The Midwest Indie Bestseller List
Explore the bestselling titles in indie bookstores throughout our region
Looking for something good to read? You've come to the right place. Our weekly Midwest Indie Bestseller List is a collection of the top-selling adult and children's titles for both hardcover and paperback releases. The list is an excellent reflection of the handselling expertise of booksellers and the taste of readers throughout our region. We release the list via email to 1,500 members throughout the industry every Wednesday afternoon. We thank the American Booksellers Association for their generous work of compiling the data from indie bookstores across the country every week.
This week's top titles: 08/17/2025
Week Ending 08/17/25
HARDCOVER FICTION

#1 My Friends
By Fredrik Backman (Atria Books)
Price: $29.99 / Get the Book

#2 Atmosphere
By Taylor Jenkins Reid (Ballantine Books)
Price: $30 / Get the Book

#3 James
By Percival Everett (Doubleday)
Price: $28 / Get the Book

#4 Great Big Beautiful Life
By Emily Henry (Berkley)
Price: $29 / Get the Book

#5 The River Is Waiting
By Wally Lamb (S&S/Marysue Rucci Books)
Price: $29.99 / Get the Book

#6 Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
By V. E. Schwab (Tor Books)
Price: $29.99 / Get the Book

#7 The Hounding
By Xenobe Purvis (Henry Holt and Co.)
Price: $26.99 / Get the Book

#8 The Correspondent
By Virginia Evans (Crown)
Price: $28 / Get the Book

#9 The Bewitching
By Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey)
Price: $29 / Get the Book

#10 Dungeon Crawler Carl
By Matt Dinniman (Ace)
Price: $30 / Get the Book

#11 Wild Dark Shore
By Charlotte McConaghy (Flatiron Books)
Price: $28.99 / Get the Book

#12 The Wedding People
By Alison Espach (Henry Holt and Co.)
Price: $28.99 / Get the Book

#13 An Inside Job
By Daniel Silva (Harper)
Price: $32 / Get the Book

#14 The Enchanted Greenhouse
By Sarah Beth Durst (Bramble)
Price: $29.99 / Get the Book

#15 Culpability
By Bruce Holsinger (Spiegel & Grau)
Price: $30 / Get the Book
HARDCOVER NONFICTION

#1 Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
By John Green (Crash Course Books)
Price: $28 / Get the Book

#2 The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
By Robin Wall Kimmerer, John Burgoyne (Illus.) (Scribner)
Price: $20 / Get the Book

#3 One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
By Omar El Akkad (Knopf)
Price: $28 / Get the Book

#4 Abundance
By Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)
Price: $30 / Get the Book

#5 A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck
By Sophie Elmhirst (Riverhead Books)
Price: $28 / Get the Book

#6 The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can't Stop Talking About
By Mel Robbins, Sawyer Robbins (Hay House LLC)
Price: $29.99 / Get the Book

#7 The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse
By Charlie Mackesy (HarperOne)
Price: $22.99 / Get the Book

#8 Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America
By Robert B. Reich (Knopf)
Price: $30 / Get the Book

#9 The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces
By Seth Harp (Viking)
Price: $30 / Get the Book

#10 King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation
By Scott Anderson (Doubleday)
Price: $35 / Get the Book

#11 The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780
By Rick Atkinson (Crown)
Price: $42 / Get the Book

#12 We Can Do Hard Things: Answers to Life's 20 Questions
By Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, Amanda Doyle (The Dial Press)
Price: $34 / Get the Book

#13 Birds: A Photicular Book
By Dan Kainen (Workman Publishing Company)
Price: $27 / Get the Book

#14 On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women's Sports
By Christine Brennan (Scribner)
Price: $29.99 / Get the Book

#15 The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War
By Erik Larson (Crown)
Price: $35 / Get the Book
TRADE PAPERBACK FICTION

#1 Remarkably Bright Creatures
By Shelby Van Pelt (Ecco)
Price: $19.99 / Get the Book

#2 Project Hail Mary
By Andy Weir (Ballantine)
Price: $22 / Get the Book

#3 One Golden Summer
By Carley Fortune (Berkley)
Price: $19 / Get the Book

#4 Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books
By Kirsten Miller (William Morrow Paperbacks)
Price: $18.99 / Get the Book

#5 The Lion Women of Tehran
By Marjan Kamali (Gallery Books)
Price: $18.99 / Get the Book

#6 I Who Have Never Known Men
By Jacqueline Harpman (Transit Books)
Price: $16.95 / Get the Book

#7 The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
By James McBride (Riverhead Books)
Price: $19 / Get the Book

#8 Accomplice to the Villain
By Hannah Nicole Maehrer (Entangled: Red Tower Books)
Price: $19.99 / Get the Book

#9 Martyr!
By Kaveh Akbar (Vintage)
Price: $18 / Get the Book

#10 All the Colors of the Dark
By Chris Whitaker (Crown)
Price: $19 / Get the Book

#11 The Frozen River
By Ariel Lawhon (Vintage)
Price: $18 / Get the Book

#12 The Thursday Murder Club
By Richard Osman (Penguin)
Price: $18 / Get the Book

#13 The Spellshop
By Sarah Beth Durst (Bramble)
Price: $19.99 / Get the Book

#14 A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping
By Sangu Mandanna (Berkley)
Price: $19 / Get the Book

#15 Just for the Summer
By Abby Jimenez (Forever)
Price: $17.99 / Get the Book
TRADE PAPERBACK NONFICTION

#1 Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
By Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed Editions)
Price: $22 / Get the Book

#2 On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
By Timothy Snyder (Crown)
Price: $12 / Get the Book

#3 The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession
By Michael Finkel (Vintage)
Price: $18 / Get the Book

#4 All About Love: New Visions
By bell hooks (Morrow)
Price: $16.99 / Get the Book

#5 The Origins of Totalitarianism
By Hannah Arendt, Anne Applebaum (Mariner Books Classics)
Price: $21.99 / Get the Book

#6 The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017
By Rashid Khalidi (Metropolitan Books)
Price: $19.99 / Get the Book

#7 A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
By Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith (Penguin )
Price: $20 / Get the Book

#8 The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
By Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. (Penguin)
Price: $19 / Get the Book

#9 The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
By David Grann (Vintage)
Price: $21 / Get the Book

#10 The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America
By Erik Larson (Vintage)
Price: $18 / Get the Book

#11 Didion and Babitz
By Lili Anolik (Scribner)
Price: $20 / Get the Book

#12 The Artist's Way: 30th Anniversary Edition
By Julia Cameron (TarcherPerigee)
Price: $24 / Get the Book

#13 A Dumb Birds Field Guide to the Worst Birds Ever
By Matt Kracht (Chronicle Books)
Price: $15.95 / Get the Book

#14 Native Nations: A Millennium in North America
By Kathleen DuVal (Random House Trade Paperbacks)
Price: $25 / Get the Book

#15 They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us: Expanded Edition
By Hanif Abdurraqib (Two Dollar Radio)
Price: $18.95 / Get the Book
MASS MARKET

#1 Animal Farm
By George Orwell (Signet)
Price: $9.99 / Get the Book

#2 1984
By George Orwell (Signet)
Price: $10.99 / Get the Book

#3 The Long Walk
By Stephen King (Pocket)
Price: $11.99 / Get the Book

#4 Slaughterhouse-Five
By Kurt Vonnegut (Dell)
Price: $9.99 / Get the Book

#5 Foundation
By Isaac Asimov (Spectra)
Price: $10 / Get the Book

#6 The Diary of a Young Girl
By Anne Frank (Bantam)
Price: $8.99 / Get the Book

#7 Jurassic Park
By Michael Crichton (Ballantine)
Price: $10.99 / Get the Book

#8 The Way of Kings
By Brandon Sanderson (Tor)
Price: $12.99 / Get the Book

#9 Dune
By Frank Herbert (Ace)
Price: $10.99 / Get the Book

#10 Hamlet
By William Shakespeare (Simon & Schuster)
Price: $6.99 / Get the Book
CHILDREN'S ILLUSTRATED

#1 The Very Hungry Caterpillar
By Eric Carle (World of Eric Carle)
Price: $10.99 / Get the Book

#2 Goodnight Moon
By Margaret Wise Brown, Clement Hurd (Illus.) (Harper)
Price: $10.99 / Get the Book

#3 Don't Trust Fish
By Neil Sharpson, Dan Santat (Illus.) (Dial Books)
Price: $18.99 / Get the Book

#4 Good Night, Gorilla
By Peggy Rathmann (G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers)
Price: $8.99 / Get the Book

#5 Bluey: Bad Mood
By (Penguin Young Readers )
Price: $9.99 / Get the Book

#6 Where's Waldo?
By Martin Handford (Candlewick)
Price: $8.99 / Get the Book

#7 Little Blue Truck
By Alice Schertle, Jill McElmurry (Illus.) (Clarion Books)
Price: $10.99 / Get the Book

#8 Jamberry
By Bruce Degen (HarperCollins)
Price: $9.99 / Get the Book

#9 The Day the Crayons Made Friends
By Drew Daywalt, Oliver Jeffers (Illus.) (Philomel Books)
Price: $19.99 / Get the Book

#10 Caitlin Clark: A Little Golden Book Biography
By Marisa DiNovis, Joanie Stone (Illus.) (Golden Books)
Price: $5.99 / Get the Book
CHILDREN'S INTEREST

#1 Glorious Rivals
By Jennifer Lynn Barnes (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
Price: $20.99 / Get the Book

#2 The Library of Unruly Treasures
By Jeanne Birdsall, Matt Phelan (Illus.) (Knopf Books for Young Readers)
Price: $17.99 / Get the Book

#3 The Spirit Bares Its Teeth
By Andrew Joseph White (Peachtree Teen)
Price: $14.99 / Get the Book

#4 A Wolf Called Fire
By Rosanne Parry (Greenwillow Books)
Price: $18.99 / Get the Book

#5 The Swifts: A Dictionary of Scoundrels
By Beth Lincoln, Claire Powell (Illus.) (Dutton Books for Young Readers)
Price: $9.99 / Get the Book

#6 Guts: A Graphic Novel
By Raina Telgemeier (Graphix)
Price: $12.99 / Get the Book

#7 The One and Only Bob
By Katherine Applegate, Patricia Castelao (Illus.) (Storytide)
Price: $10.99 / Get the Book

#8 Snoop
By Gordon Korman (Scholastic Press)
Price: $18.99 / Get the Book

#9 We Were Liars (Deluxe Edition)
By E. Lockhart (Delacorte Press)
Price: $14.99 / Get the Book

#10 Charlotte's Web
By E.B. White (HarperCollins)
Price: $10.99 / Get the Book
CHILDREN'S SERIES TITLES

#1 Sunrise on the Reaping (A Hunger Games Novel)
By Suzanne Collins (Scholastic Press)
Price: $27.99 / Get the Book

#2 The Summer I Turned Pretty
By Jenny Han (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers)
Price: $11.99 / Get the Book

#3 Dog Man: Grime and Punishment
By Dav Pilkey (Graphix)
Price: $12.99 / Get the Book

#4 I Survived the Japanese Tsunami, 2011 (I Survived Graphic Novel #12)
By Lauren Tarshis, Chris Chalik (Illus.) (Graphix)
Price: $12.99 / Get the Book

#5 The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (A Hunger Games Novel)
By Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)
Price: $16.99 / Get the Book

#6 The Wild Robot Protects
By Peter Brown (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
Price: $8.99 / Get the Book

#7 The Wild Robot
By Peter Brown (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
Price: $9.99 / Get the Book

#8 The Princess in Black
By Shannon Hale, Dean Hale, Leuyen Pham (Illus.) (Candlewick)
Price: $6.99 / Get the Book

#9 Karen's Ghost: A Graphic Novel (Baby-Sitters Little Sister, #11)
By Ann M. Martin, DK Yingst (Illus.) (Graphix)
Price: $12.99 / Get the Book

#10 Dog Man and Cat Kid
By Dav Pilkey (Graphix)
Price: $12.99 / Get the Book