The Maine Woods
Michael Finkel’s The Stranger in the Woods expands on the author’s 2014 article for GQ—one of the magazine’s most-read pieces ever—about a man who lived as a hermit for 27 years in Central Maine, never interacting with another person. The book debuted at #19 in Hardcover Nonfiction and dropped a notch in its second week. Though its nationwide showing has been relatively modest, sales were strong enough in the Northeast to make it the top-selling book in the region in the two weeks it’s been on sale.
The other regional champs are more expected, since they are among the country’s top-selling books overall. Here’s a look.
Top-Selling Books by Region
| Northeast | The Stranger in the Woods | Michael Finkel |
|---|---|---|
| East North Central | The Obsession | Nora Roberts |
| West North Central | The Obsession | Nora Roberts |
| Middle Atlantic | The Shack | Wm. Paul Young |
| South Atlantic | The Shack | Wm. Paul Young |
| South Central | The Shack | Wm. Paul Young |
| Mountain | Dragonwatch (Fablehaven) | Brandon Mull |
| Pacific | Trump’s War | Michael Savage |
(See all of this week's bestselling books.)
Bunny Hop
Too Many Carrots by Katy Hudson, in which a rabbit wrestles with the conundrum of the title, debuts at #3 on our Children’s Picture Books list, more than a year after its publication. A Barnes & Noble promotion began March 14 and runs until just after Easter: customers who buy another children’s book can buy Hudson’s for nearly half off its retail price. The week after the promotion began, weekly print unit sales jumped from 1,454 to more than 14K.
New & Notable
New York 2140
Kim Stanley Robinson
#22 Hardcover Fiction
Robinson dives deep into climate apocalypse with a book our review found “exposition-heavy,” though not irredeemably so: “Readers open to an optimistic projection of how humans could handle an increasingly plausible environmental catastrophe will find the info dumps worth wading through.”
The Idiot
Elif Batuman
#23 Hardcover Fiction
The author of 2010’s The Possessed, a highly praised essay collection, returns with her debut novel, which follows a Turkish-American Harvard student to France, Hungary, and beyond. Our starred review said that “Batuman updates the grand tour travelogue just as she does the epistolary novel and the novel of ideas, in prose as deceptively light as it is ambitious.”
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
J.K. Rowling
#2 Children’s Frontlist Fiction, #7 overall
Scholastic has repackaged Beasts and two other Potterverse texts—Quidditch Through the Ages and The Tales of Beedle the Bard—as Hogwarts Library books. 19% of the retail price of each book sold goes to two charities Rowling selected: Lumos, the children’s NGO she founded, and Comic Relief U.K.
Top 10 Overall
| Rank | Title | Author | Imprint | Units |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Shack | Wm. Paul Young | Windblown | 26,130 |
| 2 | The Obsession | Nora Roberts | Berkley | 25,430 |
| 3 | A Man Called Ove | Fredrik Backman | Washington Square | 19,902 |
| 4 | Dragonwatch (Fablehaven) | Brandon Mull | Shadow Mountain | 19,588 |
| 5 | Milk and Honey | Rupi Kaur | Andrews McMeel | 19,131 |
| 6 | The Cutthroat | Cussler/Scott | Putnam | 19,127 |
| 7 | Fantastic Beasts... (Hogwarts Library ed.) | J.K. Rowling | Scholastic/Levine | 18,451 |
| 8 | Green Eggs and Ham | Dr. Seuss | Random House | 18,124 |
| 9 | Dangerous Games | Danielle Steel | Delacorte | 18,013 |
| 10 | Trump’s War | Michael Savage | Center Street | 17,998 |
All unit sales per Nielsen BookScan except where noted.
