This Week's Bestsellers: October 16, 2017

Here Comes the Sun

Instagram poet Rupi Kaur is no stranger to these pages: we named her a 2016 PW notable thanks to the success of her collection Milk and Honey, which has gone on to be the bestselling print book of 2017 so far. Get ready for round two: her new book, The Sun and Her Flowers, tops our trade paperback list and debuts at #3 in the country.

Power Forward

The #8 book in the country is We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which collects eight of the Between the World and Me author’s essays originally published between 2008 and 2016. “Though the essays are about a particular period,” our starred review said, “Coates’s themes reflect broader social and political phenomena.” The book’s publication marks the relaunch of Random House imprint One World, now helmed by Chris Jackson, who edited Coates at Spiegel & Grau.

Shore Thing

Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach, which was named to the National Book Award longlist, debuts at #6 in hardcover fiction. It’s the author’s first novel since 2010’s Pulitzer Prize–winning A Visit from the Goon Squad and her first with Scribner—and its first-week print unit sales eclipse those of her earlier novels.

Movie Watch

The Snowman, the seventh in Jo Nesbø’s Scandinavian Noir series starring detective Harry Hole, is the author’s first novel to be adapted for the big screen in English. While early critical reviews have been largely negative (as of October 13, the movie had a 20% rating on Rotten Tomatoes), the tie-in edition of the novel debuts on our mass market list at #18.

New & Notable

Origin
Dan Brown
#1 Hardcover Fiction, #1 overall
Book five in the series best known for The Da Vinci Code begins with professor Robert Langdon in Spain for an announcement that’s poised to shake the foundations of every world religion.

Martin Luther
Eric Metaxas
#11 Hardcover Nonfiction
Metaxis, whose 2010 biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer—a Lutheran pastor who joined the plot to assassinate Hitler—has sold 316K print copies, turns his attention to the man whose protests 500 years ago kicked off the Protestant Reformation.

Sweet
Yotam Ottolenghi and Helen Goh
#16 Hardcover Nonfiction
Our starred review called this collection of 110 recipes from popular cookbook author and restaurateur Ottolenghi and pastry chef Goh, his longtime collaborator, “modern, creative, appealing, and, most important, fun.”

Top 10 Overall

All unit sales per Nielsen BookScan except where noted.

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