Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, May 3, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2025 Circana.

(Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2025, PWxyz LLC.)

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. "Great Big ...Read more

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, April 26, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2025 Circana.

(Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2025, PWxyz LLC.)

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. "Great Big ...Read more

Lydia Millet has published more than a dozen novels and two collections of stories; her latest, “Atavists,” is a bit of both — a novel in stories, a deliciously digestible and of-the-moment read.

Each chapter of the collection from the “Dinosaurs” novelist gives us a look into the lives of a group of neighbors in Southern California. ...Read more

Rare’s the author who invents her own literary language, but Jo Harkin has accomplished just that.

Her dazzling, jocular novel “The Pretender” recounts the journey of one John Collan, from his anonymous boyhood in a rural village to a claim, as Edward Plantagenet, on the English monarchy. Never has a peasant risen so far, so fast.

Set in...Read more

Seeking succor when the world seems to be closing in on you is a quintessentially human habit. Some people do it by gorging on comfort food like macaroni and cheese, others choose drink, or drugs, or gardening, or the warmth of a puppy.

I always know when I'm feeling blue, because I feel the gravitational pull of my long shelf of P.G. Wodehouse...Read more

Like a modern-day Henry David Thoreau, writer and self-reliance guru Tamara Dean set out early in this century to make a home in the country and to live simply there.

The acres of choice for her enviable homestead (strangers would pull over at random and ask to take a look around) were in the Driftless Area of southwest Wisconsin. There lies a ...Read more

May is seeming more like October, and that’s not about the drizzle or the chill.

The month is packed with potentially huge books, in a way we’d expect peak fall to be. That peak didn’t materialize last autumn because publishers were holding off on releasing promising titles in the heat of the election cycle. Apparently, they saved them ...Read more

A 400-year-old Shakespeare mystery has gotten a major shake-up.

In a paper published in the journal Shakespeare on April 24 — the day after the Bard’s 461st birthday, if you happened to have candles and an extremely large cake on hand — Professor Matthew Steggle, Chair in Early Modern English Literature at University of Bristol, presented...Read more

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, April 19, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2025 Circana.

(Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2025, PWxyz LLC.)

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. "The Perfect ...Read more

At 8:24 p.m. on Nov. 2, 2020, Caroline Darian was a happily married 42-year-old working mother, close to her parents and two brothers, David and Florian, content with a life so ordinary that she would later characterize it as “banal.”

Then, one minute later, she became someone very different. The phone rang and her life was split in two.

...Read more

For almost four decades now, Jonathan Coe has employed wit, insight and scalpel-sharp satire to deliver compulsive, incisive novels that chronicle British lives and explore facets of Britishness.

Coe’s 1994 breakthrough, “The Winshaw Legacy,” laid bare the rapacious appetites and other grotesque qualities of “the meanest, greediest, ...Read more

The subject of Ron de Beaulieu’s new book is a notorious bootlegger with a talent for misdirection.

After one of Isadore Blumenfeld’s arrests, authorities said he used seven aliases. The author’s research unearths a few more. But history doesn’t remember him as “Joe Miller” or “Dr. Ferguson.” Instead, writes de Beaulieu — a ...Read more