Send in the Klunes

TJ Klune is a well-regarded author of fantasy for adults and teens whose greatest success to date arrived with 2020’s The House in the Cerulean Sea, which has sold 625K print copies. Since that pubbed, he’s released books including a YA trilogy and two standalones for adults. This week, Somewhere Beyond the Sea, the “sweet, satisfying sequel to The House in the Cerulean Sea,” per our review, debuts at the #2 spot in the country.

In Clubland

Big Little Lies author Liane Moriarty may not have needed the boost her new book, Here One Moment, likely got from being named the Good Housekeeping Book Club pick for September, but it didn’t hurt, either. It’s the #4 book in the country and a “meticulously plotted tale,” per our starred review, that “rivets even as it thoughtfully contemplates free will, determinism, and the value of living passionately.”

Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer winner for Olive Kitteridge, is the author of this month’s Oprah’s Book Club pick, Tell Me Everything, which “brings together characters from her previous novels for a masterly meditation on storytelling,” according to our starred review. It’s the #6 book in the country.

Featured Creatures

British author Katherine Rundell’s acclaimed middle grade fantasy series starter, Impossible Creatures, has crossed the ocean and landed at the top of our children’s fiction list. The U.S. edition, with interior art by Ashley Mackenzie and an illustrated bestiary and map by Virginia Allyn, is a “realms-roving dazzler,” according to our starred review. The author, a fellow of St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, told PW in a prepub interview, “I want to write books that will offer children bold language. But I also want to offer them a sense that if you have a barrage of language at your disposal, you can use it to create better jokes. And you can use it to articulate your love and your passion in a way that will cut through people’s attention and leave them alert—and perhaps changed.”

NEW & NOTABLE

Confronting the Presidents
Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard
#2 Hardcover Nonfiction, #3 overall
“Political bitterness is in the air,” the coauthors write, by way of framing their “no-spin” assessments of every occupant of the Oval Office, one of two books on the presidency debuting on our lists. “However, the country has been through this before and emerged stronger for it. Will that happen this time? Impossible to predict.”

The Highest Calling
David M. Rubenstein
#4 Hardcover Nonfiction
PBS host Rubenstein interviews U.S. presidents including Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, as well as biographer Ron Chernow, journalist Maggie Haberman, and others, about many of the people who’ve held what “could well be argued to have been (and continue to be) the single most important position in the world.”