To a Flame
Rachel Gillig tops the charts with the romantic fantasy The Knight and the Moth. It’s the first book in the Stonewater Kingdom series and her first hardcover release; One Dark Window and Two Twisted Crowns, which comprise Gillig’s Shepherd King duology, originated in trade paper.
After the Fall
The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins, which held the peak position on our hardcover nonfiction list for 21 weeks, has been edged out by Original Sin by CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios correspondent Alex Thompson. In what our review called a “merciless exposé,” the authors “recap Joe Biden’s mounting cognitive issues from his 2020 campaign to his catastrophic, campaign-ending 2024 debate with Donald Trump.” Multiple observers have called the book too little, too late.
Piece of Cake
Just in time for the summer travel season, Baking Yesteryear author B. Dylan Hollis returns with Baking Across America, billed as “a vintage recipe road trip.” Our review said the TikTok star “affects his trademark gee-whiz enthusiasms for quirky local delicacies like strawberry pretzel salad from Pennsylvania, which fills a crushed-pretzel crust with a mixture of Cool Whip, cream cheese, and strawberry gelatin powder; and Chicago’s ‘Atomic Cake,’ which stacks banana, chocolate, and vanilla sponges.” The book debuts at #3 on our hardcover nonfiction list.
Sedimental Value
Nature writer Robert Macfarlane floats to the #14 spot on our hardcover nonfiction list with Is a River Alive?, “a lyrical inquiry into the implications of treating rivers as living beings worthy of reverence and legal rights,” according to our starred review. In a prepub interview with PW, Macfarlane explained why he paired accounts of his travels along three rivers with profiles of people affected by those waterways. “Rivers run through individuals as surely as they run through places, so I couldn’t have written this book without including the people,” he said. “There is one strong character in each of the three journeys. They all had been moved close to death by something that happened to them before they were, in some profound way, brought back to life by rivers. Watching that happen was one of the many astonishing surprises of the book.”
