SLAM DUNK This week’s batch of new best sellers includes two very different titles involving athletics. On the nonfiction side at No. 7, we have “Where Tomorrows Aren’t Promised,” a memoir by Carmelo Anthony, who plays as No. 7 for the Los Angeles Lakers. Written with D. Watkins, author of several books of his own, including “We Speak for Ourselves: How Woke Culture Prohibits Progress,” the account is dedicated “to every child who knows there is more to this life than people tell them is possible.” It begins in Brooklyn, where Anthony was born, with the view from his family’s apartment: “After pushing our old speaker against the wall and climbing my small body on top of it, I could peer through the black iron bars.” Anthony describes “hoopers, dreamers, rappers,” older kids “trading dope for cash,” girls playing jacks and his sister, Michelle, doing double Dutch “with ballerina footwork.” As his view widens, readers get to see the rest of his family, their move to Baltimore, their losses and challenges and Anthony’s road to the N.B.A. Fun fact: Anthony isn’t the only best-selling Laker right now. LeBron James’s book, “We Are Family,” is No. 4 on the middle grade hardcover list. Perhaps No. 7 and No. 6 will have a reading together?
GRAND SLAM In other sports news, Liane Moriarty’s ninth novel, “Apples Never Fall,” about a family of Australian tennis players, enters the hardcover fiction list at No. 1. The story centers on Joy Delaney, the matriarch and former co-owner of an elite tennis academy, who is missing. Moriarty delves into Joy’s long marriage, relationships with her grown children and the mysterious appearance of a bleeding stranger at her house; like all Moriarty novels, this one is a kind of literary turducken: a mystery inside a cautionary tale inside a domestic drama. In a meta twist, we learn that Joy begrudgingly took a memoir-writing class with a literary-minded friend who proposed “Game, Set, Match” as a title for her book. Joy wonders, “Was tennis her life’s theme?” It may not be the theme of “Apples Never Fall,” but it’s certainly an interesting leitmotif — just as spinning was in Moriarty’s third (underappreciated) novel, “What Alice Forgot,” in which a mother of three suffers amnesia after taking a tumble off a stationary bike. Because of this workout gone wrong, she is able to examine her life from a fresh perspective and make changes worth breaking a sweat for.
