Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, May 31, 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. "Never Flinch: ...Read more

Louise Hegarty is a prizewinning author of short fiction, including the story “Getting the Electric,” which has been optioned for a screen adaptation.

”Fair Play” is her debut novel, and here she takes the Book Pages Q&A.

Q. Please tell readers about your new book.

My book “Fair Play” begins on New Year’s Eve 2022. A group of ...Read more

Honor Jones’ debut novel, “Sleep,” opens with 10-year-old Margaret hiding under a blackberry bush during a neighborhood game of flashlight tag.

We’ve all been there: crouched in suspense under the low branches, smelling the dirt and the night air, watching the legs of our friends dart past, everything cozy, wild, exciting.

But Margaret...Read more

CHICAGO — I have known many of the people involved in the business of making pizzas and arguing about pizzas and eating pizzas, but until a few weeks ago, I had not met Marc Malnati, who is one of the towering figures of the local pizza scene.

I met him on the 200-some pages of his book titled “Deep Dish: Inside the First 50 Years of Lou ...Read more

We Minnesotans are almost all lucky enough to live near a river. The Mississippi, Minnesota, Red, Pigeon, Cascade, Crow, St. Croix, St. Louis, Whitewater, Zumbro and thousands of other waterways flow through our state.

Rivers have shaped our landscape, economy and history. Through the eons, humans have worshiped them, abused them and sometimes ...Read more

Jordan Thomas’ “When It All Burns” is a tremendous book that deepened my understanding and appreciation not just of the men and women who serve as wildland firefighters but also of the long, tragic history of land mismanagement in the American West. Without concerted efforts to reverse our abuse of the land and a dedicated examination of ...Read more

Noël Stark has experience in almost every film and TV industry position, from writing for “Paw Patrol” to appearing on “Degrassi.”

She’s a Canadian who lives in Hollywood with her family, and “Love, Camera, Action” is her debut novel.

Q. Please tell readers about your new book.

“Love, Camera, Action” is a sizzling ...Read more

First things first: Susan Choi’s “Flashlight,” her first novel since National Book Award-winning “Trust Exercise,” is almost nothing like “Trust Exercise.”

There’s no reason it should be, of course, but readers who were introduced to her work by that blockbuster (she had published four novels before it) may expect the terse, ...Read more

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