Top Titles at Public Libraries

Here are the top twenty titles US public library patrons looked for in September 2026.

Look familiar? The top four titles—The Calamity Club, Theo of Golden, Yesteryear and Whistler—have been the same for four months running—in the same order for the last three! For changes, look further down. Sally Hepworth’s Mad Mabel has climbed from fifteenth in June to ninth in July, sixth in August and fifth now.

While the top was static, September saw a slate of fast-rising releases:

Big Little Truths (#6): Liane Moriarty’s first-ever sequel was published on August 25 and is rising fast. It’s a Reese’s Book Club pick and the new HBO season of Big Little Lies will be based on it.
Hollow Bones (#7): Jodi Picoult’s 30th novel, which came out September 15, takes on the September 11th attacks. It’s already number one on the New York Times Fiction list.
The Pirate Queen (#9): Ariel Lawhon’s novel about the Irish pirate, Grace O’Malley, was only released on September 8. (On a personal note: My family goes to the island of Inishbofin, where O’Malley had a castle, every year, so we need to read this one!)
The Thoroughbreds (#13): Elin Hilderbrand’s 32nd (!) novel, and her second with her daughter, Shelby Cunningham, was published September 15. For more on Hilderbrand’s extraordinary run of summer blockbusters, see my recent post Queens of Summer.
The Witches of Cambridge (#14): Alice Hoffman’s new series, out September 8, concerns a secret coven of witches at Radcliffe in the 1950s. (Second personal note: Was my 1950’s-Radcliffe-mother a witch?)
Exit Party (#16): Emily St. John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel brings back characters from The Singer’s Gun and The Glass Hotel.
The French Illusion (#18): John Grisham’s espionage thriller was only published September 29, so this is a holds-queue story. Expect it much higher in October.
Fury in Death (#19): Book 63 in the In Death series

Remember From Screen to Shelf: How Movies and TV Shows Drive Library Patron Interest? We saw more of that this month.

Verity (#11) is back ahead of the film. It opened October 2 and took #1 domestically with $32.6 million.
Project Hail Mary is still hanging on at #12, more than six months after the film opened.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (#20) tends to hang around in the 20s and 30s every month–a lot of staying-power for a 29 year-old book. It shot up in September no dobut in connection with the release of the first trailer for the upcoming HBO series.

In other news, The Odyssey finally dropped off the list. It’s likely to take ten years to come back.

Here’s the full list: