This Week's Bestsellers: May 21, 2018

Their Eyes Are Reading Hurston

The #7 book in the country is Barracoon by journalist, novelist, playwright, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. The previously unpublished manuscript, archived at Howard University, is based on her 1931 interviews with Cudjo Lewis, the last known survivor of the Middle Passage. Lewis, born Oluale Kossula, was abducted in Benin and taken to the U.S. in 1860, more than 50 years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the States. He recounted to Hurston his childhood in Africa, his enslavement, and his life after emancipation. Our starred review said that “Kossola’s story—in the vernacular of his own words—is an invaluable addition to American social, cultural, and political history.”

(See all of this week's bestselling books.)

Rising Tide

One harbinger of summer: a new Mary Kay Andrews “Southern charmer,” or “beach blanket sizzler,” or “enjoyable escape,” as we’ve variously called her beach reads. With Andrews’s latest release—The High Tide Club, #3 in hardcover fiction—first week print unit sales for her novels, which faltered a bit after 2013’s Ladies’ Night, are back on the upswing.

Business Matters

Two of the week’s debuts offer different takes on entrepreneurship. In Venture Girls, #13 in trade paperback, Cristal Glangchai, a scientist and entrepreneur, “lays out what she identifies as the basic skills of entrepreneurship,” our review said, in a “game-changing guide to empowering young women [that] will inspire them and their parents.”

Born to Build by Gallup chairman Jim Clifton and Sangeeta Badal, principal scientist for Gallup’s entrepreneurship and job-creation initiative, lands at #19 in hardcover nonfiction. It teaches, per its subtitle, “how to build a thriving startup, a winning team, new customers and your best life imaginable.”

For more 2018 business titles, see “Working Together, Working Apart.”

New & Notable

Warlight
Michael Ondaatje
#6 Hardcover Fiction
Set in Britain after WWII, this book by the author of The English Patient and, most recently, The Cat’s Table may be, our starred review said, “Ondaatje’s best work yet.”

Endling: The Last
Katherine Applegate
#22 Children’s Frontlist Fiction
The Animorphs series coauthor and 2013 Newbery Medalist for The One and Only Ivan launches a middle grade fantasy trilogy that our starred review called “a suspenseful, tautly drawn quest.”

The Soul of America
Jon Meacham
#2 Hardcover Nonfiction, #2 overall
The Pulitzer Prize–winning presidential biographer (American Lion) examines White House leadership on issues of civil rights and equality in a book our review called “sonorous but shallow.”

Top 10 Overall

All unit sales per Nielsen BookScan except where noted.