Spring Fever

The Cubs Way by Tom Verducci debuts at #9 on our Hardcover Nonfiction list. In it, the Sports Illustrated senior baseball writer digs into how the team ended a 108-year drought to become the 2016 World Series champs. You don’t need three strikes to figure out who bought the book; here’s a look.

Regional Sales for The Cubs Way

Chicago 27.5%
The rest of the country 72.5%

(See all of this week's bestselling books.)

Fortifying Sales

Jessica Shattuck, author of two well-received contemporary novels, delves into the past with The Women in the Castle, debuting at #8 in Hardcover Fiction. The book, about three German women who form a surrogate family in the aftermath of WWII, has roots in Shattuck’s conflicted feelings about heritage. The book received healthy prepub attention—the ABA named it the #1 Indie Next List pick for April, and Shattuck published an op-ed in the New York Times, “I Loved My Grandmother. But She Was a Nazi”—that likely helped first-week print-unit sales. (As of this writing, the op-ed had more than 500 comments on nytimes.com.)

YouTube Watch

The #10 book in the country (#3 in Hardcover Nonfiction) is How to Be a Bawse, the latest pep talk/memoir by a YouTube personality. Lilly Singh, a Canadian comedian, rapper, and actor (she voiced a pair of unicorn characters in Ice Age: Collision Course) entertains 11 million subscribers with riffs on her Punjabi heritage, friendship, and male-female dynamics, and in a 2016 episode called “Getting Schooled by Michelle Obama,” hosted the then–First Lady.

New & Notable

Old School

Bill O’Reilly and Bruce Feirstein

#1 Hardcover Nonfiction, #1 overall

Fox News host O’Reilly and Feirstein, a screenwriter and the author of 1982’s Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, take aim at what they call “snowflake culture.”

Strange the Dreamer

Laini Taylor

#14 Children’s Frontlist Fiction

The author of the Daughter of Smoke & Bone YA fantasy trilogy launches a duology with a book that our starred review says is “gorgeously written in language simultaneously dark, lush, and enchanting.”

The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

Hannah Tinti

#23 Hardcover Fiction

Our starred review praised Tinti’s second novel, which charts the lives and fortunes of a father and daughter, for “seamlessly transposing classical myth into a quintessentially American landscape.”

Cork Dork

Bianca Bosker

#21 Trade Paperback

Bosker writes of quitting her job as executive tech editor at the Huffington Post to train as a master sommelier. Our review says that those who persevere through the heavy pours of wine lingo “will be rewarded with an appreciation of both wine and those pouring the bottles.

Top 10 Overall

Rank Title Author Imprint Units
1 Old School O’Reilly/Feirstein Holt 67,065
2 The Black Book Patterson/Ellis Little, Brown 40,819
3 Milk and Honey Rupi Kaur Andrews McMeel 19,307
4 Too Many Carrots Katy Hudson Capstone 19,247
5 Hashimoto’s Protocol Izabella Wentz HarperOne 18,635
6 A Man Called Ove Fredrik Backman Washington Square 18,146
7 The Obsession Nora Roberts Berkley 16,504
8 The Shack Wm. Paul Young Windblown 16,456
9 Magic Danielle Steel Dell 16,262
10 How to Be a Bawse Lilly Singh Ballantine 16,230

All unit sales per Nielsen BookScan except where noted.