In Clubland

Taylor Jenkins Reid is a celebrity book club favorite: Reese’s Book Club selected Daisy Jones & the Six and Read with Jenna picked Malibu Rising. Now Atmosphere, which got the nod from the Good Housekeeping Book Club and Good Morning America Book Club, debuts at the top of our hardcover fiction list with Reid’s best first-week print unit sales to date. It’s a “transportive” story, per our review, about “a forbidden love between two female astronauts in the 1980s.”

Copy that

Elizabeth Lim’s new YA fantasy, A Forgery of Fate, pairs a teenage art forger named Tru with Elang, a half-dragon prince. “Lim skillfully blends elements of classic fairy tales to render Tru’s many adventures across Lor’yan, a fictional world inspired by China, and inject heart-pounding action into this lush romantasy epic,” according to our starred review of the book, #7 on our children’s fiction list. “Tender moments of connection and discovery enrich Tru and Elang’s cautious developing relationship, even as they both contend with xenophobia and preconceived notions based on their nation’s mythology, and navigate a perilous world of politics and greed.”

Love, Loss, and what she wrote

Molly Jong-Fast’s new memoir, How to Lose Your Mother, is #12 on our hardcover nonfiction list and a “staggering self-portrait,” according to our starred review, that “chronicles the worst year of her life.” In 2023, Jong-Fast’s mother, Fear of Flying novelist Erica Jong, was diagnosed with dementia; soon after, her husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and her stepfather’s Parkinson’s began to worsen. “Resisting tidy sentiment or easy answers, Jong-Fast dives headfirst into the often difficult ambiguities of parent-child bonds. The results are stunning.” The author told PW that working on the memoir was her way of coping: “I bristle at the idea of writing as therapy, because I think most content that’s produced that way is terrible, but I did it. It was the only way I could process what was happening to me.”

Communication Skills

Chinese Australian author Ann Liang has released six books for teen and adult readers in three years, beginning with her 2022 debut, the YA novel If You Could See the Sun. Her latest, Never Thought I’d End Up Here, lands on our children’s fiction list at #11. “Hilarious and heartfelt, this story of budding young love simultaneously emphasizes the connections between romantic partners, between the characters and their culture, and with themselves,” according to our starred review. The Chinese American main character’s struggles with Mandarin are a key element of the plot, Liang says: “That was a very personal aspect of the story for me, because I know that it’s not just me who has lived through this. It’s something that a lot of people growing up in the diaspora community have experienced.”