Bestseller Brief: Five Books and the Worst Case — October 4, 2026

The current New York Times lists are dated October 4, 2026. The Business list is dated September 1, 2026 — it publishes monthly, not weekly — and the newest Amazon Charts week is the week of September 20, 2026. 12345

All five books below are new to this show, and every one of them is built around the worst case: who sees it coming, who welcomes it, and who ends up paying for it. One of the five carries the New York Times dagger, the mark that means booksellers reported bulk orders, and it is on the Business list. 3

Three of the five also appear on Amazon's most-sold charts this week. The two instruments count different things — the Times counts a week of print and e-book sales, Amazon counts copies and pre-orders in its own store — so agreement between them is the strongest sales evidence on offer. 45

Genre: Contemporary family drama with a suspense spine and a past-and-present structure. 1

Hook: New this week at No. 1 on the combined fiction list and No. 2 on the hardcover fiction list, and No. 6 on Amazon's Most Sold Fiction chart in the same week. 14

Spoiler-safe premise: Molly Fitzgerald was two months old on September 11, 2001, when her mother went to an appointment at the World Trade Center and never came home. Her father and the stepmother who raised her loved her, but she grew up with a dread of disasters. As an adult she runs the Rhode Island Department for Emergency Preparedness, mapping out how to save lives in storms, epidemics and plane crashes. Her husband Jesse is a police polygraph expert with his own history of crisis. Then something unexpected upends the new marriage, and both of them begin questioning what they thought they knew. 167

Spoiler warning: There is a real twist, and the reviews are explicit that the less you know going in the better. The author's page also states plainly that the novel deals with postpartum psychosis and with the damage both the condition and its under-diagnosis cause — worth knowing before page one rather than halfway through. 78

Read it if: You want a family novel with a plot that keeps moving, and you are ready to be wrong about one of the people in it. It runs 464 pages. 7

Skip it if: You want the emergency-management job to be the subject — the crisis that matters here is inside a family, not on a runway. Skip it too if you want the marriage to be the whole story; the book keeps reaching back into the family's past.

Genre: Dark fantasy and supernatural thriller, and the third and final volume of the Ninth House trilogy. 9

Hook: New this week at No. 1 on the hardcover fiction list and No. 5 on the combined fiction list. 1

Spoiler-safe premise: Alex Stern has been to hell and back more than once, and this time she left the door open behind her. Demons are creeping through the streets of New Haven and onto the Yale campus, feeding on the souls of the living and terrifying the dead. Alex and her allies can hunt them, but the gates to the underworld will open, and it is a war they cannot win. To stop it she has to dig into the secrets of Yale and its societies and into the truth hidden in her own blood, while a corrupt board and a vampire with his own ties to those societies close in. 9

The prerequisite: This is a conclusion, not an entry point. Ninth House and Hell Bent come first, and it runs 496 pages. A star from Kirkus said the trilogy ends with sharp writing, vivid characters and puzzle-box plotting. 9

Read it if: You have read the first two and want the payoff, or you like dark academia where the magic carries a body count.

Skip it if: You are not caught up — the opening of a trilogy finale explains a world you have never met. Skip it too if all you want is a campus novel; this is horror wearing a university gown. Note also that it is a Times-only pick this week and appears nowhere on Amazon's most-sold fiction chart, which is unusual for the No. 1 hardcover novel. 4

Genre: Memoir. 2

Hook: New at No. 1 on both the combined and the hardcover nonfiction lists, and No. 8 on Amazon's Most Sold Nonfiction chart in the same week — the tightest agreement between the two instruments on this week's list. 25

Spoiler-safe premise: On September 1, 2016, Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem before an NFL game, and the league he played in never gave him another snap. The book arrives ten years later, and the publisher's description starts much earlier: in Turlock, California, where a Black kid adopted into a white family spent his childhood pushing back against other people's ideas about his Blackness, and where sport became the one place his talent could not be argued with. That took him to the Super Bowl, and then to an education he had not planned on inside professional football, alongside the reading he was doing — Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Huey Newton, Angela Davis. 10

The argument: The publisher's framing is that what he saw in the NFL, in his hometown and in unpunished killings of Black and Brown Americans stopped being somebody else's fight. A starred review in Booklist calls it a candid, observant, generous chronicle of an elite, suddenly dispensable quarterback and of the civil rights activist he became; Publishers Weekly called it an inspiring story of sticking to your values no matter the cost. It runs 288 pages, the shortest book on this list. 10

Read it if: You want the ten years around the knee from the person who paid for them, or a memoir you can finish in a weekend.

Skip it if: You want the systemic history of the league and the money — this is one man's account rather than an investigation. Skip it too if the argument is already settled for you in either direction; the book is not arguing about the protest, it is telling you what the protest cost.

Genre: Political argument and reported essay. 2

Hook: New this week at No. 2 on both nonfiction lists, and No. 18 on Amazon's Most Sold Nonfiction chart. The full title is End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World. 25

Core argument: Three groups that look like enemies — religious fundamentalists, Silicon Valley technologists and ethno-nationalists — turn out to share one belief: that a cleansing cataclysm is coming, whether as messianic prophecy, as runaway artificial intelligence, or as immigration and cultural replacement. The publisher's claim is that they do not fear it; they welcome it, each convinced they will be among the saved on the other side. That gives the book its title. "End times fascism," in the authors' definition, is the politics of people who make the world unlivable and then arrange to survive the fallout — a private island, a rocket to Mars, a bunker with a door that keeps everybody else outside. 11

The second half: Klein and Taylor argue that this alliance contradicts itself, and that its inability to imagine a shared future — even for people nominally on its own side — is where it can be beaten. The phrase they reach for is a new kind of "pro-life" politics, built on reverence for a shared existence rather than on the end of it. It runs 384 pages, and the reception has been unusually warm: The Times ran two separate reviews, one calling it trenchant and the other calling it smart and provocative, and Kirkus and Booklist both gave it stars. 11

Read it if: You want the thinking underneath the headlines, and you are willing to sit with a book that has a side. Klein and Taylor are organisers and activists as well as writers, and this is a case, argued, rather than a neutral survey of the far right. 11

Skip it if: You want a detached history, or argument books exhaust you. Skip it too if the diagnosis is already familiar, because the value here is the second half — what the authors think you do about it.

Genre: Business and management memoir, from the hospitality industry. 3

Hook: No. 3 on the Times Business list in its 27th week there, and the one pick this week carrying the New York Times dagger — the mark that means booksellers reported bulk orders. The Business list publishes monthly rather than weekly, so its date and its cadence differ from the two weekly lists above. 3

Core argument: Guidara took over Eleven Madison Park at twenty-six, when it was a struggling two-star brasserie that had never quite lived up to its room; eleven years later it was named the best restaurant in the world. The method he describes is anticipating a guest's flat or broken evening and fixing it before the guest feels it — a family who had never seen snow got a sledding trip in Central Park after dinner, and a couple whose holiday had been cancelled ate in a private dining room filled with sand, beach chairs and mai tais. The part that makes it a business book is what he says he learned about his own team: if the people on the floor are meant to care how a guest feels, the manager has to care how the staff feel. In the publisher's framing, great service cannot exist without great leadership. 12

Read it if: You manage people, run anything customer-facing, or want something you can finish on a flight and quote at a meeting on Monday.

Skip it if: You want numbers, systems or a playbook with metrics in it. Skip it too if you have already decided the answer to a service problem is a better script, because this book is about the opposite of a script. And note the cost of the pick: the publisher's date on it is 2022, so this is a backlist title that keeps selling rather than the book of this month. 12

Hollow Bones is the family-drama pick, and its worst case is one the heroine never planned for. Dead Beat is the finale pick, priced at two earlier books plus 496 pages. The Perilous Fight is the shortest and the most personal, and the only one here where the worst case already happened. End Times Fascism is the argument pick, and it is a case with a side rather than a survey. Unreasonable Hospitality is the practical pick, and it is the only one about preventing a small disaster instead of surviving a large one.