And You Thought Your Student Loan Debt Was Bad

Our Hardcover Fiction list begins and ends with John Grisham. His latest legal thriller, The Rooster Bar, which follows the travails of a crew of unlicensed lawyers as they contend with such things as the twin horrors of a dodgy for-profit law school and crippling student loan debt, is both the top-selling fiction title and #1 overall bestselling print book in the country. It joins Grisham’s Camino Island, which hit this summer and has been a steady bestseller since, this week in at #25.

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

Keep It in the Family

Three books on our charts this week are family affairs. On the fiction side, Joe Hill debuts at #9 with Strange Weather, a collection of four short novels. He joins his father, Stephen King, and brother, Owen King, who collaborated on Sleeping Beauties, which is holding strong at #5 after five weeks on the chart. Over on the nonfiction list at #3 (#6 overall), Jenna Bush Hager and Barbara Pierce Bush, twin daughters of former president George W. Bush, share what our starred review called “charming” stories from their uncommon upbringing in Sisters First.

Get the Food on the Table

The #2 bestselling book in the country last week was Ree Drummond’s latest, The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Come and Get It. The book is geared toward taming the nightly chaos of getting dinner together in a harried household. Smitten Kitchen Every Day, the fifth-ranked title on our Hardcover Nonfiction list, treads similar ground, promising, per its subtitle, “triumphant and unfussy” meals. Here’s how each fared their debut week compared to their predecessors.

New & Notable

Blessed in the Darkness
Joel Osteen
#11 Hardcover Nonfiction
Osteen takes on the age-old question of why bad things happen to good people in his latest bestseller. Our review praised his grasp of scripture but found some of his advice lacking.

American Radical
Tamer Elnoury and Kevin Maurer
#23 Hardcover Nonfiction
Our starred review called Elnoury’s account of being a Muslim American working in an undercover FBI counterterrorism unit a “multifaceted, action-packed account of real-life spycraft.”

Top 10 Overall

Rank Title Imprint Author Units
1 The Rooster Bar John Grisham Doubleday 114,049
2 The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Come and Get It Ree Drummond Morrow 101,370
3 Origin Dan Brown Doubleday 48,098
4 Leonardo da Vinci Walter Isaacson Simon & Schuster 35,269
5 The Sun and Her Flowers Rupi Kaur Andrews McMeel 30,768
6 Sisters First Bush/Hager Grand Central 30,642
7 Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans Brian Kilmeade Sentinel 27,887
8 Turtles All the Way Down John Green Dutton 26,167
9 Tales from a Not-So-Secret... (Dork Diaries #12) Rachel Renée Russell Aladdin 25,753
10 Wonder R.J. Palacio Knopf 22,490

All unit sales per Nielsen BookScan except where noted.