchemised<\/a>\u00a0by SenLinYu (Michael Joseph, $40)<\/p>\n A fantasy\/dystopia with red riding hood\/handmaid vibes on the cover.<\/p>\n WELLINGTON<\/p>\n 1 Everything but the Medicine: A Doctor\u2019s Tale<\/a> by Lucy O\u2019Hagan (Massey University Press, $40)<\/p>\n Come on back to The Spinoff this weekend for a review of O\u2019Hagan\u2019s memoir.<\/p>\n 2 How to Save Democracy in Aotearoa New Zealand<\/a> by Sir Geoffrey Palmer (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30)<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s [Palmer\u2019s book] equal parts brainy and anxiety-inducing,\u201d writes The Spinoff\u2019s Lyric Waiwiri-Smith<\/a>, \u201cbut Palmer isn\u2019t the sort who lets himself get tied up in existential dread: it\u2019s more productive to write tens of thousands of words about it all. So, how do we fix this mess? According to Palmer, it can be as easy as introducing civics education in schools, as hard as lowering the voting age to 16 or overhauling the entire damn parliamentary system. In a country with legislators who historically haven\u2019t wanted to mess with how our parliament operates, Palmer knows that the latter will be the hardest sell. Although, if we don\u2019t do something soon, Palmer worries it\u2019ll be too late.\u201d<\/p>\n 3 What We Can Know<\/a>\u00a0by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape, $38)<\/p>\n 4 South by South<\/a> by Charles Ferrall (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $50)<\/p>\n All about New Zealand\u2019s \u201cheroic age\u201d of Antarctic exploration.<\/p>\n 5 The Predicament<\/a>\u00a0by William Boyd (Viking Penguin, $38)<\/p>\n 6 Mother Mary Comes To Me<\/a> by Arundhati Roy (Hamish Hamilton, $40)<\/p>\n 7 Whenua: M<\/a>\u0101ori P\u016br\u0101kau of Aotearoa<\/a> by Isobel Te Aho-White (Little Moa, $40)<\/p>\n This year has been a banger for picture books. Te Aho-White\u2019s beautiful collection of p\u016br\u0101kau feels like a classic \u2013 a book to be gifted and treasured over and over again.<\/p>\n 8 Northbound: Four Seasons of Solitude Walking on Te Araroa<\/a> by Naomi Arnold (HarperCollins, $40)<\/p>\n In excellent timing, Arnold just this week entered the hallowed halls of The Spinoff Books Confessional.<\/a><\/p>\n