Election Countdown

If nothing else, the 2016 presidential election season has been a boon to book publishing. This week, two new books about the Republican nominee debut on our Hardcover Nonfiction list.

In Trump We Trust, at #3, outlines the appeal of the man author Ann Coulter says will win the battle pitting “the working class against the smirking class.” Though its subtitle, E Pluribus Awesome!, is a bit difficult to parse (it translates, roughly, to “out of many, awesome!”), there’s no mistaking the message: “Donald Trump isn’t a politician,” the press materials say. “He’s a one-man wrecking ball against our dysfunctional and corrupt establishment.”

At #7, Trump Revealed by Washington Post investigative reporter Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher, a senior editor at the paper, draws on the work of some two dozen Post journalists as well as 20 hours of interviews Trump gave the book’s authors. The back cover includes several quotes from Trump, including, “If you do a negative book on me, watch: it won’t sell. It’s probably going to be a negative book, but what the hell.”

For our look at other Trump titles of the past several months, check out The Making of 'The Making of Donald Trump'

Movie Watch

With two million hardcover and conventional trade paperback copies sold, The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins didn’t, strictly speaking, need another edition. But here comes the movie adaptation, set to open October 7, and the debut this week of two tie-ins. One tops our Mass Market list (and checks in at #5 in the country overall), and the other lands at #5 on our Trade Paperback list. The conventional trade paperback did better than either, ranking #1 in trade paper and #2 in the country overall. Across the three editions, the book sold 74K print copies this week. Tie-ins for another adaptation, The Light Between Oceans, also pubbed this week, debuting at #7 in mass market and #9 in trade paper. M.L. Stedman’s 2012 debut novel, about the trials of a couple who live at a lighthouse in post-WWI Australia, garnered a starred review from PW; it went on to sell 533K copies in hardcover and conventional trade paper. This week the conventional trade paperback plus the two tie-ins together sold 22K print units. The movie, which opened on September 2, spawned a real-life romance between Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander, who met on set.

Surrender, New York
Caleb Carr
#10 Hardcover Fiction
Carr’s contemporary mystery is a successor to 1994’s The Alienist and 1997’s The Angel of Darkness, which starred late 19th-century psychologist Laszlo Kreizler. The new novel centers on a modern-day psychological profiler Trajan Jones, the world’s leading expert on the forensic techniques of Dr. Kreizler.

The Perfect Horse
Elizabeth Letts
#8 Hardcover Nonfiction
In the waning days of WWII, U.S. soldiers discovered that Hitler had stolen a number of purebred stallions with the goal of creating an equine master race for military purposes. Letts, a lifelong equestrian, tells the story of their rescue; she’s also the author of 2011’s The Eighty-Dollar Champion, which sold 214K print copies.

A Little Thing Called Life
Linda Thompson
#13 Hardcover Nonfiction
Eager consumers of celebrity gossip are the ideal audience for this memoir by Thompson, a Grammy-nominated lyricist and former Miss Tennessee USA, who lived with Elvis Presley at Graceland in the 1970s and was married and had two sons with Caitlyn Jenner in the 1980s.

The Couple Next Door
Shari Lapena
#20 Hardcover Fiction
In upstate New York, Anne and Marco Conti come home from their neighbors’ house to find their front door open and their
infant daughter’s crib empty. The police detectives investigating the case suspect the couple is hiding something, but what? Our review calls Lapena’s novel a “suspenseful, heart-wrenching debut.”