Osman named 2021's number one bestseller as TV star’s cosy crime titles set the tills alight

After missing out on the overall number one in 2020, Richard Osman pictured right has been crowned the king of 2021, grabbing the top spot from the author who previously pipped him to the post. The hardback of Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club was second in 2020 to Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse but the “Pointless” star’s début paperback shifted a smidgeon under 800,000 copies through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market, consigning Mackesy’s evergreen bestseller to second. If this were a European cup tie, we might now be going to penalties. 

A necessary if lengthy aside about this Top 50 and our upcoming Reviews of 2021: as in 2020, there were some lockdown data-deprived periods in 2021 which prevented BookScan from releasing full numbers, though in those black hole weeks it provided ranked charts without volume or value figures. However, we do have the full whack of Book-Scan data for the year’s final 42 weeks (henceforth: TCM42), from 20th March onwards. 

Over the course of the Reviews of 2021 we will use full-year ranked charts when appropriate, along with TCM42 figures in order to give as much data as possible. This Top 50 is ranked for the full year, yet we have supplemented it with a TCM42 column to show the sales figures at our disposal. This means that the volume may not give a title’s full picture, particularly if the bulk of its business was in the first quarter. The Thursday Murder Club paperback figures are actuals, as it was released after 20th March, but Stacey Solomon’s 23rd-ranked Tap to Tidy—which had two overall number ones in the lockdown period—has sold far more than the 76,000 units it shifted through TCM42. 

Given all that, it was simply an astonishing year for Osman, who earned £11.9m through the TCM42, chalking up 12 overall pole positions (including the Christmas Number One), 32 in Original Fiction—18 with The Thursday Murder Club, 14 for The Man Who Died Twice—and 30 in Mass-Market Fiction. There were only three weeks in 2021 in which an Osman title did not occupy at least one of those number ones. 

There were probably few people betting on beloved but perhaps a trifle niche comedian Bob Mortimer’s And Away… to have the number one celebrity memoir. Simon & Schuster certainly paid quite a bit more of an advance for Dave Grohl’s The Storyteller than And Away…, but the Foo Fighter did the business too, earning an overall UK number one and shifting just under 260,000 units for £2.9m—to Mortimer’s 330,000 and £3.8m. 

S&S, by the way, had by far its strongest-ever year in a 12-month Top 50, with four entries: Mortimer, Grohl and two TikTok-boosted titles; Adam Silvera’s They Both Die at the End; and Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us. (Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo just missed out, in 51st). S&S has never had more than three entries in a year-end Top 50 and hadn’t scored one since Phillippa Gregory’s The Last Tudor in 2018. Hoover’s five-year-old book was by far 2021’s bestselling Romance & Sagas title, while Silvera’s 2018 tome was top in Young Adult Fiction.

It was a pretty good year for the celeb memoir market overall, with Billy Connolly, Miriam Margolyes and Jeremy Clarkson joining Grohl and Mortimer in the top 50, and a further nine “famous” folk in the top 200. In just a month and a half on sale, Paul McCartney’s The Lyrics sold 61,000 copies and earned £3.8m through the TCM—only Connolly’s Windswept & Interesting earned more for a celebrity—on an eye-watering £55.23 average selling price. McCartney was able to overcome getting the villain edit in Peter Jackson’s “The Beatles: Get Back” Disney+ documentary, but was of course helped mightily by a Waterstones Book of the Year nod. 

The year was bookended by Kay Featherstone and Kay Allinson’s Pinch of Nom juggernaut: their December 2020 release, Pinch of Nom Quick & Easy, scored six straight pole positions in January and February, while Pinch of Nom Comfort Food ended 2021 with three of the last four number ones.