#1 Fans
Three new releases top their respective lists, including Jeff Kinney’s latest Wimpy Kid volume, Hot Mess, #1 on our children’s fiction list and the #1 book in the country. Romance author Ana Huang, whose series include Twisted and Kings of Sin, takes the field with The Striker, set in the world of English Premier League footy. The Gods of the Game sports romance series launch is #1 on our trade paperback list and #2 overall. And, with In Too Deep, “Lee Child hands the Jack Reacher franchise over to his brother, Andrew,” according to our review. “The series is in good hands,” and the book is #1 on our hardcover fiction list, #3 in the country.
TikTok Boom
Laurie Gilmore’s The Christmas Tree Farm, the #6 book in the country, continues in the seasonal small-town spirit of 2023’s The Pumpkin Spice Café and September’s The Cinnamon Bun Book Store, both BookTok faves. Sales of the first book took off around the release of the second, and those two books sold a combined 24K print copies this week.
Holiday Bonus
The #9 book in the country, Spectacular, is book four in Stephanie Garber’s YA romantasy series Caraval. It’s a Christmas novella and appears five years after book three, Finale. The first three installments have sold a combined 971K print copies in hardcover and trade paper. Caraval also spawned a spinoff trilogy set in the same world, Once Upon a Broken Heart; those books have sold 481K print copies in hardcover alone.
NEW & NOTABLE
Brothers
Alex Van Halen
#2 Hardcover Nonfiction, #5 overall
“We shared a last name. And we shared a band,” Van Halen writes in this affectionate tribute to his brother, guitar hero Eddie (whom he called Ed), who died of complications due to throat cancer in 2020.
Patriot
Alexei Navalny
#4 Hardcover Nonfiction, #10 overall
Russian dissident Navalny died under suspicious circumstances in an Arctic penal colony in February; his widow saw his memoir to fruition. “Navalny faces demoralizing injustice with good grace, enduring it with simple appeals to decency and poetic evocations of his homeland. It’s a stirring final testament.
