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.
Seascraper by Benjamin Wood
Longlisted for the Booker Prize, Seascraper, the story of a working-class shrimp farmer in northern England who dreams of becoming
Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy
Wild Dark Shore made the Top 100 [as voted for by the Bookety Book Books community], 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’s seed vault before the climate-changed coastline swallows what’s left. But when a mysterious woman washes ashore, everything shifts. Who she is and why she’s 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. – Mandy Myles, Bookety Book Books
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
Cyrus Shams, a freshly sober Iranian-American poet, is stalled in the shadow of his father’s recent passing and his mother’s 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 – 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 “work” 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’s first, is tender, discontent and provoking, and builds to a transcendent ending. – Madeleine Crutchley, journalist
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We Do Not Part by Han Kang
The first novel of Kang’s to be released in English since being awarded the Nobel Prize last year, We Do Not Part might be Kang’s best work yet. A writer, struggling with vivid and disturbing dreams, races, during a severe snow storm, to a hospitalised friend’s 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’s 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. – Nate Carroll
Wonderland by Tracy Farr
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’s radium. – Carole Beu, The Women’s Bookshop
How To Loiter In A Turf War by Coco Solid (first released 2022)
This pukapuka is known to us girlies as “thee one sit read”. I’ve read this book three times this year, all in one sitting, and every time I take away something new. It’s giving resistance, brown dynamic realities, katas and a reminder of our softness and strength. Coco’s storytelling offers space to cackle, cry and feel moved to stay fighting the systems that go against all you are, no matter how “small” that retaliation may be. – Katherine Atafu-Mayo, Auckland Pride
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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’s death. One night, she travels to Amsterdam to meet her brothers for dinner – 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 – Isabel and Eva navigate complicity, revenge, theft and desire in a post-war world eager to erase. A timely story with real grounding. – Madeleine Crutchley
Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li
Li wrote this memoir after the death of both her sons to suicide, in 2017 and 2024 respectively. It is an attempt at writing “within an abyss”, 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 – a reading experience that reframes your understanding of life and death. – Nate Carroll
The Vanishing Place by Zoe Rankin
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’s West Coast, it’s 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 – and doesn’t really let up from there. – Kim Knight, journalist
Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, Mai’a Williams (first released 2016)
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 “mothering – like gender – is not biologically determined but socially constructed”, 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. – Bunty Bou, digital producer for Auckland Pride
Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025 edited by Tracey Slaughter
A mega-collection to meet the moment. This book gathers poets from across Aotearoa who explore wide and far – 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 – including Cadence Chung, whose book Mad Diva is a passionate and epic we highlighted earlier in the year. A time capsule for some of the most exciting poetry in Aotearoa for 2025. – Madeleine Crutchley
When The Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During The Golden Age of Magazines by Graydon Carter
If you work in media, this might not be the book to reach for while on your hard-earned holiday – reading about Vanity Fair’s 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’re going out of fashion – 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’s easy to imagine you’re sat next to Carter while he holds court at a Manhattan dinner party. – Stephanie Holmes, editor
Case Studies: A Story Of Plant Travel by Felicity Jones & Mark Smith
For the budding historian. Jones’ interest in stories of plant travel began when she stumbled across the history of the Wardian case. The sealed glass containers, which resemble contemporary terrariums, were popularised and named by London botanist Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward. The cases were used to transport plants on colonising voyages to and from England from the 1830s. Collections for the cases in Aotearoa began shortly after the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi – life from New Zealand stowed on ships for examination in another land. It’s a project long in the making, in which the NZ botanist collaborated with photographer Mark Smith. The striking photos were first exhibited in 2019 and this book expands on the fraught history with writings by Gregory O’Brien, Huhana Smith and more. – Madeleine Crutchley
Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy, winner of the Booker Prize for her novel The God Of Smaller Things, is one of our greatest living writers and this latest memoir will only increase her weighty reputation. A firm Time Out favourite, it frames her life through the incredibly fraught relationship with her mother, who is her greatest inspiration and most effective tormentor. As well as the superb examination of parental relationships, I found this memoir a particularly beautiful expression of a creative life – how stories are formed and what they reflect of the artist behind them. – Nate Carroll
Toi te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art by Deidre Brown, Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, and Ngarino Ellis
This is an intensely visual record, with 500 images of Māori art contained within 600 pages. The mediums for these pieces are expansive: raranga (plaiting), whare (architecture), kākahu (textiles), painting, photography and toi whenua (rock art) are just some of the methods catalogued. The history is written by Māori scholars and organises the analysis into three parts, reflecting Ngā Kete e Toru – the three baskets of knowledge brought to earth by Tāne. A must-read for those invested in local art scenes. – Madeleine Crutchley, journalist
Helm by Sarah Hall
A novel 20 years in the making, Helm tracks the history of a Cumbrian wind. Ranging from Celtic England to the modern day, Hall has achieved something significant with this latest book – an encapsulation of how humanity has always been shaped by our connection to the natural world. Rising above it all is the voice of Helm, the novel’s focus and occasional narrator, who is fittingly playful and aloof, unaware of the danger of an atmosphere being pushed to the brink by human consumption. – Nate Carroll
Northbound by Naomi Arnold
Many will embark on Te Araroa this summer, whether they’re approaching the trail as an ongoing epic, or visiting sections for a shorter period of time. This memoir tells one version of the journey – journalist Naomi Arnold hiked the full track, mostly solo, over nine months. Arnold’s recounting is emotionally rich, expanding on the physical endurance of such a challenge. One to read after your own long hike, if you can’t find your own words to capture it. – Madeleine Crutchley
Kiwi Country – Rural New Zealand in 100 Objects by Te Radar and Ruth Spencer
The first fish a New Zealand child will catch is going to be a spotty. That’s a given. But did you know that all spotties are born female? And, at 3 years old, only the largest turn into males? Every second page of this compendium of country life contains something you didn’t know – or, and this is perhaps one of its true joys, something you forgot you did know. It’s 310 pages of very particular history, the secret lives of rural objects, the stories of the things that we made and that made us. A kind and gentle joy of a read that will also be helpful when you go home for Christmas and find yourself on the only pub quiz team that knows how many individual components make up a calf-length Red Band gumboot. – Kim Knight
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (first published 2005)
This is one of the most haunting and compelling novels of its generation. Ishiguro builds a world where the status quo is lethal to thriving, prompting deep moral and spiritual questions. The story lingers long after the final page – I laughed, cried and found my own ethics unsettled for weeks. Its impact even inspired applied ethics tutorials at AUT. A powerful reminder of why challenging and understanding the systems around us matters. – Adam Paterson, Auckland Pride
Tāmaki Makaurau 2025: Essays on Life in Auckland edited by Damien Levi
“What’s the best city in the world? How could it not be Auckland?” asks the epigraph at the beginning of this book, citing local poet and writer Liam Jacobson. Produced in collaboration with Auckland Libraries, this collection brings together 12 essays about the city and its surrounds. In the introduction, editor Damien Levi, who currently runs a very Auckland-y newsletter and podcast called Local Loser, asks readers to embrace dissonance and “see Auckland through someone else’s eyes”. The city sprawl shrinks in these pages. Lissy and Rudy Robinson-Cole’s crochet, neon wharenui, Puketāpapa Mount Roskill and McCahon House become a neighbourhood, a street to wander. It captures what it is like to live here, right now, for all sorts of people. – Madeleine Crutchley
Great Big Beautiful Lie by Emily Henry
Here’s the thing about me: I hate reading. It’s a terrible affliction for a writer, but there we are. The one way I’ve found to force my brain and eyes to work together is to stuff them with fluff. And that’s exactly what Emily Henry does so well. This, the latest of her rom-com releases, sees two journalists (another easy way to hook me in) vying to tell the life story of a reclusive starlet. Alice is an eternal optimist and Hayden is a big old grump. When they have to work together to get the story, sparks fly and secrets are spilled. It’s delicious. – Bridget Jones
Sky Daddy by Kate Folk
One book we would love to see make the list, and one I won’t stop recommending until I’ve convinced as many people as possible to read it, is Sky Daddy by Kate Folk. If you adore satirical, darkly funny stories with unhinged characters you can’t help but fall for, this is absolutely your moment. I live for this blend of sharp creativity and humour, and honestly, the title alone had me sold. We follow Linda, a 30-something content moderator working in the Hate & Harassment division. She lives in a windowless room inside a family’s garage (who mostly pretend she doesn’t exist) and she’s obsessed with planes. Not just in an aviation enthusiast way, she is sexually attracted to them. This is a beautiful, laugh-out-loud book about friendship and finding your place in the world. – Mandy Myles
Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid
I love a high-concept romance and the latest from Taylor Jenkins Reid delivers. Disaster strikes a space shuttle in the 1980s, leaving astronaut Vanessa stranded and entirely reliant on the instruction of CAPCOM Joan – the couple has to navigate the intricate dangers of space travel and the secrecy of their relationship over a voice link being broadcast across all of NASA. I flew (hah!) through this. It’s largely light and will certainly be an easy and earnest read to commit to over the summer weeks. – Madeleine Crutchley
The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman
A series of books about four retirees, set in an idyllic rest home, might not sound like a “cool” read but by this point those of us who are invested in the Thursday Murder Club are locked in. This is the fifth book of the series and Joyce, Ron, Elizabeth and Ibrahim are slowing down a little – but the murders will not stop. It all starts with a wedding, and ends with, well, I won’t spoil things, but I will say a surprise guest helps save the day. Richard Osman knows what he’s doing with these books – and we love him for it. The Impossible Fortune is the perfect, easy beach read. And if you haven’t started this series then you have five murders to catch up on. – Bridget Jones, editor
The Killing Stones by Ann Cleeves
Part crime thriller, part travel novel, I found myself sneaking five-minute breaks to read a little more of The Killing Stones. I love being transported to another country when reading. I’m not entirely sure what being transported with a crime novel says about me, but I can say the Hebrides and Orkney are now on my travel bucket list. Set in December, this is the perfect fast-paced holiday read. Surely it can be classified as a festive novel? – Caroline Everitt, Auckland Arts Festival
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