Love Me Two Times

Reese Witherspoon’s January book club selection, The First Time I Saw Him by Laura Dave, lands at #2 on our hardcover fiction list. It’s the “heart-pounding sequel,” per our review, to Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me. That novel was also a Reese’s Book Club pick; Witherspoon optioned it before its 2021 publication and executive produced the adaptation for Apple TV. Season one was released in 2023; season two, based on the new book, drops in February.

In Clubland

Faber published Ben Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives in the U.K. in 2025; it was later shortlisted for the Booker Prize. S&S’s Summit imprint released the book in the U.S. at the end of the year, and B&N named the novel its January book club pick. The novel, in which an unhappy family man takes stock of his life, debuts at #14 on our hardcover fiction list in its second week on sale. “Markovits endows his hero not with righteous grievance but with tenderness and wry self-reflection,” according to our starred review. “What starts as an understated chronicle of wanderlust swells to something more powerful and permanent.”

Death Becomes Her

Rosie Grant’s collection of recipes found on gravestones, To Die For, pubbed in October and followed a typical trajectory after selling
6K print copies in its first week: sales tapered off, spiked at the holidays, and fell again. But this week, it debuts on our list at #4 with its strongest sales yet.

Goal Oriented

T.Z. Layton self-published The Academy, about a 12-year-old elite soccer player, in 2022. It went on to sell 128K print copies and spawned another four installments. Sourcebooks picked up the rights in 2025 and reissued the first two Academy books in September. Book three in the middle grade series, Tournament of Champions, scores the #11 spot on our children’s fiction list this week; book four, Title Fight, pubbed simulaneously, and book five and the new book six follow in March and May, just ahead of this year’s World Cup. In the fall, Layton is launching a second series with Sourcebooks, Doubles, centered on a young volleyball player.