The change of pace that arrives for retailers in January can be jarring after the rush of the holidays, but it’s also a necessary time for reflecting on the previous year and planning for the months to come. At the Book Shop, in 2024, we did more of everything — we had more events, more partnerships, more book fairs with local schools, and more overall inventory on our shelves than ever before. It continues to be our great privilege to be a part of this amazing community.
I think looking at our bestsellers can be telling — who are we, what do we like, and what’s important to us? Our bestselling book of 2024 was “James,” by Percival Everett, a novel I personally loved, but which also won the National Book Award for Fiction and has been at the top of the bestseller lists since it came out in March 2024.
Because “James” starts to fill in the gaps in human understanding that “Huckleberry Finn” created, it’s an important read for our collective cultural identity. We know better who we are when we know better where we’ve been. Similarly, our number two bestseller, “The Women,” by Kristin Hannah, fills a neglected gap by paying tribute to the women who served in Vietnam.
Are the nurses who patched our soldiers up under the steady rain of artillery any less deserving of gratitude and remembrance than the men we carelessly threw into combat? Our customers certainly didn’t think so.
Nine of our top 15 bestsellers were fiction, two were children’s books — one of them “Shoebert the Traveling Seal,” which we published with local author Sarah Hastings, the other “The Polar Express,” by local legend Chris van Allsburg — and the other four were nonfiction. I’ll give a special shoutout to “The Serviceberry,” by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which came in at #11 on the list with a publication date of November 19 and which was out of stock between December 18 and 30. That’s a pretty impressive result for such compressed availability.
Publishing is a title-driven business, so what do we expect the bestsellers to be in 2025?
So far in January, “The Let Them Theory” by Mel Robbins and “Onyx Storm” by Rebecca Yarros are the clear winners. In February I’m looking forward to “Isolda” by Allegra Goodman, historical fiction based on the life of a 16th Century noblewoman with a remarkable life — quite a departure from “Sam,” which was based right here in Beverly.
I’ve also already read and can highly recommend: “Memorial Days,” a memoir by Geraldine Brooks (author of the bestseller “Horse”) about losing her husband, the writer Tony Horwitz, in 2019 and her delayed mourning; “Three Days in June,” by Anne Tyler, a compact and satisfying story of a woman navigating her daughter’s wedding weekend amidst complicating circumstances; “Deep Cuts,” by Holly Brickley, a novel set in the late ’90s/early 2000s that’s ideal for any indie music fan; and “One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This,” by Omar El Akkad, which is on the surface a condemnation of the atrocities in Gaza, but is also a memoir of moving to the West, becoming a journalist, and becoming disillusioned by both his profession and modern capitalism.
Whew! Are you ready for March? I’m not. There are so many good books coming, it almost scares me.
The big news is “Dream Count” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, her first novel in 10 years, which publishes on March 4. The bestselling author of “Americanah” and “We Should All Be Feminists” has written a thought-provoking novel about the lives of four women
and their loves and longings and the desire to truly know and be known by another person.
You’ll also see new books from Chris Bohjalian, Karen Russell, Colum McCann, Nobel-winner Abdulrazak Gurnah, and the next book from Suzanne Collins in the Hunger Game series — plus a couple more favorites I can’t wait to tell you about in a future column.
Later in the year, the hits keep coming with new books from Stephen King, Emily Henry, Ron Chernow, Isabelle Allende, Curtis Sittenfeld, Glennon Doyle, V.E. Schwab, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Rick Atkinson, Fredrik Backman, Douglas Tallamy, Richard Russo, Carl Hiassen, Robert Macfarlane … and I haven’t even seen the fall lists yet!
Hannah Harlow is owner of The Book Shop, an independent bookstore in Beverly Farms. Harlow writes biweekly recommendations for us. See more of what she recommends reading at thecricket.com.
