Leisure Suits
Rashad Bilal and Troy Millings land at #2 on our hardcover nonfiction list with You Deserve to Be Rich, which our review called a “practical debut manual.” The duo, cohosts of the Earn Your Leisure podcast, bring “a welcome recognition of the financial hardships faced by Black individuals,” per our review, such as discriminatory housing policies that, the authors write, “have kept Black families from getting the credit and loans that serve as the backbone of financial stability.”
Girl Power
Horror writer Grady Hendrix’s latest novel, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, debuts at the top of our hardcover fiction list. It’s set in 1970 at a home for pregnant teenagers, and while “the fantastical horror elements are uncharacteristically few,” according to our review, “Hendrix perfectly captures the girls’ youth and loss of innocence, as well as the power of their friendships.” The story took root after Hendrix learned that two of his relatives had been sent to such homes as teens. “I wondered what it must be like to have a child and be told to never talk about them again,” he told PW in a prepub interview. “It made me angry, and I decided to write a book about it.”
Age Appropriate
At #6 on our hardcover nonfiction list, Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old is the actor and model’s “candid memoir-in-essays about aging in the public eye,” according to our review. “Though most of the book deals seriously with the contradiction of feeling ‘personally empowered and systematically dismissed’ in middle age, Shields also demonstrates a flair for comedy, including in a hilarious, self-deprecating saga about peeing her pants while being transported to the hospital in an ambulance with Bradley Cooper.” The upshot? “Shields encourages women of all ages to reclaim their power. It’s hard not to be inspired.”
Lawyer Up
Scott Turow’s third legal thriller featuring former Kindle County prosecutor Rusty Sabich, Presumed Guilty, is #12 on our hardcover fiction list. Per our starred review, “Turow keeps readers guessing about the truth, impressively maintaining suspense across the book’s hefty page count.” Readers last encountered Sabich in 2010’s Innocent, and first met him in 1987, when then Chicago attorney Turow made his fiction debut with Presumed Innocent. FSG paid more for it than it had before for a first novel—$200K—and Sydney Pollack snapped up film rights for $1 million. PW’s review at the time said the book “may become a literary crime classic.” Turow has gone on to publish a dozen-plus novels and has seen his work adapted multiple times. Not bad for an author who told PW some 38 years ago that he’d thought writing would remain “a private passion.”
