Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, Sept. 27, 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. "Alchemised" ...Read more

Most folks know Frank Lloyd Wright as America’s most influential architect. What’s lesser known is he loved the movies, and Hollywood loved him.

“Wright was a big fan of the movies. He really admired Walt Disney, and even gave his staff advice on designing some of their most famous films in the 1930s and ’40s,” says Mark Anthony ...Read more

“I’d love to kill you sometime,” murmurs a character in “One of Us,” all but announcing the quiet, matter-of-fact evil that will drive him to pursue the book’s protagonists over the next 200 pages.

Charlie is his name. Or, at least, that’s what he calls himself but he also says he’s the uncle of sister-and-brother escapees ...Read more

I’m tempted to call “The Phoebe Variations” a came-of-age book.

Wisconsin writer Jane Hamilton’s eighth novel — the “A Map of the World” writer’s first since “The Excellent Lombards” in 2016 — is of a familiar type. It’s a summer-that-changed-everything story that focuses on Phoebe, who is 17, very dramatic, obsessed ...Read more

“Little Movements” Lauren Morrow’s smart, incisive and hilarious debut, is an ode to the creative process and to people everywhere who feel the pull to take a risk and try something new.

I have never read a book quite like this one, about the professional choreographic world, and featuring a deeply conflicted, 30-something, sardonic, ...Read more

In Rie Qudan’s "Sympathy Tower Tokyo," the protagonist turns to a chatbot dubbed “AI-built” to ask questions about the origin of new Japanese words borrowed from foreign languages.

She then gripes about its tendency to “mansplain things I hadn’t actually asked about” to fuel engagement. The AI tool has become “so used to stealing ...Read more

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, Sept. 20, 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 Secret ...Read more

Young adulthood might be a more uncertain period than ever before.

With so many more options, it can seem like everyone is on a different path in the period between 20 and 40 years of age as they navigate the buffet of choices that make a life. Some young adults are in cities, trying to make it at a big kid job while looking for love, while ...Read more

Who hasn’t dreamed of chucking it all, assuming a new identity and starting over?

Karen Palmer didn’t dream it, she lived it, except her experience — or at least the impetus of it — was a nightmare she writes about in her memoir “She’s Under Here.”

In 1989, Palmer, her new husband and two daughters from a previous marriage ...Read more

If you’re susceptible to vicarious (sympathetic?) hangovers, take care reading Adam Kay’s “A Particularly Nasty Case.”

“All-night Bender” is the first chapter, and that’s exactly what Dr. Eitan Rose goes on, bouncing from the techno thump of a London club to a bathhouse in the company of an American called Chester (“Why were ...Read more

If you’ve ever read a Susan Orlean book — “The Orchid Thief,” “ Rin Tin Tin” or “ The Library Book,” say — and didn’t want it to end, here’s good news. There’s more. Her memoir, “Joyride,” a chronicle of her career in narrative nonfiction, shares the backstory and process of each of her books in edifying detail.

From...Read more

When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016. Anand Pandian knew almost no one who had voted for him. He had a hard time grasping what the result meant about the country he grew up in.

That election became the springboard for a sprawling project by the Johns Hopkins anthropologist. Pandian’s new book, “Something Between Us: The Everyday ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS -- Mindy Mejia killed off her own mother in the first story she ever wrote so it’s hard to disagree with her when she says, “I’ve always been a crime writer. There have always been people dying in my work.”

That first story, about the Twin Cities native’s mom’s funeral, was way back in kindergarten. And its dark themes ...Read more

Working at an amusement park isn’t all fun and games.

In author Veronica Bane’s debut YA novel, “Difficult Girls,” Greta Riley Green finds out there’s something sinister going on at her seemingly innocent summer gig at Hyper Kid Magic Land.

Bane, who hails from San Diego and now lives in Los Angeles, spent her formative years ...Read more

Patricia Lockwood’s life and art are so closely linked that it’s appropriate for a cat meowing in the background during a phone interview from her Savannah, Georgia, home to make it into this story.

That cat, Miette, also is in Lockwood’s novel “Will There Ever Be Another You,” in fact. “Will There Ever” is a tricky book, with a ...Read more

In the middle of a conversation about “Clown Town,” the new Slow Horses novel, author Mick Herron reveals a bit of previously untold lore about the origins of Slough House.

Referring to a team of older spies who appear in the just-published book, Herron says, “Their careers never really went in the direction that they should have, very ...Read more

Plenty of memoirs have been written about fraught relationships between mothers and daughters, but few are as disturbing and fascinating as Jeannie Vanasco’s third memoir.

“A Silent Treatment” is about the ghosting the author’s mother inflicts on her frequently, for long periods of time and for reasons that are nearly unfathomable.

...Read more