The Mirror and the Light thunders into number one

Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light (Fourth Estate) has gone straight into the UK Official Top 50 number one spot in its first three days on sale, selling 95,141 copies for £1.55m across all editions.

The third Cromwell title’s hardback edition sold 84,327 copies to swipe the crown, for Mantel’s second week in the overall number one spot, and its independent booksellers special edition shifted a further 8,161 copies, with both editions topping the Original Fiction chart for last week. Various other editions sold a combined 2,653 copies. This makes the main hardback the fastest-selling book of the year, by some way, and it racked up the biggest single-week of sales for any title since David Walliams and Tony Ross' The Beast of Buckingham Palace hit the Christmas number one slot in December.

Wolf Hall has sold over a million copies across all editions and sequel Bring Up the Bodies a further half a million through the TCM—and became the first ever Booker winner to hit the UK overall number one in the BookScan era. Margaret Atwood's The Testaments (Chatto & Windus) spent three weeks in the number one last September three weeks before its Booker win was announced—perhaps The Mirror and the Light will repeat the trick. While The Testaments sold 8,036 more copies in its own launch week, it also had an extra two days on sale, as it was released on the Tuesday.

David Roth-Ey, executive publisher William Collins and 4th Estate said: “On sale for just three days, Hilary Mantel’s magnum opus, The Mirror and the Light, has shot to the top of the bestseller lists. With print and digital sales well in excess of 100,000 copies, these are, by any measure, extraordinary sales for a truly extraordinary book. I am incredibly grateful to the team at Fourth Estate and HarperCollins and to retailers across the country for their creativity and tireless enthusiasm in support of Hilary Mantel and the Wolf Hall trilogy.”

Of course, last week also saw World Book Day celebrated. The previous week’s number one, Sue Hendra and Paul Linnet’s Supertato: Books are Rubbish (Simon & Schuster Children's), spiked upwards 148% in volume week on week to 66,601 copies sold, as it dropped to second place. All 12 of the 2020 tranche charted in the top 20, selling a combined 472,018 copies.

Dilly Court’s A Village Scandal (HarperCollins) spread faster than wildfire into the Mass Market Fiction number one, selling 17,542 copies in its launch week. This was just 342 copies off Court’s biggest-selling single week of all time, and her first non-Christmas-related title to shift more than 16,000 copies in a single week.

Caroline Criado-Perez’s Invisible Women (Vintage) went straight to the top of the Paperback Non-Fiction top 20, with 7,959 copies sold. Caroline Flack’s 2015 memoir Storm in a C Cup (S&S), re-issued following the TV presenter’s death, also entered the chart, in fifth place.

Mantel's heavyweight sales bolstered the print market by an eye-watering 17.8% in value week on week to £30.38m, with World Book Day bumping volume 23.7% to 3.95 million—the highest for the year to date in both measures. With average selling price for the week at £7.68, it was easily the highest-priced WBD week since records began.