This year, the best-seller lists were again saturated with new releases from blockbuster authors like Dan Brown, John Grisham, James Patterson and Suzanne Collins. But amid the familiar names sat breakout novels from lesser known and first time writers that pulled in huge sales, taking the authors, and sometimes even their publishers, by surprise.
Here are five works of fiction that found unexpectedly broad readerships this year.
The Correspondent
by Virginia Evans
A few years ago, Virginia Evans was planning to quit writing and go to law school. She’d written seven manuscripts over 18 years, and her efforts to land a publisher had gone nowhere.
She decided to give the writing life one last go during the pandemic, when she wrote “The Correspondent,” a quirky story about a 70-something Maryland woman who writes letters to family members, journalists and prominent people like George Lucas, Joan Didion and the novelists Kazuo Ishiguro and Ann Patchett.
To Evans’s surprise, a major publisher snapped it up. To her even greater surprise, so have readers.
When Crown released “The Correspondent” this spring, it sold around 8,000 copies in its first month — a decent number for a debut, but far from a best seller.
Then, things took an unexpected turn. Instead of tapering off, as is typical in the weeks after publication, sales started to build over the summer. By September, the novel was selling 70,000 copies a month. It hit the New York Times best-seller list in October, has sold more than 550,000 copies to date and is in its 18th printing.
“This sales trajectory is unusual for any book and almost unheard-of for a debut fiction title,” said Brenna Connor, an analyst with Circana BookScan, which tracks book sales.
Evans, a 39-year-old mother of two who lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, wrote in a post on Instagram that she initially had low expectations for the book. “I wasn’t planning to show it to anyone,” she wrote.
Like her protagonist, Sybil Van Antwerp, Evans has a habit of writing letters to people she admires. In 2016, she struck up a long-running correspondence with Patchett after she wrote to her to tell her how much she enjoyed Patchett’s novel “Commonwealth.” Patchett gave “The Correspondent” a glowing blurb, calling it “a cause for celebration.”
Even to its biggest boosters, the book’s ongoing success is something of a mystery.
“There wasn’t one thing that has propelled this,” said Amy Einhorn, the fiction publisher at Crown, who acquired the novel.
“I told everyone I think this could be a sleeper hit. It’s always nice when you’re right.”
Alchemised
by SenLinYu
This year’s biggest debut novel, “Alchemised,” had hordes of devoted fans before it was even published.
Its author, SenLinYu, who identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, built a huge following online by writing “Manacled,” a viral work of Harry Potter fan fiction. Published serially on the website Archive of Our Own, “Manacled” drew more than 10 million views and more than 100,000 five-star ratings on Goodreads. It grew so popular that fans printed and bound their own elaborately designed copies.
“It kept getting bigger and farther out of my control,” SenLinYu said in an interview with The New York Times this summer.
SenLinYu decided to take the story down and rework the plot, removing any copyrighted elements of J.K. Rowling’s world. The resulting book, “Alchemised,” was published in September by Del Rey.
Set in a war-torn fantasy world, “Alchemised” centers on an illicit romance between a healer and rebel named Helena and her former classmate and sworn enemy, Kaine, who takes her captive.
Even though “Manacled” had amassed an enormous virtual following, there was no guarantee that readers would buy the reimagined print book. Committed fans had already read a version of the story for free, and converting fan fiction into a separate work can alienate readers who were drawn in by familiar characters and see fan fiction as a communal enterprise, not a commercial one. It was also unclear whether the book could attract a readership beyond Harry Potter fan fiction circles.
None of those factors hindered sales. In its first three months, “Alchemised” has sold more than 850,000 copies, and it’s currently No. 4 on The New York Times hardcover fiction best-seller list. It has vastly outsold two other popular works of Harry Potter fan fiction that were adapted and released in print this year.
No one is more surprised by this than SenLinYu, who thought that the audience had peaked when the final installment of the fan fiction story was published in 2019.
“I thought, all the people in the world who want to read it have read it — now it will quiet down,” they said.
Theo of Golden
by Allen Levi
When Allen Levi, a musician who had written scores of songs over his career, began writing his first novel, his plan was to finish it and stick it in a drawer. “I just wanted to see if I had the muscle to write a piece of long fiction,” he said.
The resulting book, “Theo of Golden,” is about an older man who moves to a city in Georgia and begins buying 92 pencil portraits off a coffee shop wall to return them to their subjects and “rightful owners.” After a group of Levi’s friends read the novel and encouraged him not to let the manuscript molder, he self-published it through Amazon in the fall of 2023.
“Theo of Golden” became a word-of-mouth smash hit. It sold 3,000 copies in 2023, then 24,000 in 2024. This year, sales exploded, prompting Atria to buy rights to the book. It has sold more than 300,000 copies this year.
The book opens with a dedication to Levi’s friend Cubby Culbertson: “As a token of gratitude for our long friendship and a reminder, just between us, that you promised to buy a hundred copies of the book if I dedicated it to you. Will that be cash or charge?”
Levi said the line was a lighthearted joke intended to invite readers into his book. He picked Culbertson because he thought he’d be a good sport about it.
He was right about that. Culbertson asked Levi to send 99 copies to book clubs, to see if they could give sales a little kick start. “He’s quite the businessman, and he said, I do want to buy 100 books — but I just want one,” Levi recalled.
Mona’s Eyes
by Thomas Schlesser, translated by Hildegarde Serle
At a time when fiction sales are often driven by thrillers and sexy fantasy books about dragons, “Mona’s Eyes” is something different.
Large commercial publishers tend to dominate best-seller lists, but “Mona’s Eyes” was published by Europa Editions, an independent literary press. Books in translation are often considered difficult to sell in the United States, and this novel was originally published in French. Its plot follows neither criminal investigators nor star-crossed dragon riders, but a 10-year-old girl and her grandfather as they visit museums in Paris every week for a year, one masterwork at a time.
“I would have expected it to sell in intellectual circles and to do well in Brooklyn,” said James Daunt, the chief executive of Barnes & Noble, “not necessarily to be shoveling it out the door in Middle America.”
Michael Reynolds, the executive publisher of Europa, said the book sold well in France when it was published there last year, and it received a bump in the U.S. from an Indie Next pick, a selection made by independent book sellers.
At Barnes & Noble, Daunt said, staff members at a few stores got behind the book — perhaps drawn in by its cover, featuring a close-up of a woman’s brown eyes from the best-known painting by Johannes Vermeer. Employees across the chain’s roughly 700 locations can see what’s selling well in other stores, so when managers saw the book taking off, they ordered more copies and displayed them prominently.
In November, Barnes & Noble chose “Mona’s Eyes” as its Book of the Year, further supercharging its sales and putting it on track to become the bookseller’s best selling title of 2025.
Buckeye
by Patrick Ryan
Patrick Ryan got the kernel of an idea for a novel when his aunt shared a piece of scandalous family history: his grandmother, who lived in a small town in Ohio, had an affair with a neighbor that lasted for decades.
That revelation inspired Ryan to write about two characters in a similar situation. It quickly swelled into a multigenerational saga that centers on two families in a small Ohio town and unfolds over 60 years.
“I wanted to write about a mistake that echoed into these people’s lives,” he said.
Ryan spent six years working on the novel. When he sent it out in 2021, he had low expectations.
“It wouldn’t have been any great surprise to me if this book hadn’t gone anywhere,” he said.
Instead, when Random House published “Buckeye” this September, it received a rapturous response from critics and booksellers. Writing in The New York Times, the novelist Jess Walter called it a “reminder of the deep pleasure of following a cast of characters over their entire lives.”
It was an instant New York Times best seller, and has sold around 211,000 copies.
Both big business and grass roots fed the book’s success. It was selected by Jenna Bush for her Read with Jenna club and by Barnes & Noble for its book club, but it also caught on with smaller clubs around the country, which Ryan spoke with over Zoom. Major retailers rallied around it — Amazon named it the best book of the year — but so did independent bookstores like The Well-Read Moose in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and Sundog Books in Santa Rosa Beach, Fla.
Word of mouth recommendations also drove sales. On his book tour, Ryan frequently heard from readers who said the novel’s themes of forgiveness and living with grief resonated with them, and led them to press the book on family and friends.
For Ryan, who turned 60 shortly before “Buckeye” came out, publishing a best-selling novel several decades into his career feels surreal.
“I wasn’t in this to have a big hit anymore,” he said. “The stuff that’s happening with this book exceeds the dreams that I let go of decades ago.”
Alexandra Alter writes about books, publishing and the literary world for The Times.
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