you know, colleen hoover is is selling very briskly, very popular, has several books on the bestseller list at the same time in the the areas where i have a special team in politics and history. erik larsen continues to sell very well, particularly his book splendor in the veil, which came out in softcover, which covers the first year of winston churchill's leadership in britain, coinciding with the bombing of britain by germany. that sold very well. and i will tell you, classics so very well during the holiday season. there's something about buying a classic book as a gift for somebody during the holiday season. what are you currently reading? i just finished reading a really terrific book with a greatest benefit of being a the owner of a bookseller. as i get something called arc's advanced readers copies. so we get ship lots of books that are not available yet, but that we can read to determine whether we want to order them so i just read an arc for an amazing book called the hopkins manuscript. it was first published in 1939 science fiction. and it's about a guy in britain who's an

we run out of colleen hoover. we run out oij rowling. these things happen. was our fault. we didn't put in enough copies initially. back in 2021 two other authors who were writing about the transgender issue, which is a very deeply controversial issue, has very strong opinions on both sides of a debate. two other authors, helenjoyce, kathleen stock, they said that waterstones was not properly promoting and distributing their books. do you have a problem or do your staff have a problem with certain books? i think we will be making judgements as to how popular those books are. not unreasonably... they were all, i checked, they were all in bestseller lists. i also know that we have them in the vast majority of our shops and we sell relatively low numbers of them. yes, they're bestsellers, but these are still relatively low numbers and they were stocked in most of our shops. when you have a small number of shops go out of stock, of course people, and the author in particular, and i'm not remotely saying that the authors should not feel deeply aggrieved if their