TikTok Boom
Leather & Lark, the second entry in Brynne Weaver’s Ruinous Love trilogy, is the #2 book in the country. In December, Zando released the first installment of the series, Butcher & Blackbird, which Weaver had self-published that August. It found its fans on BookTok, and this week moves up two notches on our trade paperback list to #8. Leather & Lark is building on that success.
Holiday Road
Even in the GPS age, weekend navigators find something reassuringly tangible about a paper map. To wit: the latest National Geographic Road Atlas, which is the #5 book in the country. NatGeo typically chooses a particular focal point when it releases an updated map book; a recent spiral-bound road atlas, for instance, highlights 100 outdoor adventures destinations as well as 24 national parks across all 50 states plus Canada, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. The new release, which covers the same territory in a more compact, foldable form, details 20 picturesque drives including Wyoming’s Centennial Scenic Byway, Cherry Orchards Drive in Michigan, and a rural route through the Kentucky heartland.
Cold Comfort
Jacqueline Winspear says goodbye to Maisie Dobbs with The Comfort of Ghosts, the 18th book in the series and #9 on our hardcover fiction list. In her final outing, “the gumshoe psychologist confronts postwar chaos in 1945 London,” according to our review. “Winspear renders the physical and emotional wreckage of postwar England with her usual sensitivity, and though the narrative gets a bit bogged down in reminiscences about Maisie’s previous exploits, the author’s fans are unlikely to mind. It’s a fitting, heartwarming conclusion to a beloved series.”
NEW & NOTABLE
Eruption
Michael Crichton and James Patterson
#1 Hardcover Fiction, #1 overall
“Working from a partial manuscript discovered in Crichton’s archives, Patterson delivers a surprisingly seamless posthumous collaboration with the Jurassic Park author, who died in 2008,” per our review. “Character comes second to plot, but the plot is suitably breakneck and plausible.”
When the Sea Came Alive
Garrett M. Graff
#8 Hardcover Nonfiction
“Pulitzer finalist Graff draws from more than 700 eyewitness accounts for this gripping and propulsive history of the D-Day invasion,” according to our starred review. The author delivers “a panoramic view of an astonishingly intricate plan coming to fruition.”
