SECTOR ANALYSIS
Hamnet and its fellow award winner, Booker Prize (and Nibbies Book of the Year) victor Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain both beat out TCM king Richard Osman, whose The Thursday Murder Club had to setle for third place in the indie ranking. Although, the cosy crime title is hardly unpopular among
indie book-buyers—the paperback claimed third aſter just four weeks on the shelves, and the hardback swiped 28th place. Not only was The Thursday Murder Club the only title to appear twice, Osman was the only author to feature more than once in the top 50 fiction ranking.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun is currently on the brink of overtaking Never Let Me Go as the Nobel Prize-winning author’s biggest-selling hardback
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and
RICHARD OSMAN TOP AND KAZUO ISHIGURO
blood in the charts. But Hamnet prevailed—even bouncing back into the Original Fiction chart in June, when bookshops reopened. Despite lockdown holes in the data, the hardback—spiking in sales with its September Women’s Prize for Fiction win and December’s
Waterstones Book of the Year announcement—is easily O’Farrell’s bestseller in the format, selling 87,477 copies in weeks the nation wasn’t
under lockdown.
Of course, while the hardback was hindered by timing, the paperback couldn’t have benefited more. Rocketing into the number one spot in its first week on sale—O’Farrell’s first, both overall and in Mass-Market Fiction—the paperback returned to the top a fortnight later, when bookshops reopened again following Lockdown 3.0. It seemed to be a particular indie darling, mentioned by booksellers as the title most returning customers were picking off the shelves—and the chart has borne this out.
the Sun was the highest-charting hardback, in fourth. The title, which became the first Original Fiction number of 2021 that wasn’t The Thursday Murder Club on its release in March, is currently on the brink of overtaking Never Let Me Go as the Nobel Prize-winning author’s biggest- selling hardback—and that’s without its first two weeks of sales, which occurred before Nielsen began report- ing sales figures again. Hamnet aside,
Women’s Prize short-
listed and longlisted titles performed strongly among indies. Brit Bennet’s The Vanishing Half hit ninth place and Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom scored 32nd, as Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby, Raven Leilani’s Luster, Claire Fuller’s Unsettled Ground and Dawn French’s Because of You also charted in the independent bookseller top 50.
Clare Chambers Small Pleasures Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Trendwatch Historical fiction
169,622 units
Maggie O’Farrell Hamnet Tinder
77,647 units
Delia Owens Where the Crawdads Sing Corsair
66,187 units
Hilary Mantel The Mirror and the Light Fourth Estate
57,217 units
Fern Britton Daughters of Cornwall HarperCollins
43,186 units
*Sales are through the TCM from 14th March to 26th June.
August 2021–January 2022 07
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