1 Alchemised by SenLinYu (Michael Joseph, $40)

So this book is the one that started life as Harry Potter fanfic imagining an illicit romance between Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy (“Dramione”). The Handmaid’s Tale vibe from the cover is completely intentional as Atwood’s dystopia heavily inspired this doorstopper fantasy (now re-written to hide the HP origins due to obvious IP issues): it’s dark AF, featuring medical torture, eugenics, cannibalism and necrophilia.

2 Impossible Fortune: Thursday Murder Club #5 by Richard Osman (Viking Penguin, $38) 

Geriatric crime-solving.

3 Strange Houses by UKETSU (Pushkin Press $37) 

Last week it was Strange Pictures. This week, Strange Houses.

4 What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape, $38)

Suspect this speculative cli-fi novel could very well make it to the next Booker longlist.

5 The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Hamish Hamilton, $38)

On the Booker Prize shortlist right now. Here’s the blurb: “When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated, yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that only served to drive Sonia and Sunny apart.

Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India, fearing she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world.”

6 Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy (Hamish Hamilton, $40)

“Some daughters manage to avoid developing a complicated agon with their mothers, but those lucky daughters, it would seem, seldom become novelists.” Writes Rebecca Mead in her review of Roy’s memoir for The New Yorker. “For the rest, the struggle is formative. It may involve the daughter’s feeling not only that her mother can read her mind but that she has written it. Roy recalls her mother’s hypercritical gaze as an act both of creation and of demolition: ‘It felt as though she had cut me out—cut my shape out—of a picture book with a sharp pair of scissors and then torn me up.’ She learned early the futility of trying to please or appease. What she absorbed instead was the power of unyielding dissent. From the moment Roy could walk, she was marching in step with a formidable rebel.”

7 Eurotrash by Christian Kracht (Serpents Tail, $30) 

The mother-son road trip novel from German author, Kracht, that really has struck a chord with Auckland readers.

8 House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk (Text Publishing, $38)

“Reading this novel is a singular experience,” says Stephanie King over on Readings. “Despite its shifts between different characters, it never felt jarring, and I never lost interest. Each story contributes to the overall arc of the narrative; the motifs and ideas recur in different minds and in different forms. The novel is also invested in historical representation, and the shifting borders after the Second World War, which saw entire populations of people moved from their homes as the lines between countries were redrawn.”

9 The Predicament by William Boyd (Viking Penguin, $38)

High stakes story about an accidental spy.

10 A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern (Penguin, $60)

Twinning with number 10, below. PSA: pop back to The Spinoff this weekend for a superb review of Ardern’s just-released picture book, Mum’s Busy Work.

WELLINGTON

1 Impossible Fortune: Thursday Murder Club #5 by Richard Osman (Viking Penguin, $38) 

2 What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape, $38)

3 How to Save Democracy in Aotearoa New Zealand by Sir Geoffrey Palmer (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30)

The Spinoff’s Lyric Waiwiri-Smith talked to Palmer about his book and retrieved sage advice such as this: “As a former minister for the environment, Palmer says the “assault” on the natural world through legislation such as the Fast-Track Approvals Bill has been “perpetual and constant”, and the end result of governments worldwide letting environmental issues slip off to the wayside will be “dreadful”. ‘The environmental catastrophes we are facing through climate change are such that it’ll be a continuous emergency if we’re not very careful,’ Palmer says. ‘You have to remember that if you don’t leave a country with a decision-making system that takes into account the problems of the future before they arise.'”

4 Pakukore by Rebecca Macfie, Graeme Whimp and Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich (Bridget Williams Books, $20)

A desperately timely collection of essays. Read an edited excerpt from Huhana Hickey’s contribution here.

5 Court of the Dead by Rick Riordan & Mark Oshiro (Puffin, $30)

Brand new Percy Jackson ahoy!

6 Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy (Hamish Hamilton, $40)

7 Flashlight by Susan Choi (Jonathan Cape, $38) 

Another from this year’s Booker Prize shortlist. It’s so wonderful to have such curation – six, superb novels to read through and judge and then bet on which will be the winner. Flashlight is blurbed by Aotearoa’s own Eleanor Catton who says the novel is “Ferociously smart and full of surprises, Flashlight is thrilling to the last.”

8 Everything but the Medicine: A Doctor’s Tale by Lucy O’Hagan (Massey University Press, $40)

“Lucy O’Hagan describes a life spent bending the system to fit the patient, instead of the other way round. Driving a patient an hour up the coast because she had just given them bad news and they had no car to get to their family, giving a patient time to cry because he feels like a failure in life, working to learn te reo Māori to kōrero and build a stronger connection with her Māori patients.” Read more of Emma Marr’s review on The Spinoff, here.

9 Flesh by David Szalay (Jonathan Cape, $38)

And the third novel from the 2025 Booker shortlist on this here weekly chart. Szalay is certainly making a splash with this one. Here’s the blurb:

“Fifteen-year-old Istvan lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals at school and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbour – a married woman close to his mother’s age – as his only companion. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that Istvan himself can barely understand, and his life soon spirals out of control.

As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the currents of the twenty-first century’s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London’s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.”

10 Anything Could Happen by Grant Robertson (Allen and Unwin, $40)

Twinning with number 10, above.