The Testaments smashes first day sales for Waterstones

Waterstones has celebrated its biggest first day of sales of 2019 with Margaret Atwood's Booker-shortlisted The Testaments (Chatto & Windus). 

The highly-anticipated sequel to The Handmaid's Tale was published on Tuesday 10th September with a midnight launch at Waterstones' flagship store and a reading from Atwood herself. 

Crowds queued around the block to buy a copy at midnight as Handmaidens marched around the store as the major launch at Waterstones Piccadilly and by lunchtime on Tuesday, Waterstones says The Testaments had surpassed the record total day one sales of Fing by David Walliams and Tony Ross (HarperCollins). Fing sold 75,862 copies its first week through the TCM and to date 416,906 copies.

Waterstones fiction buyer Bea Carvalho told The Bookseller: “We have had a fantastic day of sales with The Testaments today. It is our biggest first day sale of 2019 so far: in fact we had already surpassed total day one sales of the second best one by lunchtime. Last night’s event at Piccadilly was a huge success – it was one of our most ambitious launches to date and it, along with our other midnight openings and some 150 events taking place from today across our estate, has helped us to launch this long-awaited book with a bang. It’s an astonishingly good book and we’re delighted to finally be able to share it with our customers. It has been wonderfully heartening to hear some of their excited early responses today, and we look forward to continuing the conversation with them for months to come.” 

The Bookeller’s charts and data analyst Kiera O’Brien predicts The Testaments will shift more than 100,000 print copies in the UK through the TCM in its first week and beat E L James who enjoyed the biggest launch week for an adult fiction title this year with The Mister at 52,674 copies sold. O’Brien said: “I predict it’ll be the biggest launch week for a fiction title this year. Long-awaited sequels tend to zip straight off the shelves—in 2015, Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman sold 168,455 copies in its first week, and Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage sold 71,568 in its first three days in 2017.”

“The Handmaid’s Tale spent seven weeks atop The Bookseller’s Weekly E-book Ranking across summer 2017, during the television adaptation’s first series, so it’s likely The Testaments will break some glass ceilings in digital format too.”

Indie bookshop Red Lion Books in Colchester - which won funding from Vintage for its launch idea - reported high sales following a sold-out event to mark publication. Red Lion hosted a midnight launch with customers invited to submit personal and anonymous testaments of when they have experienced forms of prejudice. These testaments were read by an actor in a powerful evening of storytelling, said manager Jo Coldwell. The indie, which had ordered more than 100 copies, is now planning on ordering more due to high demand. Coldwell said: "We had pre-sold for the event and it was an incredible evening, I felt very privileged to be a part of it. We ordered 111 copies and we are going to have to order in more. People are so excited about it."

Up in Scotland, The Portobello Bookshop in Edinburgh, has plans to restock as copies fly off the shelves with some surprise signed copies to go to a few lucky customers who pre-ordered. Other indies reported good first day sales. 

At last night's National Theatre event - broadcast to cinemas worldwide - Atwood was joined by actresses Ann Dowd, Lily James and Sally Hawkins, who read passages from the new book as the three different charracters who narrate it. 

Interviewed by broadcaster Samira Ahmed, Atwood confirmed that for The Testaments - just as with The Handmaid's Tale - she decided not to include anything in her story of the repressive Gilead regime that hadn't actually happened at some time in the real world. Saying she had been interested "in how these regimes crumble and fall apart", she also threw light on the character of Aunt Lydia,  the formidable Gilead enforcer played by Dowd in the TV adaptation, who is one of the narrators of The Testaments. Atwood made a comparison between her and Henry VIII's fixer Thomas Cromwell, whom she had been reading about both in the work of Hilary Mantel and in the recently published historical biography. "He was a person with a secret life and secret thoughts, and although he was doing Henry's stuff, he had this other agenda of his own," she said. "Looking at totalitarian regimes and who is there in the hierarchy [of power], you find all sorts of motives - some are believers, but some are opportunists who see a way for themselves to move forward." 

Asked how she felt about the adoption of the famous red and white Handmaid's outfit by women protestors in recent years, she said the costume worked as "a brilliant symbol of protest, because it's visual, these women are not making a noise so they can't be thrown out, they are very modestly dressed, and yet everyone knows exactly what the clothes mean."