NYT Best Sellers Books: 14 Titles Readers Keep Coming Back To
The New York Times bestseller list is the most closely watched sales chart in publishing, and a place on it tends to follow a book for the rest of its life. This guide pulls together fourteen titles that have all made the list, covering fantasy, horror, literary fiction, mystery and romance.
The order comes from our own shop data, starting with the books our readers look at most. Each entry explains what the book is actually about and what it has achieved, whether that is 150 million copies sold, an Arthur C. Clarke Award, or fifteen weeks at number one.
Throne Of Glass
Sarah J. Maas opened her epic fantasy series with Throne of Glass in August 2012. It follows Celaena Sardothien, a teenage assassin in a corrupt kingdom ruled by the tyrannical King of Adarlan, who forms unexpected bonds and uncovers a conspiracy along the way. The series ran to eight books, concluding in October 2018, and appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. Hulu and Disney-ABC optioned it for television in 2016, though the rights later returned to the author.
The Stand
Published in 1978, The Stand is Stephen King's post-apocalyptic epic about a weaponised influenza strain that escapes a military installation and kills roughly 99.4% of the world's population within a month. The survivors gather into factions led by figures of good and evil, and the novel introduces Randall Flagg, an antagonist King would return to for decades. King set out to write something in the spirit of The Lord of the Rings and found the scale of characters and storylines hard going. The 1990 Complete and Uncut Edition restored over 300 pages and runs to 1,152 pages, making it his longest stand-alone work.
The Night Circus
Erin Morgenstern wrote The Night Circus across three National Novel Writing Month competitions before it was published in 2011. Le Cirque des Rêves opens only at night and appears in cities without warning, and it doubles as the arena for a contest between two young magicians, Celia Bowen and Marco Alisdair, trained since childhood by rival masters. The narrative is nonlinear and told from multiple viewpoints. Celia and Marco fall in love once they work out who their opponent is, which complicates a game neither chose to enter.
The House In The Cerulean Sea
TJ Klune's 2020 fantasy follows Linus Baker, a lonely case worker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, sent to assess an orphanage on the remote island of Marsyas. The six children there include a wyvern, a forest sprite, a shapeshifter and Lucy, short for Lucifer. Linus arrives expecting to observe and file a report, and instead grows attached to the children and to Arthur Parnassus, the man who raises them. The book turns on the idea that the children should not be defined by other people's fear of them.
The Secret History
Donna Tartt's 1992 debut is a campus novel about six Classics students at an elite Vermont college, narrated years later by Richard Papen as he reflects on the murder of their friend Bunny Corcoran. It is an inverted detective story, so the question is not who did it but how they got there. Knopf ordered 75,000 copies for the first edition rather than the usual 10,000 for a debut, and it became a bestseller. The New York Times credits it with originating dark academia, a sub-genre it caused to "explode like a firework".
Where The Crawdads Sing
Delia Owens, a zoologist by profession, built her 2018 novel around two timelines: Kya growing up alone in the North Carolina marshes from 1952, and the investigation into the death of local golden boy Chase Andrews. Owens's background in animal behaviour feeds directly into the book, with the deception and violence of nature mirroring how the men in Kya's life treat her. By April 2023 it had sold over 18 million copies, and a film adaptation arrived in July 2022.
The Alchemist
Paulo Coelho's 1988 novel follows Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who dreams of treasure at the Egyptian pyramids and sets out across North Africa to find it. He is robbed in Tangiers, works for a crystal merchant, falls in love at an oasis and meets the alchemist of the title. Originally written in Portuguese, it has been translated into more than 65 languages and sold over 150 million copies worldwide.
Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel's 2014 novel moves between the years before and after the Georgia Flu wipes out most of the world's population. It opens with an actor dying on stage during King Lear in Toronto, then jumps twenty years forward to the Traveling Symphony, a nomadic troupe performing Shakespeare and classical music around the Great Lakes. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2015, had sold 1.5 million copies by 2020 and was adapted into a ten-part HBO Max series in December 2021.
The Midnight Library
Matt Haig's 2020 novel puts Nora Seed in a library between life and death, where every book holds a version of the life she might have lived had she chosen differently. She tries them: rock star, Olympic swimmer, glaciologist in the Arctic, Cambridge philosophy lecturer. Each one carries its own griefs, which is rather the point. It was generally well received by critics.
The Thursday Murder Club
Richard Osman's debut, published in September 2020, introduced four pensioners at the Cooper's Chase retirement village in Kent who meet weekly to pick over cold cases. When a property developer is murdered, Elizabeth, Ron, Joyce and Ibrahim have a live one to work on. It launched a series and was released as an audiobook read by Lesley Manville.
Fourth Wing
Rebecca Yarros published Fourth Wing in May 2023 and it reached number one on the New York Times list, helped enormously by BookTok. Violet Sorrengail was trained to be a scribe and has weak joints, but her mother, the general who runs Basgiath War College, orders her into the Riders Quadrant instead, where cadets regularly die. It sold over two million copies in six months, has been translated into roughly 30 languages and won International Book of the Year at the 2024 TikTok Book Awards.
Fairy Tale
Stephen King's 2022 dark fantasy follows Charlie Reade, a 17-year-old who cares for his elderly neighbour Mr Bowditch and inherits something far stranger than money: a shed containing a portal to another world. Charlie crosses into Empis to find a magical sundial that might restore Bowditch's dying dog, Radar, and walks into a land cursed by an illness called "the gray" and ruled by a figure known as Flight Killer. Published by Scribner on 6 September 2022.
The Bridges Of Madison County
Robert James Waller's 1992 romance is set on a farm in 1960s Madison County, Iowa, where an Italian-American war bride has a brief affair with a National Geographic photographer sent to shoot the local covered bridges. The book is framed as a novelisation of a true story but is entirely fictional. It is one of the bestselling books of the 20th century with 50 million copies sold worldwide, and became a 1995 film and a 2013 musical.
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini followed The Kite Runner with this 2007 novel about two Afghan women, Mariam and Laila, born a generation apart and bound together by marriage to the same abusive man in Kabul. Hosseini has described it as a mother-daughter story in contrast to the father-son story of his debut. It sold over a million copies in its first week, spent fifteen weeks at number one on the New York Times list and drew strong reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and Booklist.
Bestseller lists are a record of what readers reached for, not a ranking of quality, but a book that stays on the chart for months usually has something going for it. There is plenty of range here, from a 1,152-page pandemic epic to a retirement village murder mystery, so pick by subject rather than by sales figure.