2020s vision: Richard Osman Hoovers up sales
The paperback edition of The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman is the bestselling book of the decade so far according to data from Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market.
We are now entering the halfway mark of the 2020s and, after the collective trauma of the last five years, perhaps it is no real surprise that a cosy crime mystery from one of the UK’s most popular television personalities has appealed to so many.
But while the Covid-19 pandemic may have influenced the kinds of books the public has been buying, it has also had another more obvious effect on the bestseller list. For 17 weeks in 2020 and 10 weeks at the beginning of 2021, the UK was in lockdown and many shops were closed, meaning Nielsen BookScan didn’t reveal volume or value figures for these weeks. So, officially Osman is just one of three books to have sold more than a million copies in the last five years – but it seems likely that, during the data blackout, fourth place Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens would have sold the additional 28,618 copies needed to cross the seven-figure mark.
Osman himself is a victim of the lack of data: the hardback edition of The Thursday Murder Club was published in September 2020 and four weeks of its Christmas peak are missing – a period that might have pushed it from the 11th place it currently occupies into the top 10.
Most of the other books at the top end of this chart were published – or in the case of Colleen Hoover, reached prominence – after the pandemic and so are unaffected by the lack of data. One notable exception, though, is Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse – which is currently a comfortable third in the chart, some 400,000 copies ahead of Owens. Although it was first published in the autumn of 2019, Mackesy topped the chart of the year in 2020 with sales of 613,537, selling an average of just over 17,043 copies in the weeks for which we have data. The illustrator would have needed to average 12,000 copies in the missing
weeks to equal Osman’s first place figure of 1,720,800.
After the collective trauma of the last five years, perhaps it is no real surprise that a cosy crime mystery has appealed to so many
Speculation aside, The Thursday Murder Club sold nearly three times as many copies as The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse in 2024, so its position at the top of the chart as we enter the second half of the decade looks to be safe – even if we could factor in missing sales.
Hoover is responsible for the only other book to have sold more than a million copies in the last five years. It Ends with Us was first published way back in 2016 but had sold fewer than 6,000 copies by the end of 2020 – it wasn’t until 2021 that sales took off, before peaking at 693,850 units in 2022. There is a film tie-in edition of It Ends with Us, but even if sales of that were combined with the original edition, it still wouldn’t overtake Osman. But, with sales of over 300,000 copies in 2024, it looks like its second-place position is safe for now.
Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library is sitting at position six in the chart, nearly 100,000 units ahead of Prince Harry’s Spare. The Duke of Sussex may hold the record for the fastest selling non-fiction title of all time, but unlike Haig – whose paperback continues to sell in the tens of thousands – sales of the hardback have stalled at 713,511.
Though this chart stops at the end of 2024, Hoover’s Verity will overtake Spare this week, while Ugly Love – also by Hoover – is sure to do the same later in 2025. Sandwiched between the two Hoovers is Bella Mackie’s How to Kill Your Family, which will also climb the charts and push Prince Harry down to at least tenth place by the end of the year.
Children’s titles are less represented at the top of the chart, with the biggest one of the decade so far being Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by JK Rowling, in 17th position with sales of 615,186 copies.
