This week’s bestselling books – August 30

NONFICTION
1 View from the Second Row by Samuel Whitelock (HarperCollins, $49.99)
Rugby.
2 Seriously Delicious by Polly Markus (Allen & Unwin, $49.99)
Food.
3 Serviceman J by Jamie Pennell (HarperCollins, $39.99)
Killing people.
4 Sam the Trap Man by Sam Gibson (Allen & Unwin, $45)
A free copy of this new collection of bushman yarns is up for grabs in this week’s giveaway contest. It’s very he-man, from a time before Woke, resolutely outdoors; its blurbological assessment says in a deep voice, “From shooting his first deer, to labouring through freezing cold South Island winters as a young trapper, to the time he woke up somehow covered in blood, each chapter weaves together the story of an incredible life full of adventure.”
To enter the draw, pass on a survival skill of any description that might make things easier for someone who decides to go bush with the declaration that they might be some time, ie they’re intending to go in and not come out for weeks, maybe longer. Email it to [email protected] with the subject line in screaming caps HOW NOT TO DIE IN THE BUSH. Entries close at midnight, Sunday August 25.
5 The Last Secret Agent by Pippa Latour & Jude Dobson (Allen & Unwin, $37.99)
6 The Road to Chatto Creek by Matt Chisholm (Allen & Unwin, $45)
A free copy of The Chis’s latest memoir of the rural life was up for grabs in last week’s giveaway contest. A very charming extract appeared in ReadingRoom; it was about good bastards who help out other good bastards around the farm because such is the code of good bastards. As such, readers were asked to share a story about a selfless, neighbourly act of a good bastard in their lives.
Quite a few entries were from people who nominated themselves as a good bastard. Vanity is not the code of a good bastard; selflessness is all. And so there were heartwarming stories such as the good bastard who sorted out a neighbour who was redirecting an open drain to run into a woman’s section, and the good bastard (“a heart of gold caregiver”) who turned around the life of a poor old guy who couldn’t get out of bed and had soiled himself.
But the winner is Vivienne of Christchurch, who writes, “It was raining hard. In fact it had been raining all night. In the early morning, we could see the Waimumu stream was rising at a very rapid rate and we had sheep on the wrong side of what was shortly going to become a fast flowing river. John, my husband was recovering from a gallbladder operation three days earlier. In the 1970s, keyhole surgery was either so new or it hadn’t been discovered, at least at Kew Hospital in Invercargill. We were on a party line together with most of our neighbours, but I knew it was no good ringing any of them. They would be in the same predicament as us.  
“Suddenly, down the drive came our neighbour Andrew Copland, Presbyterian to the core, short of speech, always good for a ‘go’ at the government and what was happening with the wool prices. He came to the door, in his gumboots and oilskin, hat jammed on his head, dogs in the back of the truck. He had realised John wouldn’t be able to do anything. We need to shift those sheep, he told me, indicating  the ones on the other side of the rising waters. It took several hours, wading from one side to the other, dogs barking, Andrew shouting orders, sheep anxious. I’ll never forget it. I was a newbie farmer. I was a journalist with the Southland Times. I wrote about these events and interviewed the farmers. Now I was up to my thighs in freezing water, on a rescue mission. Andrew was the Good Bastard, an earthy son of the soil. “
Huzzah to Andrew the good bastard; and primarily in this instance, huzzah to Vivienne. A free copy of  The Road to Chatto Creek by Matt Chisholm is hers.
7 The Life of Dai by Dai Henwood and Jaquie Brown (HarperCollins, $39.99)
8 A Life Less Punishing by Matt Heath (Allen & Unwin, $37.99)
9 Waitohu by Hinemoa Elder (Penguin Random House, $35)
10 Becoming Tangata Tiriti by Avril Bell (Auckland University Press, $29.99)
FICTION
1 The Bookshop Detectives: Dead Girl Gone by Gareth Ward & Louise Ward (Penguin Random House, $38)
2 Home Truths by Charity Norman (Allen & Unwin, $36.99)
3 All That We Know by Shilo Kino (Hachette, $37.99)
4 The Mess We Made by Megan O’Neill (Hachette, $37.99)
5 At the Grand Glacier Hotel by Laurence Fearnley (Penguin Random House, $37)
6 The Axeman’s Carnival by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35)
7 Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $28)
8 The Girl from London by Olivia Spooner (Hachette, $27.99)
9 Kāwai by Monty Soutar (David Bateman, $39.99)
10 Ōkiwi Brown by Cristina Sanders (The Cuba Press, $37)
Historical novel. From a rave review by Louise Ward, in the Napier Courier: “This this tale of dastardly deeds and colonial crime begins, ‘He had the long nose of a merciless man and cheeks sharp as a gravedigger’s spade.’ In Edinburgh in 1829, William Burke and William Hare were arrested for a series of murders, killing to supply bodies for anatomical research. Burke was hanged, and what happened to Hare, who escaped the noose by turning King’s evidence, remains a mystery. In Sanders’ novel, a young woman, a slave on a whalers’ ship, is left behind in Port Nicholson [Wellington] in 1841. She happens across a strange man with sharp cheekbones and a long nose, locally named Ōkiwi Brown after the bay in which he lives … Sanders’ prose is captivating. Its constant action and convincing dialogue immerse the reader in the characters’ personalities and lives.”
Great cover.