Hair Raising

The movie Hair Love, written and directed by Matthew A. Cherry, won the Oscar for best animated short film on February 10. Its success spiked interest in the 2019 picture book adaptation, written by Cherry and illustrated by Vashti Harrison (the Little Leaders books), which our review called “a bighearted ode to individuality and father-daughter collaboration.” The annual flood of Valentine’s Day books crowded the title off our picture book list, but it made a strong showing, with print unit sales up 260% compared with the week before.

Dept. of Meteorology

Jenny Offill’s Weather, which our starred review called “excellently sardonic,” debuts at #12 in hardcover fiction. In the novel, Offill’s third (after Last Things and Dept. of Speculation), she tackles climate change anxiety through the increasingly obsessive worries of a university librarian. In a January interview, Offill told PW that, in writing the book, she wanted to avoid what she sees as the drawbacks of political fiction and the language it uses. “If you’re not particularly drawn to earnestness,” she asked, “how do you make yourself be a more engaged person?” Mission accomplished.

Media Watch

The new Netflix series The Stranger, based on Harlan Coben’s 2015 thriller, dropped January 30. The mass market tie-in, which pubbed two days earlier, debuts on our list at #19. To date, the novel, which our review called “thoroughly entertaining,” has sold 316K print copies in hardcover and mass market.

NEW & NOTABLE

THE POPULIST'S GUIDE TO 2020
Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti
#5 Trade Paper
Ball and Enjeti, cohosts of The Hill TV’s Rising, address the divergent ideas of populism championed by the left and right. “Krystal is a Democrat and Saagar is a Republican,” they write in the introduction, “but we are both first and foremost pro–working class.”

FLORET FARM'S A YEAR IN FLOWERS
Erin Benzakein
#6 Hardcover Nonfiction
The Instagram-famous florist (646K followers) offers a seasonal guide to flower arranging. It follows her 2017 debut, Floret Farm’s Cut Flower Garden, which has sold 68K print copies and which she’s since propagated into a growing field of branded calendars, planners, and notebooks.

All unit sales per NPD BookScan except where noted.