Strong words

Six months after James Islington’s The Will of the Many pubbed, BookTok embraced the epic fantasy series launch for the 2023 holiday season, and it’s gone on to sell 202K print copies. His follow-up, The Strength of the Few, sold more than 30 times as many print copies in its launch week as the first book did, and debuts at #1 on our hardcover fiction list. Both received starred PW reviews; our review praised the new book’s “evocative prose and nuanced ruminations on the nature of power and sacrifice.”

November Mourning

As the 50th anniversary of the Nov. 10, 1975, sinking of the Great Lakes freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald approached, journalist John U. Bacon’s The Gales of November, which pubbed October 7, gained wider traction. His account of the tragedy hits our hardcover nonfiction list for the first time at #12.

Know Kings

The spicy monster romantasy Between Two Kings by Lindsay Straube lands at #2 on our trade paperback list. It’s the sequel to Kiss of the Basilisk, which Straube self-published in installments before Bloom picked it up; the trade paperback has sold 92K copies since it pubbed in February. Straube’s website includes a 17-point list of trigger warnings for the series—assault, attempted murder, blood, bullying, cannibalism... and that’s just the ABCs. Over on our hardcover fiction list, Janet Evanovich takes the #10 spot with The King’s Ransom, her “fun, frothy sequel to The Recovery Agent,” per our review. Series heroine Gabriela Rose, the review said, is “an ideal action protagonist: resourceful, daring, shrewd, and sexy.”

Media Watch

As with previous collaborations between historian Geoffrey C. Ward and documentarian Ken Burns, The American Revolution, #8 on our hardcover nonfiction list, is a companion to Burns’s PBS docuseries of the same name. According to our review of their 608-page history, “The achievement of this volume is to be forthright and occasionally critical, but still grand and stirring.” The U.S. is gearing up for the 250th anniversary, next July 4, of the Declaration of Independence, so expect to see many more books that mine the era—and start practicing the spelling and pronunciation of semiquincentennial.