IN BRIEF Top 10 Ireland


Fiction helped Irish readers navigate the pandemic lockdown, with four of its top five titles coming from the sector


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The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the


Horse galloped into third place in Ireland. Charlie Mackesy’s soothing book of illustrations could not have been more fitting for this year, and it has the sales to match.


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Bestseller Lists Ireland Top 10


1


Singing to the summit


of the charts


Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing surges into the Ireland chart’s top spot, with 46,528 copies sold. Escapist fiction became a necessity for the locked-down Irish public, with sales for 2020 marginally up year on year, despite the closure of bookshops. The title has also been a hit in the UK, shifting nearly 250,000 copies in paperback.


4


The Keyes to success see Marian fly on home soil


Marian Keyes was the author of the bestselling hardback fiction title of the year to date, with Grown Ups zipping into the charts in February. Even before the book- buying public battened down the hatches for lockdown and stocked up on reading material, Keyes’ novel was a strong seller, reach- ing number one on her home turf and four other countries in its first week on sale, and bagging the Original Fiction top spot in the UK charts.


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2 People power boosts Rooney


Sally Rooney was already a superstar of literary Ireland, but with the BBC adaptation of Normal People airing in the depths of lockdown, her Booker-longlisted title roared back up the charts.


5


Irish readers are digging the Dirt


Controversy dogged Jeanine Cummins’ Oprah Book Club pick American Dirt from its release but, like Grown Ups, it benefited from being a big pre-lockdown release. With 23,552 copies sold for the year to date in hardback in Ireland, the story of a mother and son attempting to cross the US-Mexico border in the Trump era was barely 1,000 units off Grown Ups, charting fifth overall.


Daly express clocks up colossal sales for couple


breakout cooks


Billed as the “Irish Pinch of Nom”, The Daly Dish certainly lived up to the heavyweight hype. Developed from authors Gina and Karol Daly’s slimming recipes blog, it became the fastest-selling title in the Irish charts since J K Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in 2016, and the second fastest selling non-fiction title since records began in 2003—trailing only homegrown footballer- turned-Sky Sport troll-in-chief Roy Keane’s memoir. With 22,810 copies sold for the year to date, The Daly Dish is the bestselling Irish-published book in the chart. Incidentally, Trade Non-fiction is in growth year on year, up 0.1% in volume and 2.2% in value terms.


8 Silent but deadly


Alex Michaelides’ The Silent Patient topped the Crime, Thriller and Adventure category for the year with 16,155 copies sold, beating queen of Irish noir Liz Nugent’s Our Little Cruelties into the top 10.


12 14th October 2020 9


Rooney’s début finds itself among Friends


Sally Rooney’s début Conversations with Friends bounced back into the Irish top 10, following the success of Normal People and, er, “Normal People”. After the adaptation became a lockdown staple, the Nibbies Book of the Year 2019 zipped to the top of the Irish and UK charts—and proved so popular in Ireland that songs from the soundtrack soared up the streaming charts. With Conversations with Friends’ BBC adaptation announced, expect a similar cultural earthquake on broadcast.


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Mathematical Tables charted


strongly in seventh place with 19,995 copies, as school closures led to a rise in school study guides and workbooks, both in the UK and on the Emerald Isle.


10


Start your engines: driving titles on the up


The Motorcycles and Work Vehicles Driver Theory Test zoomed into 10th place, one of three ode titles in the Irish top 100 suspended


into 10th plac one of thr


Driving & Highway Code titles in the Irish top 100. As in the UK, driving leslessons were suspended across Ireland during lock


restarting in July, demand has rocketed. In the UK, The Official Highway Code racked st


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up some of its highes weekly sales outside December since 2015 across the summer


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Source: Nielsen BookScan’s Irish Consumer Market. Data range: 40 weeks ending 3rd October 2020.


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