Sales boost for le Carré as nation tunes into The Night Manager

BBC 1's acclaimed adaptation of John le Carré’s The Night Manager has sent Penguin's book sales soaring.

After the first episode for the series starring Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie aired on 21st February it drew in ratings of 6.1m, the 2013 Penguin Classics' edition entered the Top 50 after selling 3,963 copies.

Nearly half of the edition's sales have come from February alone, according to Nielsen BookScan TCM, which showed a sales leap of 99.7% to 15,657 copies sold since publication in November 2013.

Waterstones has reacted to the series by promoting the 2013 Penguin Modern Classic edition of The Night Manager as a February "Rediscovered Classic".​

The TV tie-in edition, released under Penguin Modern Classics on 18th February, meanwhile, shifted 1,996 copies the week after the first episode, seeing a 162% rise week-on-week. It is currently mumber eight on the Apple ibooks bestseller list.

The cast of "The Night Manager". Picture: BBC/The Ink Factory/Mitch Jenkins

Penguin reported sales of over 23,000 copies across all editions in both paperback and e-book in 2016, with sales rising consistently week-on-week since the start of the year. The week following episode one showed a week-on-week uplift of 66%, according to Penguin.

Ratings for the BBC-televised series have been described as "close to unpredented". Whereas the normal pattern for a series is to see ratings fall between 10 and 20% between the first and second episodes, say producers, "The Night Manager" actually saw a 5% increase.

The resulting leap in sales surpasses those for War and Peace when it occupied the same Sunday night slot. War and Peace (Vintage Classics) didn’t hit the Top 50 until the last episode was broadcast.

le Carre's The Night Manager was first published in 1993.