Handler’s Baggage

Comedian and activist Chelsea Handler is also a publishing powerhouse. Her 2005 debut, the trade paper original My Horizontal Life, had a modest start but went on to sell 924K print copies. She’s written five books since, including her latest, Life Will Be the Death of Me, the #2 book in the country this week. It’s “amusingly offbeat and told with the biting sarcasm expected of the TV personality,” our review said. First-week print unit sales are as close as she’s come to matching those of 2010’s Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang.

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

Flower Power

Martha Hall Kelly’s first novel, the WWII-set Lilac Girls, has sold 877K print copies since its 2016 release. With her follow-up, the WWI-era prequel Lost Roses, “Kelly memorably portrays three indomitable women who triumph over hardships,” our review said, “and successfully brings a complex and turbulent time in history to life.” It lands at #3 in hardcover fiction, with better print unit sales than Lilac Girls tallied in its first five weeks.

Mac’s New Pack

Macmillan imprint Celadon began publishing in February, and four books later it has a pair of bestsellers on its hands. The latest, Wolfpack by athlete-activist Abby Wambach, is the #8 book in the country. It’s a call “to come together, unleash our power, and change the game,” per the subtitle, and sprang from Wambach’s 2018 commencement speech at Barnard College. The imprint’s first release, The Silent Patient, screenwriter Alex Michaelides’s debut thriller, has sold 75K print copies since it pubbed in February; it’s currently #10 in hardcover fiction.

New & Notable

Diary of an Awesome Friendly Kid
Jeff Kinney
#1 Children’s Frontlist Fiction, #1 overall
This Wimpy Kid spin-off, originally presented at half its present length as a Scholastic Book Club promotion, centers on Greg Heffley’s long-suffering sidekick, Rowley Jefferson.

Charged
Emily Bazelon
#7 Hardcover Nonfiction
Bazelon, a New York Times Magazine staff writer, offers an “indictment of the traditional prosecution model,” our starred review said, “following the developments in two gripping cases with novelistic intensity.”

Working
Robert A. Caro
#13 Hardcover Nonfiction
“In this superb collection of original and previously published pieces,” Caro “offers a glimpse into the process behind his epic biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson,” per our starred review.

Top 10 Overall

Rank Title Author Imprint Units
1 Diary of an Awesome Friendly Kid Jeff Kinney Amulet 88,536
2 Life Will Be the Death of Me Chelsea Handler Random/Spiegel & Grau 62,442
3 Where the Crawdads Sing Delia Owens Putnam 40,795
4 Little Blue Truck’s Springtime Schertle/McElmurry HMH 31,162
5 Becoming Michelle Obama Crown 27,176
6 The Path Made Clear Oprah Winfrey Flatiron 23,485
7 Girl, Stop Apologizing Rachel Hollis HarperCollins Leadership 22,359
8 Wolfpack Abby Wambach Celadon 18,614
9 Someone Knows Lisa Scottoline Putnam 17,860
10 A Gentleman in Moscow Amor Towles Penguin Books 16,973

All unit sales per NPD BookScan except where noted.