Hanya Yanagihara's To Paradise debuts in the Original Fiction number one
Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise debuted directly into the Original Fiction number one, selling 10,630 copies in its first week on sale. This is more the double the biggest week of sales for Booker Prize-nominated A Little Life, which sold over a quarter of a million copies in paperback.
Janice Hallett’s The Twyford Code also debuted in the category chart, swimming into third place. The author’s debut, The Appeal, has sold over 110,000 copies in paperback to date, and recently returned to the Mass Market Fiction top 20 after featuring in many of the broadsheets’ best books of the 2021 round-ups. The Twyford Code, after one week on the shelves, is already only 500 units away from The Appeal’s total sales in hardback—a sure sign of a breakout paperback hit.
Sarah Pearse’s The Sanatorium checked in for another week atop the Mass Market Fiction top 20, rising to second place in the Top 50. Adele Parks’ Both of You closely followed, securing third place overall. Though New Year, new you dominates the January headlines, the quieter resurgence of paperback fiction, after the bolshy hardback sales of the run-up to Christmas, is always evident. However, with the nation turned back on to reading following the lockdowns of the pandemic, fiction’s healthy run continued—last week’s fiction sales were up 34% in volume on the same week in 2020
With Richard Osman’s The Man Who Died Twice falling from the Original Fiction number one, this marks the first week the TV presenter-turned-author has not claimed either of the fiction chart top spots since the last week of July 2021. It also rings the changes from a year ago, when the long winter lockdown of early 2021 saw The Thursday Murder Club notch up 17 of the first 18 Original Fiction number one spots of the year. Levelling up with Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train’s record of 29 weeks in the category chart number one, The Thursday Murder Club only dropped from the top of the chart when its paperback was published in May. While it’s likely The Man Who Died Twice will return to the Original Fiction number one before its own paperback release, at least this year other hardback fiction releases have a fighting chance.
