Harry Potter's reign continues
Here’s a look at what’s new on Paste BN’s Best-Selling Books list…
The boy who rules: J.K. Rowling and her creation, Harry Potter, have been having a good summer, and it looks like they are on track for a great year. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts One and Two has dominated the No. 1 spot for six consecutive weeks. (The full list is out Thursday.)
Sales of Cursed Child, which was released July 31, shows no signs of slowing down. The book surpasses Me Before You's streak of four weeks at No. 1 earlier in the year, and matches Me Before You for a total of six weeks at the top spot. The script of the play, written by J.K. Rowling, Jack Thorne and John Tiffany, is billed as the 'eighth' book in the Harry Potter franchise where Harry, the boy wizard, is all grown up with kids of his own.
Paste BN's Kelly Lawler gave the book a 3 (out of four) star review, writing “While reading the script is an incomplete experience — noticeably lacking the richness that acting and staging would add to a realized production and the familiar Rowling prose a novel would have contained — it may capture just enough of the old Potter magic to please even the most skeptical fans.”
Penny's growing popularity: Slowly but surely, Louise Penny's Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is proving popular. A Great Reckoning, the 12th book in the Inspector Gamache series, lands at No. 3 on this week's list. In the latest Chief Inspector Gamache mystery, our hero tries to root out corruption at a Quebec police academy in the midst of a murder.
Penny and her popular inspector first appeared in Paste BN's Best-Selling Books List in 2009 with The Brutal Telling. Over the years the the series has increased in popularity with the author's last two books The Nature of the Beast in 2015 and The Long Way Home, in 2014, both making it to No. 5.
"It has been a remarkable journey from her first novel, Still Life, which sold about 9,000 copies in hardcover and before the world of e-books. A Great Reckoning has 166,000 copies in print after three trips to press before publication and we are estimating our next reprint now." Andrew Martin, publisher of Minotaur said in a statement. He also attributed the book's success to the author's "social media presence and engagement with a growing base of devoted fans."
The popularity of Penny's series has transcended books, with a newly open walking tour in Quebec City based on her novel Bury Your Dead. According to the tour company, Tours Voir Quebec, the two-and-a-half-hour tour "follows the trail of Chief Inspector Armand Gamache as he investigates the murder of a local amateur archaeologist, whose body was found in the cellar of the Québec Literary and Historical Society."