Keeping Up with Jones
Our starred review called Stephen Graham Jones’s The Buffalo Hunter Hunter an “ingenious, weird western reimagining of the vampire tale.” It lands at #3 on our hardcover fiction list, with first-week print unit sales more than double those of his previous horror novel.
Hungry for More
Suzanne Collins has the #1 book in the country—by a factor of 10—with Sunrise on the Reaping, her second Hunger Games prequel. It’s set 40 years after the events of the first prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which has sold 1.8 million copies in hardcover since its 2020 publication. (Two trade paper editions have sold another 860K copies.) Sunrise is a “brutal tale of compassion and rage,” per our starred review, “and a frank examination of propaganda and tragedy.”
Round Robin
Millions of fans on TikTok and Instagram follow Texas trial lawyer Jefferson Fisher for his advice on effective communication and handling difficult discussions. His debut, The Next Conversation, distills these lessons into three rules—Say it with control. Say it with confidence. Say it to connect.—and nabs the #2 spot on our hardcover nonfiction list. Fisher and at least two other authors on that list have all hosted one another on their popular podcasts: Mel Robbins, whose self-help title The Let Them Theory is holding steady at the #1 spot, and Lewis Howes, who, with the personal finance primer Make Money Easy, lands at #13.
Writing Wrongs
James Patterson and J.D. Barker top our hardcover fiction list with The Writer, in which NYPD detective Declan Shaw investigates bestselling true crime author Denise Morrow for murder. “Shaw and Morrow’s cat-and-mouse game quickly becomes preposterous, but the narrative only gains steam as one gonzo plot twist follows the next,” according to our review. “Though goofy, it’s loads of fun.” In Patti Callahan Henry’s The Story She Left Behind, #11 on our hardcover fiction list, children’s book illustrator Clara Harrington searches for her mother, renowned children’s book author Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham, who disappeared decades earlier. “Henry imbues her story with lush descriptions [and] intriguing linguistic puzzles as Clara attempts to decipher Bronwyn’s dictionary of the invented language that was central to her work,” our review said. “Readers will be riveted.”
