Mackesy's title tops the 2020 sales chart

Charlie Mackesy's The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse (Ebury) was the bestselling book of 2020 through Nielsen BookScan's UK Total Consumer Market.

The illustrated title, released in October 2019, galloped into the Hardback Non-Fiction top spot 19 times across the course of last year, including eight weeks across the first national lockdown last spring.

The 2020 chart is based on full-year data, although Nielsen BookScan was unable to report volume or value data across 17 weeks in 2020 owing to lockdown restrictions closing bookshops and as yet has not released the 2020 Top 50 chart's volume figures.

This is the first time that a non-fiction title released in a previous year has topped an annual chart. Novels have previously achieved the feat: John Green's The Fault in Our Stars (Penguin) and David Nicholls' One Day (Hodder) hit the yearly number one in 2013 and 2011 respectively, a year after each of their publication dates—but importantly, the same year as their blockbuster film adaptations were released. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Bloomsbury), published in 1997, swiped the 1999 number one.

The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse rocketed in sales in late 2019 following its announcement as Waterstones Book of the Year and was a scant 5,000 copies away from that year's Christmas number one. Unlike most Christmas hits, it maintained an impressive weekly level of sales into last year, claiming its first overall top spot in February 2020. As the coronavirus crisis disrupted normal life, the soothing mental health guide remained steadily high in the charts.

Meanwhile, Richard Osman's The Thursday Murder Club (Viking), which swiped the Christmas number one in December with 134,514 copies sold in a single week, was the bestselling fiction title of the year and in second place overall, after notching up the highest sales for a debut crime title on its September release.

Adult Fiction had a stellar year across the board. Delia Owens' Where the Crawdads Sing (Corsair) was the highest-charting paperback fiction title, with Bernardine Evaristo's 2019 Booker winner Girl, Woman, Other (Penguin) closely behind in seventh place overall. Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain (Picador), the prize's 2020 winner, also charted in 32nd place.

Paperback fiction clearly helped the nation through Lockdown 1.0, with spring chart regulars including Sally Rooney's Normal People (Faber), Alex Michaelides' The Silent Patient (Orion) and Bridget Collins' The Binding (The Borough Press) hitting the year's top 50. Peter May's Lockdown (Riverrun), which had been hiding in a drawer for 15 years until it became suddenly topical, charted 48th, after being published at the end of April.

Evaristo's Booker winner was a lockdown stalwart but hit its highest weekly sales to date (outside of lockdown) in the summer, as Black Lives Matter protests prompted anti-racism titles and books by Black authors to soar up the charts. Reni Eddo-Lodge's Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race (Bloomsbury), published in 2018 in paperback, charted 17th place in the 2020 Top 50.

Some normality continued in 2020—David Walliams once again dominated the Children's charts. The November-published Code Name Bananas (HarperCollins) was the Children's bestseller of the year, with Lockdown 1.0-released Slime just four places below, both illustrated by Tony Ross. In total, the author-illustrator duo scored five titles in the Top 50. Stephenie Meyer's Twilight reboot Midnight Sun (Atom) charted 27th, with Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler's The Smeds and the Smoos (Alison Green) in 50th.