Out, dame spot

Polkinghorne, the book, is looking like a bestseller and quacking like a bestseller. It's been No 1 at Unity Books, No 1 at Time Out bookstore, but only as far as No 2 to date in the NielsenIQ BookScan national nonfiction charts. Damn Dame Jacinda Ardern and her memoir A Different Kind of Power for hogging the No 1 spot week after week. I stand with the conspiracy theorists: she is ruining my life. She has placed my Polkinghorne book in a kind of lockdown. I would love it to get to No 1 but her book is parked in the way, and what's so good about her book, anyway? So it tells the story of one of the world's most remarkable and inspirational leaders. So it elevates the human spirit. But nothing much happens in it, whereas every page of my book is filled with incident, none of it uplifting.

- By Steve Braunias

Polkinghorne, the book, is on tour. I am giving an author talk in Parnell next week, Christchurch at the end of the month, Queenstown in October. The world tour is set for 2026. All I need are the invitations. I can see London and Paris going the way of my recent author talk at the Devonport Library – standing room only, mobbed at the book-signing queue, a literary event to compare with other great nights in world writing, such as the famous poetry reading at The Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7, 1955, when Allen Ginsberg gave his first public performance of Howl. My book, too, wrote of minds destroyed by madness.