This Week's Bestsellers: July 23, 2018

Not Resting on Her Laurels

Ottessa Moshfegh debuts at #14 in hardcover fiction with My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which our review said “showcases Moshfegh’s signature mix of provocation and dark humor.” First-week print-unit sales top those for the author’s earlier titles, including the novella McGlue, which was published in 2014 by the nonprofit Fence Books, as recipient of the first Fence Modern Prize in Prose. Penguin plans to rerelease McGlue in January.

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

Local Loyalty

The #9 book in the country is Willa of the Wood, the latest historical middle grade fantasy by Robert Beatty. The book follows a new character in his Serafina universe, which centers on the Biltmore Estate in the author’s hometown of Asheville, N.C. Barnes & Noble at the Asheville Mall threw a splashy, six-hour launch party on July 8; local indie Malaprop’s will host the author July 28. Willa was the #1 title in BookScan’s South Atlantic region, with 52% of print units sold in Asheville alone.

Coin of the Realm

Naomi Novik’s nine-volume Temeraire alternate history series has sold hundreds of thousands of print copies. In 2015, a year before she finished the series, she published a standalone, the Polish fairy tale–inspired Uprooted, which our starred review called a “breathtaking departure.” Now comes Spinning Silver, debuting at #17 in hardcover fiction with more than twice as many print copies sold in its first week as Uprooted. From our starred review: “This gorgeous, complex, and magical novel, grounded in Germanic, Russian, and Jewish folklore but richly overlaid with a cohesive, creative story of its own, rises well above a mere modern reimagining of classic tales.”

New & Notable

Clock Dance
Anne Tyler
#7 Hardcover Fiction
Three years after A Spool of Thread, which had been rumored to be Tyler’s last novel, the Pulitzer-winning author delivers a book our starred review called “a bittersweet, hope-filled look at two quirky families that have broken apart and are trying to find their way back to one another.”

Indianapolis
Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic
#9 Hardcover Nonfiction
“Simultaneously a gripping narrative, a convincing analysis, and a pitiless exposure of institutional mendacity,” as our review put it, this book is a collaboration between Navy veteran Vincent (Same Kind of Different as Me) and Vladic, a filmmaker who has been fascinated with the Indianapolis naval disaster since she was a teen.

Hope Never Dies
Andrew Shaffer
#14 Trade Paper
Barack Obama and Joe Biden are a crime-solving team in a work of fan-fic our review called an “entertaining, offbeat whodunit.” In a q&a with PW, Shaffer explained the impetus for the novel: “I wrote the book about their bromance that I wanted to read.”

Top 10 Overall

All unit sales per Nielsen BookScan except where noted.