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Pilkey tops US print bestsellers

Thursday, 13 January 2022   Books+Publishing
@booksandpublishing

In the US, children’s book author Dav Pilkey’s Mothering Heights (Dog Man #10) was the bestselling print book in 2021—one of three of Pilkey’s titles to crack the top 25, reports Publishers Weekly.

Fox News and conservative radio host Mark R Levin took second spot with American Marxism (Threshold). Levin’s book was the only political nonfiction title to make the top 25 after the subcategory grew in popularity during the Trump era.

Other notable bestsellers included Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse—Barnes & Noble’s 2019 Book of the Year—which sold more than 120,000 more copies in 2021 than it did in 2020, and Amanda’s Gorman’s  The Hill We Climb, the poem the author read at the inauguration of President Joe Biden.

Only two books—Mothering Heights (Dog Man #10) and American Marxism—sold more than one million print copies in 2021, compared to seven titles that sold more than one million print copies in 2020, including Barack Obama’s A Promised Land, which sold more than 2.5 million copies.

US top 25 overall print bestsellers 2021

  1. Mother Heights (Dog Man #10) (Dav Pilkey, Scholastic)
  2. American Marxism (Mark R Levin, Threshold)
  3. Big Shot (Diary of a Wimpy Kid #16) (Jeff Kinney, Scholastic)
  4. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (Charlie Mackesy, HarperCollins)
  5. Atomic Habits (James Clear, Random House)
  6. It Ends with Us (Colleen Hoover, S&S)
  7. The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Eric Carle, Philomel)
  8. Oh, the Places You’ll Go! (Dr Seuss, various imprints)
  9. The Four Agreements (Don Miguel Ruiz, Amber-Allen)
  10. The Four Winds (Kristin Hannah, St Martin’s)
  11. They Both Die at the End (Adam Silvera, Quill Tree)
  12. The Song of Achilles (Madeline Miller, Ecco)
  13. The Midnight Library (Matt Haig, Viking)
  14. Where the Crawdads Sing (Delia Owens, Putnam)
  15. Cat Kid Comic Club (Dav Pilkey, Scholastic)
  16. I Love You to the Moon and Back (Hepworth/Warnes, Tiger Tales)
  17. The Body Keeps the Score (Bessel van der Kolk, Penguin)
  18. Rowley Jefferson’s Awesome Friendly Spooky Stories (Jeff Kinney, Penguin)
  19. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (Taylor Jenkins Reid, Washington Sqaure)
  20. Grime and Punishment (Dog Man #9) (Dav Pilkey, Scholastic)
  21. The Hill We Climb (Amanda Gorman, Viking)
  22. Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? (Bill Martin Jr., Holt)
  23. The Deep End (Diary of a Wimpy Kid #15) (Jeff Kinney, Abrams)
  24. The Last Thing He Told Me (Laura Dave, S&S)
  25. The Judge’s List (John Grisham, Doubleday).

 

Category: International news