The 2025 Whitcoulls Top 100 Books List is announced today and with it the news that an astonishing 25 percent of titles chosen are in the fantasy genre. Thirty-one of the titles featured are new books and twenty books on the Top 100 feature writers from Aotearoa New Zealand.

Whitcoulls Book Manager Joan Mackenzie says, “the predominance of fantasy books voted for this year captures the zeitgeist; they’re what so many people are reading at the moment and purchasing instore or online.”

Mackenzie is particularly pleased to see readers voting more New Zealand writers into the 2025 Top 100 – one-fifth – an increase of five from last year. Interestingly, eleven of these are non-fiction books while the other nine are novels.

“Notable among these are Vanya Insull’s cookbook Everyday Comfort Food at #12; Rachel Paris’s novel See How They Fall at #17; and non-fiction book, Fungi by Liv Sisson at #25. Publishing royalty, Catherine Chidgey, Becky Manawatu and Jenny Pattrick also make an appearance, as do local celebrities, Dai Henwood and Matt Heath,” says Mackenzie.

Check out the full twenty books by Aotearoa's authors that feature on the list in our handy reading list below.