Top Titles at Public Libraries

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

Autumn is upon us and the summer’s top books are starting to fall.

Kathryn Stockett’s The Calamity Club and Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden are still at the top of the tree. Below them, the order that held all summer gave way. Yesteryear, #1 in May and June, slipped to sixth. Ann Patchett’s Whistler fell from fourth in September to tenth. And Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent, #1 from January through March, dropped to thirteenth, its lowest yet. The fresh cider donuts in this Fall metaphor are eight new books, four of them long-awaited follow-ups:

Partita (#8). Barbara Kingsolver’s first novel since the Pulitzer-winning Demon Copperhead, and an Indie Next pick. A Tennessee piano teacher gets a call from a lover she hasn’t heard from in twenty years.
A Court of Splintered Harmony (#11). The first new A Court of Thorns and Roses novel in five years sold 1.7 million copies on its first day, and it barely had a week of October.
Peck & Peck (#16). Bonnie Garmus’s follow-up to the phenomenon that was Lessons in Chemistry, and also an Indie Next pick. A young man lands a job at a prestigious, dysfunctional New York poetry journal in the eighties.
Hollywood, Ending (#18). John Green’s first novel in nearly ten years, and his first for adults, debuted at #1 on the New York Times list. Two young actors are cast in an Andy Warhol biopic.

Two more brought back old mystery friends. Louise Penny brings back Chief Inspector Armand Gamache for his 21st novel, Miss Wolcott’s Ghost (#17). And Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple returns in Lucy Foley’s estate-authorized Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel (#19), fifty years after Christie’s last Marple novel. Rounding out the newcomers are Freida McFadden’s Halloween-timed The Witch (#4) and Rebecca Yarros’s Threshing Day (#9), a book of stories in the Fourth Wing series, but emphatically not book four.

Several of October’s top books are barely October books at all. Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Splintered Harmony didn’t arrive until October 27, leaving it just five days of the month, and it still reached #11. Bonnie Garmus’s Peck & Peck came out October 13 and Louise Penny’s Miss Wolcott’s Ghost on October 20. That’s the holds queue at work—patrons don’t wait for publication day to go looking. We saw the same thing last month, as John Grisham’s The French Illusion came out with just two days of September left, and still made #18. We said to expect it “much higher in October.” With a full month, it jumped to #3. Expect Maas at or near the top in November, with Garmus and Penny rising too.

Finally, the screen-to-shelf effect we’ve been tracking all year is fading. Project Hail Mary fell out of the top twenty, seven months after the film opened. Verity was a surprise: the film opened at #1 on October 2 and has taken in more than $70 million domestically, but the book slipped from #11 to #12. And 1997’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone held at #20 ahead of the HBO series, which premieres Christmas Day.

Here’s the full list: