Atwood and Shafak lead Booker shortlist sales

The Booker Prize will be awarded tonight (Monday 14th October), with sales of Margaret Atwood's The Testaments (Chatto & Windus) outselling every title on the shortlist, according to Nielsen BookScan. 

Atwood is streets ahead of the rest of the list, after selling 179,175 copies of The Testaments in hardback, spending three weeks in the UK Official Top 50 number one spot and instantly becoming the bestselling hardback fiction title of 2019 to date upon its publication. The long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid's Tale in volume accounts for 85% of the entire shortlist's sales, with none of the other five books shifting more than 11,000 units.

If Atwood is named the winner tonight, 19 years after she won the prize for The Blind Assassin (Vintage), The Testaments will immediately become the longest-running Booker winner in the UK overall top spot in the Nielsen BookScan era. Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies (Fourth Estate) is currently the only winner of the Booker Prize to swipe a post-1998 number one. It spent one week in the top spot after its paperback publication in May 2013. The Testaments is already by far the longest-running Booker shortlisted title, with Ian McEwan's Atonement (Vintage) racking up two weeks in the top spot in 2007—six years after its inclusion among the 2001 nominees, during its Oscar-winning film adaptation's run in UK cinemas.

Atwood would also join Mantel as the second woman to win the Booker twice, after The Blind Assassin triumphed in 2000. J M Coetzee and Peter Carey have also racked up double wins. Atwood would also repeat Mantel's feat of writing two Booker winners within the same series.

Elif Shafak's 10 Minutes 38 Seconds (Viking) is the second-bestselling title in the current Booker shortlist, with 10,916 copies sold across its hardback and trade paperback. 

Lucy Ellmann's 1,000-page single sentence Ducks, Newburyport (Galley Beggar Press) has sold 4,254 copies in total, a rise of 1,221% on its pre-longlist sales of 322 copies sold. Illinois-born Ellmann who now resides in Edinburgh is the only representative from America on the list - the 2018 longlist featured three US authors following pressure earlier that year on the Booker Prize Committee to reverse its decision on inclusion of US authors.

Only second-time shortlistee Chigozie Obiama's An Orchestra of Minorities (Little, Brown) has been released in paperback in the UK so far and the mass market edition has sold 3,496 copies since 13th August, boosting the title's total to 5,093 copies across all editions. Last year's winner Anna Burns' Milkman (Faber) was also the only title to have been published in paperback at the time of the Prize's announcement.

Bernadine Evaristo's Girl Woman Other (Hamish Hamilton), about the lives of black British women, their struggles, laughter, longings and loves, has sold 3,976 copies in hardback since its release in May. If Girl Woman Other goes all the way, Evaristo will be the first British woman of colour to win the Booker Prize—the three previous British BAME winners, V S Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro, have all been men

The latest title to be released aside from The Testaments, Quichotte (Jonathan Cape), by former winner Rushdie, has caught up quickly, shifting 5,922 copies across hardback and trade paperback since its publication on 29th August. The reworking of Don Quixote is nominated 38 years after Rushdie won for Midnight’s Children (Vintage).

Milkman surprised its critics by racking up the highest full-week sales immediately after its win for any winner in the BookScan era last October, selling 18,786 copies. It has gone on to sell 242,175 copies across all editions, making it the bestselling winner since Bring Up the Bodies in 2012. Before its win was announced, Milkman had sold just 5,895 units across all editions, and jumped 882% in volume the week of the announcement.

Though none of the longlisted titles that missed out on a shortlist nod come close to the sales of The Testaments, several have outpaced the remaining Booker five. Oyinkan Braithwaite's My Sister the Serial Killer (Atlantic) sold an impressive 18,388 copies in hardback. Its paperback, a Richard and Judy Book Club pick, has sold 11,062 copies in two weeks on sale. Max Porter's Lanny (Faber) has hit 17,891 copies in hardback to date and John Lanchester's The Wall has shifted 23,918 copies across all editions, with its September-published paperback already on 10,747 copies sold.

Tonight's award marks the first year the prize has been sponsored by charitable foundation Crankstart. The 2019 winner will be announced at an awards ceremony at London’s Guildhall, where they will be awarded £50,000.

Chair of judges Peter Florence said 2019 has been "the most extraordinary year of entries" with the "range of scope a testament to a vibrant and deeply adventurous publishing industry".