Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, May 24, 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 Knight and...Read more

In “Spent,” the protagonist looks like Alison Bechdel and quacks (well, bleats) like Alison Bechdel but the subtitle “A Comic Novel” is a clue that she’s not Alison Bechdel.

The writer/cartoonist has written three graphic memoirs, including the groundbreaking “Fun Home,” but “Spent” is something different. It brings back ...Read more

We’ll never know about all the paintings destroyed or stolen by the Nazis in World War II. Were there forgotten Vermeers? Trashed Picassos? But what we do know is that a woman named Rose Valland saved tens of thousands of works.

Valland is the real-life heroine of “The Art Spy,” a curator at Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris in the 1940s. ...Read more

You always get your money’s worth with mega-bestselling author Stephen King.

The guy knows how to fill up pages, and although it’s no 1,000-plus tome like “The Stand,” “Never Flinch,” his seventh Holly Gibney outing, is 448 pages strong.

To be sure, King has more to offer than a solid page-to-cost ratio. He could write the book ...Read more

From the Triple Crown races of the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes, to the Breeders’ Cup and beyond, it’s impossible to think about horse racing without also conjuring the shadow of all the beautiful thoroughbreds who’ve died on the track.

CNN reporter Katie Bo Lillis usually covers the intelligence community and national ...Read more

CHICAGO — The couple has a cute dachshund named Dahlia, who enjoys napping on a couch near the front windows of as colorful a storefront business as you are likely to find here or, for that matter, anywhere.

It’s called Heart & Bone Signs and the couple is Andrew and Kelsey McClellan. They are artists, and what they have been doing here for...Read more

It’s hard to know what to make of Paul Gauguin.

Postimpressionism is an umbrella term for European painters such as Gauguin who moved beyond the plein-air (“outdoor” ) breakthroughs of Degas, Renoir and especially Monet. Its practitioners turned toward symbolism and abstraction to uncover transcendent truths beneath brightly hued, often ...Read more

To give an idea of the scope and difficulty of Jack El-Hai’s new book: He usually does three or four revisions. This one was more like 10 or 12.

“It was a hard book to write,” said El-Hai of “Face in the Mirror,” which covers nearly 20 years — from 2006, when a Wyoming man named Andy Sandness shot himself in the head and immediately...Read more

Let’s say you’re married to Henry VIII but he’s sick of you, so you’re about to be killed by an executioner. Might one thing on your mind — possibly the first thing — be, “Exactly how sharp is that axe?”

Rachel McCarthy James is way ahead of you in her “Whack Job: A History of Axe Murder.” In a chapter about the many people ...Read more

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, May 17, 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. "A Curse Carved...Read more

As pundit David Brooks once opined, the United States is a creedal nation: “Almost every significant movement in American history has been led by people calling upon us to live up to our creed.”

Few public figures have grasped Brooks’ insight as deeply as the activist whose legacy Mark Whitaker chronicles in his luminous, nuanced “The ...Read more

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, May 10, 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. "Shield of ...Read more

Florence Knapp thanks her two book clubs in the acknowledgments of “The Names,” which seems especially appropriate because her debut novel has “book club” written all over it.

Specifically, it has my book club written all over it. “The Names” is the sort of novel that’s bound to create discussion about the events happening, what ...Read more

Samuel Langhorne Clemens may well have led a happier life if he had remained a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. But then he never would have become Mark Twain — with all the heartache, frustration and dadgum bother (as he might put it) that job entailed.

It’s that dark side, usually cloaked beneath Twain’s legend, that dominates Ron ...Read more

One overcast Friday morning in 1973, a barrel containing a baby boy washes up on the shore of an Irish fishing town.

The new arrival quickly causes a stir among the residents of Killybegs (hometown of author Garrett Carr): “Any fresh baby represented possibility but here was one with no parents, no history, a child who was entirely future.”...Read more

A title can speak volumes.

Yale historian Greg Grandin’s panoramic, gorgeously crafted “America, América” announces its thesis in a repetition of a single word, with one subtle difference (check out the second “e”). That accent alludes to the fusion of capital and religion as European empires staked their flags in the New World, ...Read more

There is a lot of creepiness in “The Peepshow,” beginning with the ripped wallpaper on the cover of the book.

Initially, it may seem only as disturbing as any overly fussy, flocked 1940s wallpaper would — until you get to the part of “Peepshow” that describes how, having murdered (at least) four women, John Christie hid them behind ...Read more