Out of Obscurity
The biggest hardcover nonfiction debut this week, at #4, is Atlas Obscura by Joshua Foer and Dylan Thuras, cofounders of the website of the same name, and Ella Morton, associate editor at the site. The book and website guide readers to unusual locales around the world; here’s a by-the-numbers look.
Website founded: 2009
Twitter followers: 103K
Facebook fans: 576.3K
Latitude, longitude of the Atlas Obscura office: 40.729571, -73.958291
Number of places profiled in the book: 700
First-week print-unit sales: 11K
(See all of this week's bestselling books.)
Found in Translation
Death’s End by Cixin Liu, translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu, debuts at #20 in Hardcover Fiction and closes out the author’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy of hard science fiction novels. The first, The Three-Body Problem, won the 2015 Hugo Award for best novel and has sold 22.8K copies in hardcover, 26.6K in trade paper. The second, The Dark Forest, has sold 9,682 in hardcover; the trade paperback has sold 3,108 copies since it pubbed in August. First-week print-unit sales for the latest book are almost triple those for the first two titles.
Movie Watch
The Tom Hanks and Felicity Jones mystery-thriller Inferno opens in theaters October 28. It’s based on the 2013 Dan Brown novel of the same name, which sold 1.4 million copies in hardcover and another 433.7K in trade paper. The tie-in edition debuts this week in mass market at #7, with 9,643 print units sold.
New & Notable
Home
Harlan Coben
#1 Hardcover Fiction, #4 overall
Coban’s 11th thriller featuring sports agent Myron Bolitar “ends with a reveal that few, if any, will anticipate,” our review said.
Designing Your Life
Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
#5 Hardcover Nonfiction
A New York Times feature and other mainstream-media coverage boosted the profile of Burnett and Evans, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Stanford University professors, who propose that by thinking like a designer, one can achieve a fulfilling life.
The Seasoned Life
Ayesha Curry
#8 Hardcover Nonfiction
The author, a self-taught chef, a blogger, and the wife of NBA star Stephen Curry, has 4.2 million Instagram followers and, now, a bestselling cookbook to her name.
Beautiful
Mark D. Sikes
#25 Hardcover Nonfiction
Interior designer Sikes, who has been featured in Vogue, House Beautiful, and elsewhere, has 63.1K Instagram followers and counts Reese Witherspoon among his clients.
Top 10 Overall
| Rank | Title | Author | Imprint | Units |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Killing the Rising Sun | O’Reilly/Dugard | Holt | 100,017 |
| 2 | Harry Potter and the Cursed Child | J.K. Rowling et al. | Scholastic/Levine | 52,682 |
| 3 | The Girl on the Train | Paula Hawkins | Riverhead | 49,408 |
| 4 | Home | Harlan Coben | Dutton | 33,396 |
| 5 | The Girl on the Train (mass market movie tie-in) | Paula Hawkins | Riverhead | 29,439 |
| 6 | The Girl on the Train (trade paper movie tie-in) | Paula Hawkins | Riverhead | 26,229 |
| 7 | Little Blue Truck’s Halloween | Schertle/McElmurry | HMH | 25,830 |
| 8 | Blue | Danielle Steel | Dell | 21,860 |
| 9 | Commonwealth | Ann Patchett | Harper | 18,111 |
| 10 | Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children | Ransom Riggs | Quirk | 17,840 |
All unit sales per Nielsen BookScan except where noted.
