2022 in books: Colleen Hoover’s bestselling year, Bob Dylan and Bono memoirs, self-help queen Brené Brown goes viral, Salman Rushdie stabbed
- 12 months ago romance and young-adult novelist Colleen Hoover was a word-of-mouth sensation. Now she’s everywhere you turn in the book world
- Brené Brown coolly dissected human emotions, Matthew McConaughey, Bob Dylan and Bono wrote – and recorded – memoirs; Salman Rushdie was attacked on stage
In any other year, there would have been a long line of candidates competing for 2022’s biggest literary story.
Robert “J.K. Rowling” Galbraith returned with The Ink Black Heart (Sphere, 2022), and Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing (Corsair, 2019) was given a substantial second wind courtesy of Reese Witherspoon’s movie adaptation. Jenny Han’s “The Summer I Turned Pretty” trilogy (Penguin, 2010-2012) received a similar commercial boost with Amazon’s popular series.
The Bullet that Missed (Penguin, 2022), the third novel by British television personality turned crime writer Richard Osman, continued the momentum generated by 2020’s record-breaking debut, The Thursday Murder Club.
Another writer who kept selling into 2022 was Taylor Jenkins Reid, with her Golden Age of Hollywood confessional The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (paperback Simon & Schuster, 2021).
And if you thought nothing could top James Patterson’s collaboration with former United States president Bill Clinton, along came Patterson’s collaboration with Dolly Parton: Run, Rose, Run (Century, 2022).
