Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Alan Moore’s Jerusalem. Brit Bennett’s The Mothers and Nathan Hill’s The Nix. Liane Moriarty’s Truly Madly Guilty and Anna Snoekstra’s Only Daughter. Jonathan Rabb’s Among the Living and Robert Hicks’s The Orphan Mother. Patrick Phillips’s Blood at the Root and Beth Macy’s Truevine. Many of the books that buzzed at BookExpo America (BEA) also buzzed at the American Library Association (ALA) conference in Orlando earlier this summer. (Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson was so popular in Orlando that even Norton's display copy was stolen.) Of course, publishers bring different titles to the different shows, and it’s interesting to see what new titles caught fire at ALA. Not surprisingly, much attention was paid to Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn (Amistad: Harper Collins), the National Book Award, Coretta Scott King Award, and Newbery Honor Award winner’s first adult title. Margaret Atwood’s tart, smart Hag-Seed (Hogarth: Crown) and Marisa Silver’s Little Nothing (Blue Rider), about a special child born to a peasant family a century ago, also drew readers. Thrillers in demand included Karin Slaughter’s The Kept Woman (Morrow), a new Will Trent novel; James Patterson’s Woman of God (Little, Brown), with suspense surrounding a female pope; Robert Dickinson’s The Tourist (Redhook), with a woman’s putative disappearance introducing a time-shifting plot; JP Delaney’s psychological tingler, The Girl Before (Ballantine); Camilla Lackberg’s The Lost Boy (Pegasus), with clues to a murder held close by the victim’s high school sweetheart; and In Sunlight or In Shadow, ed. by Lawrence Block (Pegasus), collecting 17 newly commissioned stories written in response to Edward Hopper’s moody, sometimes desolate paintings. Mysteries led off with Sophie Hannah’s new Hercule Poirot adventure, Closed Casket (Morrow). Also popular: two Kensington cozies, Laurien Berenson’s Live and Let Growl: A Melanie Travis Mystery and Leslie Meier’s British Manor Murder: A Lucy Stone Mystery, plus other Kensington titles that included Jason Overstreet’s The Striver’s Row Spy, a debut novel set during the Harlem Renaissance, and Simona Ahrnstedt’s All In, about a Swedish corporate raider whose love life is all business. Soho Press celebrated Soho Crime's 25th birthday with a party at ALA featuring Cara Black, whose 16th Aimée Leduc mystery, Murder on the Quai, especially excited fans as it was a prequel to the series. More big Soho mysteries included Peter Lovesey's next Peter Diamond outing, Another One Goes Tonight; Colin Cotterill's I Shot the Buddha, a Dr. Siri Paiboun title set in 1979 Laos and Thailand; and Tim Hallinan’s Fields Where They Lay, a holiday twist on his popular Junior Bender series. Other hot Soho titles: Roy Scranton's debut novel, War Porn, a viscerally tough work that connects three lives shattered by America’s invasion of Iraq, and Okey Ndibe's memoir Never Look an American in the Eye, with the novelist and founding editor of African Commentary chronicling his move from Nigeria to America. Another hot memoir, published by Tin House and distributed by Norton, was Regina McBride’s Ghost Songs, the novelist’s account of her parents’ suicides when she was still in her teens and her subsequent search for self and roots. Romance flourished at ALA, in part because of the packed United for Libraries panel, “Isn’t It Romantic?” Sought-out titles from that panel included Susan Wiggs’s Family Tree (Morrow), a tale of one woman’s life divided into two acts by a year-long coma, as well as Heather Graham’s Deadly Fate (next in the “Krewe of Hunters” series) and Brenda Novak’s The Secret She Kept (second in the “Fairham Island” series), both from Mira: Harlequin. Kimberly Belle’s The Marriage Lie, also from Mira: Harlequin, concerns a dead husband’s secrets, and Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s First Star I See Tonight (Morrow) enjoyed a popularity first generated at Day of Dialog in Chicago. More pop fiction that popped: Brunonia Barry’s The Fifth Petal (Crown), with the author returning to contemporary Salem for a peek at murder; Jay Kristoff’s Nevernight (Thomas Dunne: St. Martin’s), wherein a young woman plans vengeance while training at a school for assassins; Elan Mastai’s All Our Wrong Todays (Dutton), a debut novel whose protagonist time travels from a utopian 2016 to the same year in our actual, clearly dystopian world; and Graham Moore’s The Last Days of Night (Random), an electrifying historical about a massive suit Thomas Edison brought against George Westinghouse. HarperCollins had hits with two titles from its Harper Voyager imprint: Sarah Beth Durst’s The Queen of Blood: Book One of The Queens of Renthia, with thoughtful Daleina and exiled warrior Ven joining forces to discover why the spirits inhabiting their land are so bloodthirsty; and Brom’s Lost Gods, with ex-con Chet Moran traveling to Purgatory to save his wife and their unborn child. In fact, the publisher’s ALA list differed enough from its BEA list to surface a good number of new and interesting titles. Aside from already mentioned works by Hannah, Slaughter, Phillips, Wiggs, and Woodson, in-demand titles from HarperCollins included Nadia Hashimi’s A House Without Windows, about a devoted Afghan wife jailed for her husband’s murder; Jenny Colgan’s The Bookshop on the Corner, the New York Times best-selling author’s trade paperback original about a librarian remaking her life; Paulette Jiles’s News of the World, set in post–Civil War Texas; Anne Valente’s Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down, a debut about four teenagers undone by a school shooting; Anthony Bourdain’s Appetites, the celebrity chef’s first cookbook in ten years; and Elizabeth Lesser’s Marrow, featured at United for Libraries’ “Reads Like Fiction” panel, about the author's drawing closer to her sister—and to an understanding of self—after donating bone marrow to her. Finally, while Workman did well with Gayle Forman’s Leave Me and Joshua Foer & others’ Atlas Obscura, two books that also sang at BEA, it, too, fielded a spate of hot new titles. Evidently, people couldn’t get enough of award-winning food writer Elaine Khosrova’s Butter: A Rich History, because, really, who can get enough of butter generally? Other big Workman titles included Lydia Reeder’s Dust Bowl Girls: A Team’s Quest for Basketball Glory (Algonquin), featured at United for Libraries’ “Reads Like Fiction” panel; Grace Bonney’s enthused-over In the Company of Women: Inspiration and Advice from over 100 Makers, Artists, and Entrepreneurs; and Taylor Hart’s Crochet Taxidermy: 30 Quirky Animal Projects, from Mouse to Moose, evidently easy enough for everyone to do (except me). The surprise fiction hit was Tom McAllister’s The Young Widower's Handbook, whose klutzy young hero runs away after his wife’s death. Look for more ALA buzz titles next week, with a complete list of the show’s most popular titles.