Best-Sellers

Fiction

1. “A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini (Riverhead, $25.95). A friendship between two women in Afghanistan against the backdrop of 30 years of war; from the author of “The Kite Runner.”

2. “Blaze,” by Richard Bachman (Scribner, $25). An early Stephen King novel – Bachman is his alias – here revised. A criminal who was an abused child plots a kidnapping.

3. “Double Take,” by Catherine Coulter (Putnam, $25.95). Dillon Savich and Lacey Sherlock – F.B.I. agents as well as husband and wife – join with a San Francisco colleague to solve a murder and find a missing woman.

4. “The Children of Hðrin,” by J. R. R. Tolkien. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Illustrated by Alan Lee (Houghton Mifflin, $26). In Middle-earth, an evil lord wants to destroy his rival’s children.

5. “The Harlequin,” by Laurell K. Hamilton (Berkley, $25.95). The vampire hunter Anita Blake is under surveillance by a troop of vampire enforcers.

Nonfiction

1. “The Reagan Diaries,” by Ronald Reagan. Edited by Douglas Brinkley (HarperCollins, $35). Selections from the 40th president’s daily White House diaries.

2. “The Diana Chronicles,” by Tina Brown (Doubleday, $27.50). The Princess of Wales’s romance with the media in the age of celebrity journalism.

3. “The Assault On Reason,” by Al Gore (Penguin Press, $25.95). How the Bush administration has degraded the political environment through secrecy, fear and the rejection of fact-based reasoning.

4. “Einstein,” by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, $32). A biography of the genius based on newly released personal letters.

5. “Outrage,” by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann (HC/HarperCollins, $26.95). An attack on illegal immigration, United Nations profiteers, lazy congressmen and high drug prices.