Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, Oct. 19, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2024 Circana.

(Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2024, PWxyz LLC.)

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. "The Waiting: ...Read more

Manhattan’s Ferrari dealership wraps around a corner near landmarks like the Seagram Tower and Lever House; its plate windows look in on the planet’s most glamorous cars, a gallery seemingly plucked from the nearby Museum of Modern Art. In his alluring “The Driving Machine,” architect and urban planner Witold Rybczynski illuminates the ...Read more

One morning in June, at her home off a dirt road outside Duluth, Minnesota, Sharon McMahon tended to her many channels.

An interview for the newsletter she’d just launched needed transcribing. Posts about upcoming Supreme Court cases needed preparing. And the text on the book jacket for her upcoming book needed approving.

And, as always, ...Read more

Short in physical stature but a giant in his time, Abe Saperstein created in Chicago that international sensation called the Harlem Globetrotters.

That remains his most notable and influential accomplishment but this was a man of inexhaustible energy and ideas. You can add to that achievement such others as pioneering the three-point shot; ...Read more

This story begins in a land across the sea …

When I first learned about Katherine Rundell’s “Impossible Creatures” (after critic Ron Charles praised it in the Washington Post), the U.K. fantasy novel wasn’t yet available here in the States.

Thankfully, the book, about two young people facing a murderous threat, a mysterious landscape...Read more

Charles Baxter’s new novel, “Blood Test,” is billed as a comedy, and it is a comedy mostly in that it is not a tragedy. Is it funny? Yes, but darkly so; its humor, which is delightful, is wrapped around truths and drama and so, while we laugh, we also feel a shot of anxiety. It is a wonderfully crafted book, more complicated than it first ...Read more

Everything old is old again in Richard Osman’s latest comic mystery, “We Solve Murders.”

It’s not part of Osman’s “The Thursday Murder Club” series, but his fifth book to feature detectives who are old enough to collect pensions and read Modern Maturity. And it’s part of a wave of mysteries with sleuths who are more likely to ...Read more

Internationally acclaimed photographer Alec Soth didn’t intend to create the photo book “Advice for Young Artists.” But in September 2022, when a Plymouth hotel hosting a horror convention wouldn’t let him take pictures, he photographed various goth people he had cast for the shoot in an Airbnb.

“It became kind of this party of loners...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS -- Early word on Paula Hawkins’ latest, “The Blue Hour,” compares it to Agatha Christie. But when the “The Girl on the Train” novelist hears it likened to Daphne Du Maurier, instead, she immediately concurs.

“I certainly had those stories in my head,” said Hawkins of Du Maurier, whose novels include “The Birds,” �...Read more

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, Oct. 12, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2024 Circana.

(Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2024, PWxyz LLC.)

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. "Counting ...Read more

CHESTERTOWN, Md. -- There’s hope that the era of American idiocy will end soon, and while a lot of that rides on the outcome of the presidential election, you can feel some real optimism from this trend: Bookstores have been making a comeback.

Amazon put a bunch of them out of business, of course, but while e-commerce exploded, new stores ...Read more

French economist Thomas Piketty has long argued that the richest figures and their heirs will only grow exponentially wealthier in the coming decades, concealing fortunes in offshore tax havens and influencing politicians to keep government tentacles away from their yachts, private jets and Mediterranean estates.

In her stellar work of literary...Read more

Andrew Davis, Chicago to his core, was telling me a couple of days ago, “I am a visualist, not a wordsmith,’’ but he was selling himself short.

Though he is rightly acclaimed for his “visual” accomplishments, which include directing a bunch of successful movies, especially “The Fugitive,” I was holding in my hands a book “...Read more

It's publication day for Kenny G when we speak via phone, and the jazz saxophonist is in a car on the way to a bookstore in New Jersey to celebrate the release of his memoir "Life in the Key of G."

In the book, the musician born Kenneth Gorelick writes often about how he practices his instrument at least three hours every day. So it's fair to ...Read more

Nicholas Sparks can’t always remember the way a book idea comes to him, but for the bestselling author’s newest novel, “Counting Miracles,” Sparks knows exactly how it happened.

“Not all my books are so clear,” Sparks says by phone in mid-September from his home in New Bern, North Carolina (which, unlike western North Carolina, ...Read more

One minute Tegan is cycling through a beautiful, sunlit forest, the next she is cartwheeling over her handlebars and tumbling down a steep slope.

She ends up in a ravine, her arm broken, and she lies there for a few days, slipping in and out of consciousness. Eventually, she is spotted by a stranger and taken to a strange facility, one that is ...Read more

Each month, a wealth of interesting new books hit the shelves.

Here are some standout novels, nonfiction, YA, children’s and more to put them on your reading radar.

Oct. 1

“I Will Do Better,” Charles Bock

Widowed novelist Bock writes in this memoir about raising his young daughter on his own after the death of his wife from leukemia....Read more