BOOK OF THE YEAR FICTION
OVERVIEW
BEAUTIFUL WORLD WHERE ARE YOU Sally Rooney returned in 2021 to deliver the highest-selling original publication in Faber’s history—launch sales eclipsed Normal People’s first-day sales by 1,200%. The jacket reveal was a literary event in itself, and 50 partnered bookshops opened as early as 7 a.m. on publication day with exclusive breakfasts, merchandise and signed copies on offer.
SORROW & BLISS With a challenging six months between acquisition and publication, the publicity campaign for Meg Mason’s beautifully constructed novel about modern love and mental illness generated a huge word- of-mouth buzz. The novel was a hit across media platforms, was named as a book of the year by more than 20 publica- tions, acquiring many devoted and vocal fans along the way.
PUBLISHERS 1 FABER 2 FABER
3 WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON
4 FOURTH ESTATE 5 PUSHKIN PRESS 6 HARPERVOYAGER
EMPIRE OF THE VAMPIRE Beating Sarah J Maas and Ben Aaronovitch to become the top-selling fantasy title of the year, Empire of the Vampire capitalised on Jay Kristoff’s growing reputation as a cult favourite. With a modest marketing budget, the novel’s sales achieved 350% growth on Kristoff’s last outing in hardback, and fan demand reportedly broke the Waterstones website twice.
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KLARA AND THE SUN Faber created a new series look to herald the publication of Klara and the Sun, giving Kazuo Ishiguro’s backlist striking, bold covers. The publicity campaign secured an interview with the Nobel Prize winner in every broadsheet, each with a different angle. “Another masterwork, a work that makes us feel afresh the beauty and fragility of our humanity,” said the Observer.
CLOUD CUCKOO LAND Anthony Doerr’s follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning All the Light We Cannot See explores topics of climate change, pandemics and divided communities over three sepa- rate time frames. Fourth Estate devised an ambitious consumer advertising campaign which reached more than seven million people, and ran a campaign aimed at libraries through The Reading Agency.
THE PASSENGER After being discovered in an archive, Ulrich A Boschwitz’s gripping tale of a Jewish businessman fleeing from the Nazis across Germany in 1938 was first published in German in 2018, and then snapped up by Pushkin. The Passenger became Pushkin’s first Sunday Times top-10 bestseller in both hardback and paperback, and is now set to become a literary classic.
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© Grant Sparkes-Carroll
© Leo Baeck Institute
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