Different Strokes
Ali Hazelwood tops our trade paperback list with Deep End, “a kinky, character-driven new adult romance” involving collegiate swimmers, per our review. First-week print unit sales put the new novel on the highest platform of the winners’ podium.
Making His Bones
TJ Klune debuted in 2011 with Bear, Otter, and the Kid. He got his start with Dreamspinner Press, a queer romance indie, and his own imprint, BOATK Books. Then Tor snapped up 2020’s The House in the Cerulean Sea, which has gone on to sell 703K print copies. As well as releasing new Klune books, Tor has begun reprinting older titles, including The Bones Beneath My Skin, which the author self-pubbed in 2018. It lands at #7 on our hardcover fiction list.
Roam If You Want To
A pair of new releases speak to a widespread desire to be, well, anywhere else. On the Hippie Trail, #4 on our hardcover nonfiction list, is a lightly edited version of the diaries Rick Steves kept in 1978—before smartphones, before social media influencers—when he and his friend Gene Openshaw ventured overland from Istanbul to Kathmandu. Four spots below, Brian “The Points Guy” Kelly teaches readers How to Win at Travel by making the most of loyalty programs, nabbing free flights and upgrades, and more: “Maximize the ecosystem and leverage it to your advantage,” he writes. Somebody pass the hookah, please.
Wings of Desire
At #3 on our children’s fiction list, Allison Saft’s Wings of Starlight reboots the Disney Fairies franchise, which includes several middle grade titles, for YA romantasy fans. (Tinkerbell, we hardly knew ye.) Fairies—or faeries—also figure into the #15 book, Sasha Peyton Smith’s The Rose Bargain. It’s the first in a duology set in an alternate Victorian England and hinges on a competition to win the hand of a fae prince. “Smith delves beyond familiar palace intrigue and mystical romance to explore themes of classism, complex family dynamics, gender disparity, and the unbreakable bond of sisterhood in this compelling fantasy,” according to our starred review. “A simmering romantic plot is sharpened by searing comparisons of girlhood and war—a Maypole dance is a blood sport and readying for a ball is preparing for battle.” Sounds about right.
