There's a nice bit of symmetry regarding the career of acclaimed novelist Anita Shreve—All He Ever Wanted, which lands today on our fiction list following its April 15 laydown, is the author's 10th novel and her fifth national bestseller. Right from the start (Eden Close, in 1989), Shreve's novels—Strange Fits of Passion, Where or When, Resistance, The Weight of Water—garnered glowing reviews and a steadily growing readership. Then in March of 1999, Oprah chose the Back Bay trade paper edition of The Pilot's Wife for her on-air book club, and sales skyrocketed. That book spent 50 weeks on PW's charts, and was made into a much-lauded TV movie starring Christine Lahti. Following a hefty 270,000 first printing, Little, Brown (the publisher of Shreve's last six books) is running national TV ads for All He Ever Wanted (a first for Shreve)—in New York, L.A., Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and nationally on the Oxygen and WE cable networks. Meanwhile, the Back Bay trade paperback of Shreve's previous work, Sea Glass, continues to perk along—it spent 12 weeks on PW's list, with 620,000 copies in print after four trips to press.
With reporting by Dick Donahue
