Billionaire Books Club
Ana Huang tops our trade paperback list and has the #1 book in the country with King of Envy, book five in her spicy Kings of Sin billionaire romance series.
Under the Sea
Shelby Van Pelt debuted in 2022 with Remarkably Bright Creatures, a novel that centers on the friendship between a widow and an octopus. It seemed poised for modest success, even with a Read with Jenna nod, but it turned out to have legs. It’s sold 834K copies in hardcover to date—68K of them this year—and the Netflix film adaptation just wrapped. This week, the handsell and word-of-mouth favorite debuts at #2 on our trade paperback list.
Virtual Reality
The latest title in Natasha Wing’s Night Before picture book series, The Night Before the Virtual Dentist, is the brainchild of Kenny Brechner, owner of DDG Booksellers in Farmington, Maine, and Head Start coordinator Danielle Hamlin, who suggested virtual dentistry as a picture book subject: in Maine and other areas where there’s a dentist shortage, community-based care in schools and other settings fills the gap for kids. Brechner brought Hamlin’s idea to PRH, and the book, illustrated by Nathalie Beauvois, debuts at #4 on our picture book list. Most copies were distributed to kids in Maine’s Virtual Dental Home program, and various retailers are selling the books as well, making it the #1 book in New England.
In the Details
In the wake of Pope Francis’s funeral and the conclave that ultimately elected Leo XIV, the first U.S.-born pope, Data over Dogma podcaster Dan McLellan’s The Bible Says So lands at #10 on our hardcover nonfiction list. It’s “a smart and historically grounded look at what scripture says about some of Christianity’s most provocative questions,” according to our review. “He perceptively examines how biblical tenets have been skewed or exploited by some believers to cloak their innate prejudices, which then become ‘identity markers’ used to justify ‘authoritarianism and social dominance.’ ” McLellan, a biblical scholar with a PhD from the University of Exeter, is Mormon, a fact he addresses in the book’s introduction: “My scholarly positions are not influenced by my membership in the LDS Church. In fact, my positions overwhelmingly and directly conflict with Latter-day Saint ideologies.”
