Scythe Matters

Brynne Weaver rounds out her Ruinous Love trilogy, about rival serial killers with the hots for each other, with Scythe & Sparrow, which swoops to the top of our trade paperback list. Leather & Lark, the second installment of the BookTok-beloved dark rom-com series, pubbed in June and returns to our list at #15.

Fae Accompli

Debuting at #4 on our hardcover nonfiction list, Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales is Heather Fawcett’s third fantasy set in an alternate early 20th century and centered on the title character, a Cambridge professor in the fictional field of dryadology, the study of faeries. In a recent Substack post, Fawcett named some of the books that inspired her series, including Yeats’s Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, Janet Taylor Lisle’s Afternoon of the Elves, and Susan Cooper’s The Boggart.

Good connection

Since making her debut with 2023’s Lovelight Farms, B.K. Borison has become known for her contemporary rom-coms set in the fictional small town of Inglewild, Md. After four Lovelight books, she heads to the big city—Baltimore—for First-Time Caller, #6 on our trade paperback list. It’s a “delightful contemporary that pairs a burned-out radio host and a luckless-in-love single mother,” according to our review. The Sleepless in Seattle–inspired story launches Borison’s Heartstrings series with her strongest first-week print unit sales to date. Next up, an even bigger departure: October’s paranormal holiday rom-com Good Spirits, starring the Ghost of Christmas Past.

Group Effort

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry, a “rousing treatise on the benefits of communal values,” per our review, pubbed in November and has been on our hardcover nonfiction list ever since. In 13 weeks, the book’s release-to-date sales have surpassed 150K print units. Kimmerer, a MacArthur-winning botanist and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, is best known for 2013’s Braiding Sweetgrass, which our review praised for its “deep compassion and graceful prose.” That title, a word-of-mouth hit that took six years to cross the 150K mark, has now sold 1.1 million print copies; a 2022 YA edition has sold another 54K print copies. The author reaches out to a younger readership with the forthcoming picture book Bud Finds Her Gift, illustrated by Naoko Stoop and slated for fall.