Igniting a Firestorm

BookTok sensation Rebecca Yarros has the #1, #2, and #7 books in the country. At the top, Iron Flame is the sequel to Fourth Wing; the latter, which pubbed in April, has maintained a consistently high position on our list and also appears this week in a limited-release edition with a refreshed cover, new endpapers, sprayed edges, and two bonus chapters. Numerous complaints about misprints in the new edition and in Iron Flame—upside down, out of order, and missing pages, for starters—prompted the publisher, Entangled, to issue a statement and commit to resolving the issues.

Dear Mr. Fantasy

Christopher Paolini has the #4 book in the country with the YA novel Murtagh, which picks up one year after the events of the previous installment in the author’s Inheritance Cycle, 2011’s Inheritance. Paolini self-published the first book in the series, Eragon, in 2002 at age 18; Knopf released it the following year. Since completing Inheritance, the author has published related works as well as books for adults, beginning with To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, but Murtagh seems to be the book fans were waiting for.

All the Right Moves

Popular STEM romance novelist Ali Hazelwood makes “a seamless transition into YA romance,” per our starred review, with Check & Mate, “a feminist rendering that sheds light on sexist views within the world of competitive chess, all while spinning a swoon-worthy romance.” It lands at #4 on our children’s fiction list. In a conversation hosted by PW, Hazelwood told fellow YA author Alex Aster, whose Nightbane debuts at #6, that she’d always wanted to write a chess-centric book, but was concerned the subject might be too quiet. “I was so happy The Queen’s Gambit came out,” she said, “because it was proof that people were interested in chess as a sport, and in chess players as characters.”

NEW & NOTABLE

MY NAME IS BARBRA
Barbra Streisand
#2 Hardcover Nonfiction,
#6 overall
Our starred review deemed this long-awaiting memoir “a gift”: “Utilizing her own journals, her mother’s scrapbooks, and interviews with colleagues and friends, the decorated singer and actor delivers a thoroughly enjoyable survey of her life and career that—even at nearly 1,000 pages—never overstays its welcome.”

BOOKSHOPS & BONEDUST
Travis Baldree
#1 Trade Paperback
The “cozy standalone sequel to Legends & Lattes shows that even a battle-hungry orc can find happiness in life’s simple pleasures,” per our review. “Baldree’s formula of placing low-stakes stories in high-fantasy settings remains good fun.”