Literary fiction and Michelle Obama top Super Thursday picks

Super Thursday will fall on 4th October this year, The Bookseller can reveal, when a whopping 544 new hardbacks will be hitting shelves—40 more than on last year’s equivalent day—all vying for a slice of the lucrative Christmas book market.

The day fires the starting pistol for the make-or-break autumn season, with booksellers all scrambling after their share of the festive sales: last year, 62.8 million books were sold for £551.9m between 7th October and 24th December through Nielsen BookScan. Around a third of the market’s annual volume sales come in the final quarter of the year.

Super Thursday gifts this year come in the form of memoirs from Anthony Joshua, Gary Barlow, Kevin Keegan and Shane Warne, as well as non-fiction from Sir David Attenborough, Tim Peake and Jo Brand. Novels from Martina Cole, Eoin Colfer, Liane Moriarty and Peter James will also be vying for adults’ attention, while children’s big-hitters David Walliams, Liz Pichon, Jacqueline Wilson and Michael Morpurgo are all hoping to win parents’ purchases. Meanwhile, Zoe “Zoella” Sugg and Kiran Millwood Hargrave have servings which might tempt teenagers away from their tablets.

The overall verdict from retailers is that, like last year, there is no emerging trend to plug the adult colouring or hygge gap, but the broader line-up is solid. “This autumn we see a good spread of strong titles and big name authors across all genres,” said the Waterstones buying team, while Blackwell’s trade buying manager Katharine Fry agreed that “overall, it’s a solid season”.

Literary fiction is king this autumn, retailers have said, with “long-awaited new novels by some of the most popular authors of our times,” according to Waterstones head of fiction Chris White. Sebastian Faulks’ Paris Echo is out on 6th September (Hutchinson), William Boyd’s Love is Blind (Viking) hits shelves two weeks later, and there is also Kate Atkinson’s Transcription (Doubleday), Sarah Perry’s Melmoth (Serpent’s Tail) and Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Labyrinth of the Spirits (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).

But the chain retailer is placing its biggest bets on double offerings from J K Rowling. The fourth instalment of her Robert Galbraith-authored Cormoran Strike series, Lethal White (Little, Brown), will be published, though the date is not yet confirmed, along with the next playscript in the Fantastic Beasts franchise, The Crimes of Grindelwald (Little, Brown), out on 16th November. The latter was also tipped by Gardners to be in high demand in the festive season.

Scaling the Shard

In the fiction camp, W H Smith is backing C J Samson’s next Shardlake novel Tombland (Mantle), along with new works from Peter James, Lee Child and Jeffrey Archer.

Several retailers—including Waterstones, W H Smith, indie Chorleywood Bookshop and wholesaler Gardners—believe Michelle Obama’s Becoming (Viking) will feature prominently in the charts following its release on 13th November. “This will steal the show across the non-fiction market,” said Alastair Aldous, W H Smith trading controller for books. Waterstones non-fiction buyer Richard Humphreys said it was one of a number of upcoming titles about inspiring women, which “continue to be in high demand” following the success of Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, and possibly accelerated by the global response to the #MeToo movement, which began last autumn. “We are delighted that books about inspiring women continue to be in high demand, and Cathy Newman’s feminist history of modern Britain, Bloody Brilliant Women (William Collins), is a perfect addition to the list. Speaking of iconic women, Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming is long-awaited and we expect it to do extremely well,” Humphreys said.

In non-fiction, W H Smith also has high hopes for memoirs from Barlow and Joshua, as well as autobiographies from Tina Turner and Roger Daltrey.

Standing the heat

While booksellers from indies to supermarkets are generally in agreement that the autumn schedule is strong, they disagreed on the strength of the cookery offering, perhaps the only slightly weaker area of the line-up. In particular, they are split on their expectations for Jamie Oliver’s latest, Jamie Cooks Italy (Michael Joseph).

Waterstones buying manager Kate Skipper believes it’s a “strong candidate” to claim the Christmas Number One, but W H Smith’s Aldous is less convinced. “Cookery will be interesting... Will Jamie be able to deliver another blockbuster? Only time will tell,” he said. Blackwell’s Fry said, “Cooking is lacking the huge list of mega celebrity chefs, other than Jamie”, but Sainsbury’s buyer Emma Brewster anticipates it will be “another great autumn” for Oliver.

Brett Wolstencroft, manager of Daunt Books, said Super Thursday was “an important day for the kind of cookery we do exceptionally well with”, naming Yotam Ottolenghi’s Simple (Ebury) and Rogan by Simon Rogan (HarperCollins), which he said both look “sumptuously produced”. Rosamund de la Hey, owner of The Mainstreet Trading Company in St Boswell’s, also backed Ottolenghi’s title, and said she expected vegan cookbooks to continue to sell well. An Amazon spokesperson agreed, stating the retailer had “recently seen growth in food and drink titles” and naming plant-based diet books as “one of the trends to watch”. History looks particularly robust this year, retailers including W H Smith, Waterstones and Daunt Books agreed,  with Blackwell’s Fry saying the genre “looks particularly strong with titles from Ben Macintyre, Max Hastings and Kate Williams.”

In children’s books, along with Rowling, Walliams and Jeff Kinney, retailers believe Tracy Beaker’s return—as a grown up, and with a child of her own—in Jacqueline Wilson’s Super Thursday release My Mum Tracy Beaker(Doubleday) will intrigue fans, with Louise Chadwick of Button & Bear Bookshop in Shrewsbury saying it is “sure to be big”.

Wolstencroft added: “It certainly looks as if the makings of a great autumn season are there: great literary fiction, fine histories and biographies, and some fine cookery too. If anything is missing—and I may have just missed it—I cannot think of a big thriller, in the Robert Harris league, perhaps.”