I Hate Myself for Loving You
Two adult romantasies with similar fanfic origins claim the top spots on our hardcover fiction list. Julie Soto’s Rose in Chains reimagines The Auction, a Draco Malfoy x Hermione Granger enemies-to-lovers pairing. Brigitte Knightley’s The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy is also “Dramione-coded,” the author told Today. Both authors are favorites on the fanfic site An Archive of Our Own, as is SenLinYu, whose Alchemised, a reworking of her Dramione fanfic Manacled, pubs in September.
Eat, Stray, Love
Adriana Trigiani takes the #6 spot on our hardcover fiction list with The View from Lake Como, in which an Italian American woman decamps for bella Italia, “rents a charming apartment overlooking a picture-perfect piazza, drinks superb espresso, acquires a stray kitten, and melts on multiple occasions into the arms of the landlady’s gorgeous son,” per our review. The novel garnered the author ‘s best first-week print unit sales in years.
Body Politic
The Great Revolt coauthor Salena Zito lands at #2 on our hardcover fiction list with Butler, an account of the campaign-trail assassination attempt on President Trump and an analysis of the region in which it happened. “While well observed and knowledgeable, this pointed plea for a return to local reporting lacks fresh political insights,” our review said, and suffers when the author “veers into detailed accounts of her schmoozy, admiration-filled interactions with Trump, who calls her ‘my beautiful Salena.’ ” Five notches below, 2024 by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf is a different effort to explain, per the subtitle, “how Trump retook the White House and the Democrats lost America.”
Fever Pitch
Christine Brennan profiles basketball star Caitlin Clark in On Her Game, a “top-notch biography of the WNBA player,” according to our starred review. “Brennan more than justifies her assessment of Clark as a ‘groundbreaking, historic, immensely popular, but also at times controversial cultural figure’ who is ‘dramatically altering one of the last great bastions of male superiority.’ ” The book, which debuts at #4 on our hardcover nonfiction list, follows on the heels of another 2025 women’s basketball bestseller: the memoir Uncommon Favor by Dawn Staley, a six-time WNBA all-star and the longtime University of South Carolina women’s basketball head coach. It pubbed in May and also debuted at #4 with about the same number of print copies sold.
