Movie Watch
French Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi masterpiece is, err, Dune well at the box office, and its film tie-ins are Dune pretty well themselves. The film’s trade paperback tie-in, which was released on September 21, is #6 on that list, and the mass market paperback, which published a week later, is #9 on the mass market list. Expect a repeat in 2023, when the recently announced sequel film is due to hit theaters.
Smash of the ‘Titan’
One of the bestselling manga series of all time, Hajime Isayama’s Harvey Award–winning Attack on Titan, wraps up its 34-volume run as the #5 book in the country, with its latest installment easily hitting #1 on our trade paperback list in its first week. It lands just a few months before the immensely popular anime adaptation’s final season premieres its second part. Its nearly 28,000 copies sold is almost double the last book’s first-week numbers—which themselves were almost triple those of the book before that. That trend goes back at least through Attack on Titan, Vol. 30—one more reminder that manga mania in the U.S. is only getting bigger.
Oh Lucy!
Elizabeth Strout’s Oh William!, the third novel in her Amgash series starring Lucy Barton, debuts at #8 on our hardcover fiction list. The book is from Strout’s second-bestselling series, after the Olive Kitteridge series. “It’s not for nothing that Strout has been compared to Hemingway,” our starred review said of the Pulitzer Prize winner’s latest, which it called an “illuminating character-driven saga” handled “with a mastery of restraint and often in spare, true sentences.”
NEW & NOTABLE
THE JUDGE'S LIST
John Grisham
#1 Hardcover Fiction, #1 overall
Lacy Stoltz returns in perennial bestseller Grisham’s latest thriller, in which the investigator, publisher Doubleday said, “follows the trail of a serial killer, and closes in on a shocking suspect—a sitting judge.”
THE PIONEER WOMAN COOKS: SUPER EASY!
Ree Drummond
#1 Hardcover Nonfiction, #2 overall
The bestselling author and Food Network star returns to shelves with a new cookbook focused on quick and easy meals. Highlights, publisher Morrow notes, include recipes for a butter pecan french toast skillet, buffalo chicken “tot”chos, white lasagna soup, and broccoli-cheddar stromboli.