Which books will make the Bookety Top 100 each year, and which one will come out on top, is always a fun surprise. So once the votes have been counted and the final list is locked in, we like to sit down and look a little closer at the results. Here’s what we found in this year’s Top 100.

The Winner!

Is it surprising to see Wild Dark Shore in the number one spot? Absolutely not. It has had an epic rise, shooting up the list from #62 last year, when it made its first appearance only a few months after being released, to #1 this year. You can really see the impact this book has had over the past year and a bit for it to now be sitting in the top spot.

This eerie, atmospheric, thriller-esque mystery is set on the fictional Shearwater Island and follows the Salt family, the last remaining family on the island, whose isolated existence is interrupted when a mysterious woman washes up on the rocks. Who is she, where has she come from, and what does she want?

Charlotte McConaghy has spoken about struggling badly with Wild Dark Shore in its early stages. She wrote the first 25,000 words four times and deleted them four times before deciding she needed to experience the sort of landscape she was trying to write about for herself. That meant travelling to Macquarie Island, the remote subantarctic island that inspired Shearwater Island. Getting there involved a two-week ocean voyage, with essentially one boat going at one time of year. There was also the small matter of McConaghy having a 16-month-old baby she couldn’t leave behind, so she took him with her.

On the island, she encountered millions of penguins and seabirds, seals and an almost impossibly untouched landscape, alongside the remnants of its brutal history of wildlife exploitation. The trip helped her realise that the novel needed to be a mystery and upon her return home, she finally understood the structure and wrote the first draft in a little over a month.

Since then, Wild Dark Shore has become an international bestseller, won the 2025 Dymocks Book of the Year and the 2026 Indie Book of the Year, and was longlisted for both the Women’s Prize and Stella Prize. And now it can add another extremely prestigious accolade to the list.

Previous Winners

Both of our previous number ones are sticking around, with 2024 winner Auē still sitting very comfortably at #5, while last year’s winner Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow comes in at #10.

It’s a five-way tie for most listed author!

There isn’t one single most-listed author this year. Instead, five authors share the title, with three books apiece.

Catherine Chidgey has The Book of Guilt at #21, The Axeman’s Carnival at #32 and Pet at #96. Kristin Hannah has The Women at #11, The Nightingale at #13 and The Great Alone at #30. Taylor Jenkins Reid has Atmosphere at #7, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo at #18 and Daisy Jones and the Six at #45. Ann Patchett has Tom Lake at #37, Whistler at #38 and The Dutch House at #51. And Fredrik Backman has My Friends at #24, Beartown at #58 and A Man Called Ove at #70.

Not only are there five authors tied for the most appearances on this year’s list, but they all have three books each, meaning just five authors take up 15% of the entire Top 100. It really speaks to the power of finding an author you love and then wanting to read everything they write.

Eight books from Aotearoa authors

There are eight books by Aotearoa authors in this year’s Top 100: Becky Manawatu’s Auē, Rebecca K Reilly’s Greta & Valdin, Josie Shapiro’s Everything Is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, Saraid de Silva’s Amma, Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss, and three books from Catherine Chidgey: The Book of Guilt, The Axeman’s Carnival and Pet.

Which also gives Chidgey another distinction: she is the only Aotearoa author with three books on this year’s list. The Axeman’s Carnival has actually climbed steadily over all three lists, from #52 in 2024 to #43 in 2025 and now #32. The Book of Guilt has made an even bigger leap, from #78 last year to #21 this year.

Some numbers for all the data nerds out there

72% of the books on this year’s list are written by women, while 8% are by Aotearoa authors. There are 29 new entries this year, while 58 books have now appeared on the list for three years running.

The oldest book on the list is Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, first published in 1813, making it 213 years old and still sitting very comfortably at #26. At the other end, the most recently published books are Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize-longlisted John of John and Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say, both released on 5 May 2026, meaning they had only been out for a matter of weeks when voting opened and still managed to make the Top 100.

The shortest novel on the list is Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, at around 128 pages, while the longest is Terry Hayes’ I Am Pilgrim, coming in at 912 pages.

The list giveth and the list taketh away

The Top 100 can be, well, a little fickle. And it’s important to remember that the book industry is heavily trend based, both in new releases and in backlist titles. Everything I Know About Love dropped from #17 last year to #92 this year, while To Kill a Mockingbird went from #19 to #79 and Where the Crawdads Sing from #15 to #64.

But probably the most notable trend on last year’s Top 100 was the rise of romantasy onto readers’ bookshelves, and therefore onto the list. Fourth Wing jumped from #68 in 2024 all the way to #3 in 2025. This year, however, the genre is mostly absent, with Fourth Wing dropping back to #72. Although, with a spate of long-awaited new releases due to hit shelves over the next few months from the likes of Rebecca Yarros and Sarah J. Maas, we wouldn’t be surprised to see romantasy make a comeback next year.

How did our predictions go…

Not amazing it would seem… last year we made ten predictions about books we thought might find their way onto the next Top 100 and Lily King’s Heart the Lover, Florence Knapp’s The Names and Fredrik Backman’s My Friends are the three that made it. But we couldn’t quite predict how well they would do. Heart the Lover debuted at #2, The Names at #3 and My Friends at #24.

Next year we are predicting that…

There are plenty of big books arriving over the next few months, but these are the ones we’re putting our money on: Partita by Barbara Kingsolver, American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee, The Starving Bride by Catherine Chidgey, Fruit Fly by Josh Silver, The Valley by Asher Emanuel, Under Story by Chloe Benjamin, Switzy by Emma Cline, Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel, Stations by Louise Kennedy and Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus.