14 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ APRIL 6, 2020
We Need a Hero,
or Five Kennedy Center Education artist-in-residence Mo Willems began hosting a daily
livestream, Lunch Doodles, on March 16. He takes viewers inside his studio, sharing old
notebooks, early sketches, and more. In the second episode, he featured Waiting Is
Not Easy!, a 2014 Elephant & Piggie picture book with a timely topic: “We’re going
to do a lot of waiting for the next couple of weeks,” he told viewers. The title returns
to our picture book list at #14, with its best weekly print unit sales since 2018.N.K. Jemisin followed her Hugo Award
hat trick for the Broken Earth trilogy
with the 2018 collection How Long ’til
Black Future Month?, which opens with
“The City Born Great.” A
reworked version of that
story acts as prologue to
her new novel, The City
We Became, debuting at
#12 in hardcover fiction.
In the trilogy launch,
which our starred review
called a “staggering con-
temporary fantasy,” the soul of New York
is under siege from a malevolent force,
and human avatars of the five boroughs
must come together to defeat it.With Major League Baseball’s
opening day postponed until
at least June, fans can look
back on last season’s underdog
story. In Buzz Saw, which our
review called “emotional and
informative,” Jesse Dougherty,
who covers the Washington
Nationals for the Washington
Post, “digs into the exciting
story of how the team went
from a losing record in May 2019
to World Series champions fiveTOP 10 OVERALL
1 Little Fires Everywhere Celeste Ng Penguin Books
2 Where the Crawdads Sing Delia Owens Putnam
3 Little Blue Truck’s Springtime Schertle/McElmurry HMH
4 Pete the Cat: Big Easter Adventure Dean/Dean HarperFestival
5 Big Preschool – School Zone
6 It’s Not Easy Being a Bunny Sadler/Bollen Random House
7 The Big Book of Silly Jokes for Kids! Carole Roman Rockridge
8 The Splendid and the Vile Erik Larson Crown
9 Happy Easter, Mouse! Numeroff/Bond HC/Balzer + Bray
10 You’re My Little Honey Bunny Natalie Marshall Silver DolphinRANK TITLE AUTHOR IMPRINTINFORMATION SUPPLIED BY NPD BOOKSCAN. COPYRIGHT © 2020 THE NPD GROUP. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.BY CAROLYN JURIS
Behind the Bestsellers MARCH 22–28, 2020
NEW & NOTABLE
THE GLASS HOTEL
Emily St. John Mandel
#6 Hardcover Fiction
“This ingenious, enthralling novel
probes the tenuous yet unbreakable
bonds between people,” our starred
review said, “and the lasting effects of
momentary carelessness.” It follows
Mandel’s 2014 National Book Award finalist,
Station Eleven, about a global pandemic.LADY IN WAITING
Anne Glenconner
#3 Hardcover Nonfiction
With no new episodes of The Crown
on deck, royal watchers are digging
into this memoir, which received a
starred review from PW, by a
longtime confidante of Princess
Margaret. “From a generation where we
were taught not to overthink, not to look
back or question,” Glenconner writes in the
prologue, “only now do I see how extraordi-
nary the nine decades of my life have been.”THE OFFICE
Andy Greene
#5 Hardcover Nonfiction
Another book for binge watchers,
this is a “fascinating oral history,” our
review said, of the NBC sitcom, which
Nielsen reports is currently among
the most-watched shows on Netflix.
ALL PRINT UNIT SALES PER NPD BOOKSCAN EXCEPT WHERE NOTED Note: Due to extreme sales volatility caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, we are temporarily omitting unit sales for individual titles from the lists.months later.” Not surpris-
ingly, this book is a hometown
favorite, with 48% of sales in
the D.C. market area.week
ended:
FEB. 22MAR. 21FEB. 29MAR. 28MAR. 7MAR. 141,1,1,1,2,9,Recent Weekly Print Unit Sales for Waiting Is Not Easy!