TikTok Boom

Lynn Painter debuted in 2021 with the YA rom-com Better Than the Movies. “It sold, but it wasn’t this major thing,” she told PW. “It was not until a year later, when it was just hitting paperback, that Haley Pham, who is on BookTok and a huge YouTuber, said it
was her favorite book.” The novel went on to sell 485K print copies and has since spawned a sequel, Nothing Like the Movies, the #8 book in the country this week.

In Clubland

October book club picks include the latest Barnes & Noble and Read with Jenna selection, The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich, which lands at #11 on our hardcover fiction list. Our starred review called it “a captivating tale of love and everyday life amid environmental upheaval and the 2008 financial crisis.” Good Morning America Book Club tapped A Song to Drown Rivers, #14 on our hardcover fiction list and YA author Ann Liang’s “propulsive adult debut,” according to our review. The GMA YA Book Club, meanwhile, chose Sabaa Tahir’s Heir, #11 on our children’s fiction list and an “enrapturing spin-off series,” per our starred
review, from the author’s Ember in the Ashes quartet.

Weird Science

Actor and comedian Kate McKinnon lands at #3 on our children’s fiction list with The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science, illustrated by Alfredo Cáceres. It’s a “ludicrous and unpredictable female-centered romp, a series-starting debut in the tradition of Daniel Pinkwater and Dav Pilkey,” according to our review. McKinnon distilled the book’s theme in a prepub interview with PW: “The thing that everyone is telling you is too weird or too much or too impossible or too silly—that is the thing that will save you and will help heal the world.”

NEW & NOTABLE

Be Ready When the Luck Happens
Ina Garten
#1 Hardcover Nonfiction, #1 overall
After 13 cookbooks, the Barefoot Contessa has written a memoir, which opens with her unlikely first step—encouraged, as ever, by husband Jeffrey—into the professional culinary world: “Oh shit! I just bought a specialty food store!”

The Message
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#3 Hardcover Nonfiction, #7 overall
In what our starred review called “an incendiary shot fired over the bow of America’s mainstream journalistic establishment,” Coates “delivers an incandescent rebuke of journalists—including himself—for parroting ideological narratives that reify Palestine’s oppression.”