This Week's Bestsellers: August 11, 2014

‘Lucky’ Strikes

Amy Bloom’s Lucky Us debuts at #23 on our Hardcover Fiction list with 3,226 print copies sold. This is Bloom’s first novel since 2007’s Away, which has sold 200K copies to date in hardcover and paperback, according to Nielsen BookScan. Lucky Us, which earned a starred review from PW, is set in the 1940s, which Bloom describes as a “big-shouldered, red-lipped” era in U.S. history. In the book, a pair of sisters leave the Midwest to seek fame and fortune, first in Hollywood, then in New York City. Bloom told PW last spring that she doesn’t typically undertake research while writing fiction, because she tends to write about subjects with which she is already familiar. But for Lucky Us, she read first-person accounts of ordinary peoples’ lives during World War II. After coming across a mention of a teenager whose German parents were interned by the U.S. government, Bloom adapted the incident for her novel. “Luck is both good and bad,” Bloom said in the interview. “Life’s an endless roll of the dice and there’s not much you can do about it.”—Claire Kirch

Spy Master

In an age of widespread government and corporate surveillance, spy stories both real and fictional continue to fascinate readers. Ben Macintyre’s latest, A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, about a British double agent who defected to the Soviet Union in 1963, is #4 on our Hardcover Nonfiction list with 7,011 print units sold. Those sales figures could take off like an SR-71, as Macintyre’s most recent book, 2012’s Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, has sold about 88K in hardcover and paper. He’s built a solid reputation, receiving starred reviews from PW for both titles, and A Spy was given a cover review in the New York Times Book Review; it also landed the lead review in the New Yorker. Macintyre lives in the U.K. and hasn’t toured stateside for the book, but Today Show viewers may have seen A Spy Among Friends recommended by bestselling thriller writer Daniel Silva.—Alex Crowley

‘Fortune’ Found

Landing at #22 on our Hardcover Fiction list is Daisy Goodwin’s The Fortune Hunter, the follow-up to her 2011 debut, The American Heiress. That book, which, like The Fortune Hunter, examines Victorian-era social relationships, has sold more than 250K print units according to Nielsen BookScan and is still going strong: last week, Heiress sold more than 3,000 copies in paperback. PW’s review called The Fortune Hunter—whose plot abounds with fox hunting, as well as plenty of longing—a “beautifully written page-turner.” Goodwin, who lives in London and is a past chair of the Orange Prize judging panel, is also a TV producer and the editor of numerous poetry anthologies. But she’s clearly found her audience two novels in; if sales of The American Heiress are any indication—the paperback has outsold the hardcover tenfold—one might expect Hunter’s fortunes to keep rising.—Gabe Habash

Regional Bestsellers

What’s America reading? A whole lot of YA novels. According to sales data from Nielsen BookScan, the bestselling print books in seven of eight regions are young adult novels, with Veronica Roth’s Four being the most popular, taking four regions, followed by Gayle Forman, whose If I Stay was tops in two, and John Green, whose The Fault in Our Stars is the most popular book in the northeast. The only adult title to take a region was Dinesh D’Souza’s America: Imagine a World Without Her, which was the bestselling title in the Pacific region. Here’s how the bestsellers break down, coast to coast.

Top 10 Overall