No Stranger to the List
Liane Moriarty’s latest, Nine Perfect Strangers, is the #7 book in the country. Her popularity predates the success of her best-known novel, Big Little Lies, which Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon acquired screen rights to just after its publication. 2013’s The Husband’s Secret, for instance, sold 189K print copies before Lies was released. Anticipation for her new books has been building, as first-week print unit sales show.
(See all of this week's bestselling books.)
The Best Words
The #1 book in the country is Whose Boat Is This Boat?, a parody picture book by the staff of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. It’s “comprised solely of comments spoken by President Donald J. Trump in the wake of Hurricane Florence on September 19, 2018, in New Bern, North Carolina,” according to the flap copy; The Late Show is donating 100% of its proceeds to charity.
It’s been a good year for children’s book parodies from late night talk shows: A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, a Last Week Tonight with John Oliver production whose proceeds also went to charity, is the 11th bestselling book of the year to date.
Typecasting
The paperback edition of Tom Hanks’s 2017 short fiction collection, Uncommon Type, pubbed in September and in the weeks since has appeared sporadically on our trade paper list. It got a big boost this week from the author’s appearance at Oregon’s Portland Book Festival; it returns to our list at #12, with the Portland area accounting for more than half of the week’s print unit sales.
New & Notable
Homebody
Joanna Gaines
#2 Hardover Nonfiction, #3 overall
Just six months after the publication of Magnolia Table, the bestselling book of the year to date, Gaines releases her second title of 2018, an interior decorating guide.
Past Tense
Lee Child
#1 Hardcover Fiction, #4 overall
“Child’s spare prose continues to set a very high bar,” our starred review said of the 23rd Jack Reacher novel, which sees the ex–military policeman visiting his late father’s rural New Hampshire birthplace, a setup that lets fans discover “more of this enduring character’s roots.”
Top 10 Overall
| Rank | Title | Author | Imprint | Units |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Whose Boat Is This Boat? | The Late Show | Simon & Schuster | 209,032 |
| 2 | The Meltdown (Diary of a Wimpy Kid #13) | Jeff Kinney | Amulet | 149,928 |
| 3 | Homebody | Joanna Gaines | Harper Design | 93,828 |
| 4 | Past Tense | Lee Child | Delacorte | 69,825 |
| 5 | The Reckoning | John Grisham | Doubleday | 50,398 |
| 6 | The Wonky Donkey | Smith/Cowley | Scholastic | 49,267 |
| 7 | Nine Perfect Strangers | Liane Moriarty | Flatiron | 36,414 |
| 8 | Girl, Wash Your Face | Rachel Hollis | Nelson | 33,919 |
| 9 | Every Breath | Nicholas Sparks | Grand Central | 27,754 |
| 10 | Dark Sacred Night | Michael Connelly | Little, Brown | 25,828 |
All unit sales per Nielsen BookScan except where noted.
