The Millions Top Ten: March 2016

April 8, 2016 | 15 books mentioned 2 2 min read

We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for March.

This Month Last Month Title On List
1. 2. cover Fortune Smiles 4 months
2. 3. cover Slade House 6 months
3. 4. cover The Big Green Tent 5 months
4. 5. cover What Belongs to You 3 months
5. 6. cover My Name is Lucy Barton 3 months
6. 10. cover The Past 2 months
7. 9. cover A Brief History of Seven Killings 4 months
8. cover Girl Through Glass 1 month
9. 8. cover City on Fire 6 months
10. cover The Lost Time Accidents 1 month

Ascend, ascend Lauren Groff and Margaret Atwood! Set forth and lay claim to your spots within our Millions Hall of Fame. For one of these authors, it’s their second time making the list. For the other, it’s their debut. Can you guess which is which? The answer may surprise you.

And with the ascension of Fates and Futures and The Heart Goes Last, we welcome two newcomers to our monthly Top Ten: Girl Through Glass by Sari Wilson and The Lost Time Accidents by John Wray.

In his write-up for our Most Anticipated Book Preview three months ago, Matt Seidel described how Wilson’s novel “alternates between late-1970s New York, where its heroine works her way into George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, and the present day, where she is a dance professor having an affair with a student.” It’s a novel ripe with dramatic tension, and one more than a little fixated on body type, as Martha Anne Toll noted in her recent exploration of women — lost, thin, and small — in fiction.

Joining Wilson on the list this month is John Wray, whose newest novel, The Lost Time Accidents, covers a great many topics, such as physics, the Czech Republic, watch factories, Nazi war criminals, the Church of Scientology (but not really), and science fiction, among others. In her write-up for the Book Preview, Anne K. Yoder called it a “mash-up of sci-fi, time-travel, and family epic [that’s] both madcap and ambitious.” The novel was also covered by Michael Schaub in a recent edition of The Book Report — come for the overview, but stay for Bong Crosby!

Stay tuned for next month’s list, in which two more newcomers are poised to join our ranks.

This month’s near misses included: The Queen of the Night, Mr. SplitfootThe Turner HouseEternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles, and The Sellout. See Also: Last month’s list.

works on special projects for The Millions. He lives in Baltimore and he frequents dive bars. His interests can be followed on his Tumblr, Nick Recommends and Twitter, @nemoran3.