You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Pat Barker's second Trojan War retelling has battled to the top of the Original Fiction charts in its launch week, with the hardback earning the former Booker winner a best ever weekly sales total—in any format—in her nearly 40-year career.
The Women of Troy (Hamish Hamilton) shifted 6,060 units through Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market, ending the two-week run of Stephen King's Billy Summers (Hodder) at the Original Fiction summit. Barker's previous weekly personal best was the a smidgeon over 5,000 units in June 2019 for the paperback release of her first Troy book, The Silence of the Girls (Hamish Hamilton). This continues what might be called 2021's Hot Homer Summer with Stephen Fry's Troy (Penguin) and Madeline Miller's 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction winner The Song of Achilles (Bloomsbury) also in last week's Top 50.
Cosy crime continues to pay for Richard Osman, with The Thursday Murder Club (Penguin) claiming a lucky 13th overall number one, eight of which have been earned by the mass market paperback. With a 14,260-copy haul, the paperback cracked the 400,000-units sold barrier last week, and also earned its 15th non-consecutive Mass Market Fiction number one. With The Man Who Died Twice (Viking) due in two weeks and a dead cert to be the number one, there is the possiblity that Osman's newest will be the first-ever hardback sequel to directly replace its mass market fiction predecessor at number one since records began. But there are a number of high-profile launches over the next fortnight that might get in the way, including Jamie Oliver's Together (Penguin Michael Joseph) out on 2nd September, and Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where are You (Faber) which is released on 7th September.
Last week, The Bookseller reported that independent bookshops were having a "staycation boom" with takings and footfall hugely up owing to changes in pandemic travel. There may be something in that as less independent international travel seems to be a boon for UK booksellers: just under £29.7m was sold through the TCM last week, broadly in line with £29.97m earned during 2020's August bank holiday week. The five August bank holidays from 2015 to 2019 all earned between £25.5m to £26.8m, meaning the pandemic has given the home market about a 15% boost in 2020 and 2021. The devil is in the detail. BookScan is forbidden from breaking down the numbers by retail channel and the sales surge might have had winners and losers. If our reported indie boost was replicated completely across the country then it might not have been the best week, say, for retailers which have a huge presence in airports.
A hot trend this autumn is menopause titles with a number of big titles on the way including Mariella Frostrup and Alice Smellie's Cracking the Menopause (Bluebird) on 16th September and Meg Matthews' The New Hot (Ebury) on 1st October. Paving the way is Dr Louise Newson's Preparing for the Perimenopause and Menopause, part of the launch list of Penguin Life's new Experts series, which shifted 7,768 copies to top Paperback Non-Fiction. Somewhat incredibly, Dr Newson's book is the first title on menopause to ever hit number one on either non-fiction chart.
Jane Dunn's Jane's Patisserie (Ebury), on 11,555 units sold, reclaimed the Hardack Non-Fiction number one spot for the third non-consecutive week after being edged out in the previous chart by Rugby Leage legend Rob Burrows' Too Many Reasons to Live (Macmillan). Meanwhile, the top-selling hardback non-fiction launch of last week was And it was Beautiful (Seven Dials), shifting 3,887 copies, journalist Phil Hay's look at Leeds United's resurgence under its intense Argentinan oddball/genius manager Marcelo Bielsa. In Children's it was a 10th number one on the trot for David Walliams and Tony Ross, with Megamonster (HarperCollins Children's) selling 8,035 copies.