After peaking in 2021 with 839.7 million copies sold, print sales seem to have settled in at a new post-pandemic normal. Publishers Weekly reports total unit sales of 762.4 million in 2025, which is 0.3% higher than in 2024 but more than 9% lower than the 2021 high.

Mel Robbins’s self-help juggernaut The Let Them Theory topped charts with more than 2.8 million copies sold, followed closely by Rebecca Yarros, whose Onyx Storm moved a combined total of more than 2.7 million units across two editions, and Suzanne Collins’s latest Hunger Games prequel, Sunrise on the Reaping, which notched just over 2 million.

Other notable data:

• 👑 BookTok fave Freida McFadden takes home the crown for Most Popular, with three unique titles among the year’s top 20 bestsellers
• 👧 8 of the 20 bestselling titles are kids’ books
• 🐻 The oldest book tohit the top 20: Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin, originally published in 1967
• 💸 Bank on The Nightingale. Kristin Hannah’s four-quadrant hit, which hit shelves a full decade ago, sold nearly half-a-million copies.

Also notable, though sadly unsurprising, is the utter lack of diversity among the year’s top sellers. Indeed, the last time an author of color appeared among the 20 best-selling titles of the year was 2022 (Michelle Obama’s The Light We Carry).

→ See more highlights and trend data.

At first look , this week’s featured new releases don’t seem to have much in common beyond the fact that they both appeared on many lists of the most anticipated books of 2026.

Dig a little deeper, and This is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin, a decade-spanning epic set in contemporary Pakistan, and Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash, a darkly humorous family saga, are both deeply inventive considerations of how we navigate chaos and connection in complex systems.

Also hitting shelves this week:

• ❤️ A modern love story pitched as “ Nora Ephron meets Emily Dickinson“
• 👩‍🎨 The adult romantasy debut of a popular YA writer, about a sculptress in Florence
• 🖊️ A 1,000+ page biography of the founder of Random House
• 🩺 An emergency room doc reveals 99 of the worst ways to die (and how to avoid them)
• 🧠 Strategies for handling change from a renowned cognitive scientist

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Looking to read more in the year ahead? ThriftBooks is here to help you reach your reading goals. Our Reading Challenge is designed to inspire you to explore more stories, discover new favorites, and build a reading habit that lasts all year long. Start planning your next reads with a mix of new and used books, and enjoy FREE shipping on domestic orders over $15 as you grow your bookshelf and your love of reading.

It’s not Gabriel García Marquez’s fault that magical realism has become one of the most overused terms in modern book blurbing. If anyone is to blame, it’s actually his grandmother, a skilled storyteller whose ability to drop a deadpan delivery of “the wildest things with a completely natural tone of voice” made it difficult for the young author to distinguish fact from fiction.

When Márquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, it was largely due to the incredible success of One Hundred Years of Solitude , a multigenerational saga set in a fictional town in which magic carpets are unremarkable but ice is a miracle. History—and names—are repeated to the point of absurdity. The opening line refers to a scene readers never actually get to read. Wild things are relayed in a completely natural tone. The supernatural is mundane.

This is original recipe magical realism, and it blew people’s minds.

🎧 Learn more about the book that made magical realism a global phenomenon on the Zero to Well-Read.

Five years into relentless attacks on public libraries, with tens of thousands of books banned across the country, things can feel bleak and hopeless. The good news is that they’re not. We have the power to create change and reverse the damage being done. 

Getting started can be overwhelming. But never fear! This handy guide, compiled by a host of people who’ve been on the ground pushing back, offers practical tasks for how you can defend the right to read this year. The tasks are wide-ranging and invite you to show up where, how, and when you can. 

Among the suggestions: 

• Attend a screening of The Librarians documentary to learn how librarians have emerged as first responders in the fight for democracy and library users’ First Amendment Rights. If you can’t attend a screening, mark your calendars to watch the PBS Independent Lens premiere on February 6, 2026.
• Write a letter to your library board complimenting something aboutthe work being done in your public library. 
• Help build the QT Library , a queer library in Boston that aims to grant access to queer and trans literature. How can you help “build” the library? Donate money or books, if you’re able. If those are not in your budget, spread the word about the institution. You can also participate in their virtual Trans YA book club.
• Pick up a book published in the last six years that talks about far-right politics or extremism. Some titles of interest include Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism by Seyward Darby, Culture Warlords or Wild Faith by Tal Lavin, and Michael Edison Hayden’s forthcoming Strange People On The Hill (April 7). 

📋 Bonus: There’s a Google Spreadsheet to help you track what activities you do during the year. – KJ

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“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

You’ve likely seen this quote from George Orwell’s 1984 all over social media. It’s been in heavy circulation since 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good was shot and killed by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer in Minneapolis last week. The book and its many quotables have stayed relevant since its 1949 publication, and certainly during Trump administrations past and present (sales of 1984 skyrocketed during the first Trump presidency). But as conservative news outlets, social media personalities, and administration officials alike have asked us all to deny the facts made plain by footage of the shooting, Orwell’s chilling observation of post-truth totalitarianism has resonated anew.

As readers, we turn to books to make sense of our world, and you might be thinking of doing so now. Perhaps you haven’t read Orwell, or you have, but you’re in need of a refresh. Whatever your reason for dipping your toes into these Orwellian waters, here’s a quick guide to Orwell’s seminal works and some related reading.

• Nineteen Eighty-Four : In the year 1984, the world is in a state of perpetual war. The totalitarian superstate Oceania is run by the Party, whose dictatorial leader Big Brother is bolstered by a rabid cult of personality drummed up by the Thought Police. In this surveillance state, a man named Winston Smith is tasked with rewriting history from within the Ministry of Truth, and that act is getting old. Orwell drew inspiration for this dystopian work of science fiction from the Stalinist Soviet Union and fascist Nazi Germany. It is a bold examination of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, propaganda, and the manipulation of truth and language.
• Animal Farm : This satirical novella published in 1945 is an allegory for the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent rise of Stalinism. A group of farm animals decides to overthrow their human farmer and establish a new government of their own. The pigs lead the effort and begin to abuse their power, morphing into a regime more oppressive than the one they replaced and stoking further rebellion amongst the other animals. Orwell explored several of the same themes in Animal Farm as he did later in 1984, while also examining class struggle, the corrosiveness of greed, and the corrupting nature of absolute power.
• Homage to Catalonia: Animal Farm and 1984 might be Orwell’s most famous works, but they aren’t the only ones that examine global conflicts with searing social commentary. Homage to Catalonia is a work of nonfiction, Orwell’s personal account of his experience fighting for the anti-fascist Republican army in Spain in 1936. It has become the most widely read book about the Spanish Civil War.

Related Reading:

• Who was George Orwell, anyway? Find out with this deep dive into Orwell’s life, work, and legacy
• On the rise of algospeak and its striking parallels to the Newspeak of 1984
• There’s more where that came from: Here are 25 quotes from 1984 that we wish weren’t so achingly relevant. -VD

Val McDermid is the author of Winter: The Story of a Season, out now from Grove Atlantic.

Winter is when I write. But it’s also when I read. The weather is chill and often damp (if not downright wet!) and the days are short, so there are fewer temptations to fritter the day away outside. Instead, I can spend my days reading and writing without guilt.

It’s the time of year when I make my annual pilgrimage to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. 

I’m jealous of Stevenson’s versatility. He could write anything, from The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to A Child’s Garden of Verses via Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes and dozens of short stories. And he succeeded at everything he turned his hand to, from predicting the future success of the Californian wine industry in The Silverado Squatters. His work has been adapted in every medium, from animated films to opera libretti.

But my true love remains Treasure Island. It’s been close to my reading heart since I first encountered it as a Classic Comic when I was around 8 years old. To my mind, it’s a book that has everything – classic characters (who doesn’t know Long John Silver and his parrot?), pirates, mutiny, adventures on the high sea and in the baking heat of the island itself, and, probably best of all for a reader with any imagination, an open ending. Long John Silver is still out there and there is still treasure on the island… And all of this delivered in rich and vibrant prose. 

Stevenson died at 44 and I can’t help wondering how much more he would have given us if he’d had more time. He wrote his own epitaph which is carved on his grave in his beloved Samoa: 

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie
Glad did I live and gladly die
And I laid me down with a will
This be the verse you grave for me
Here he lies where he longed to be
Home is the sailor home from the sea
And the hunter home from the hill

Winter for me will always be RLS.

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Written by Rebecca Schinsky, Kelly Jensen, Vanessa Diaz, Danika Ellis, and Jeff O’Neal. Thanks to Vanessa Diaz for copy editing.

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