The Thursday Murder Club sweeps the regions

Richard Osman's The Thursday Murder Club (Penguin) has topped all but one of the UK's regional bestseller charts, with only Central Scotland crowning Douglas Stuart's Booker-winner Shuggie Bain (Picador) instead. Osman's cosy crime debut, published in paperback in May, is currently the bestselling title across the UK through Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market, on 356,014 copies sold up to 7th August.

Seven titles featured in every one of the top 10 bestseller charts for the 13 UK regions covered by Nielsen BookScan—from mid-March, when sales figures returned to the chart following the third national lockdown, up to 7th August—with Osman's and Stuart's debuts joining Matt Haig's The Midnight Library (Canongate), Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet (Tinder Press), Lee and Andrew Child's The Sentinel (Corgi), David Walliams and Tony Ross's Megamonster (HarperCollins) and Charlie Mackesy's The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse (Ebury).

Osman sold the most copies of The Thursday Murder Club in London, with 68,265 copies sold, 19% of the title's UK total. Usually, the capital marches to a different beat compared to the rest of the regions—for example, in 2019, Pinch of Nom Everyday Light (Bluebird) scored a top spot in every region except London, where Adam Kay's This is Going to Hurt (Picador) swiped the top spot. However, despite the age of the average Londoner reportedly clocking in at five years younger than the UK average as a whole, Osman's retirement-home-set murder mystery has definitely struck a chord with the capital's book buyers.

Fiction proved strong in The Smoke, with The Midnight Library and Hamnet scoring second and third, and Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half (Dialogue) in eighth. Bennett's Women's Prize 2021-shortlisted title was Waterstones' Fiction Book of the Month for May, the first full month of 2021 that London's bookshops were open. The novel racked up 30% of its total volume in the capital.

Despite the print market posting growth of 9% in volume and 8% in value from March to mid-July against the same period in 2019, London was one of just two regions, along with Northern Scotland, to fall in volume, by 1%. This was in sharp contrast to the rest of the UK—nine regions posted double-digit volume growth, with the North East bouncing by 21% and Yorkshire by 20% compared to two years ago.

The Midlands and Southern regions particularly took to The Thursday Murder Club, with the title selling more than 10,000 units than its nearest competitor in each region. In the Midlands, Osman's debut sold nearly 15% of its entire total, racking up the second-largest volume of 52,425 copies. Coventry and Birmingham-born authors Lee and Andrew Child scored their biggest regional sales for co-written Jack Reacher title The Sentinel in the Midlands, of 29,545 copies.

Shuggie Bain interrupted The Thursday Murder Club's clean sweep in Central Scotland, beating it by 2,998 copies. The paperback of the Booker-winner, published in April 2021, sold 14% of its total sales in the region, the highest proportion outside London. Scotland famously backs its own authors, with Ian Rankin's A Song for the Dark Times (Orion) also charting in Central Scotland's top four. Rankin's Inspector Rebus title actually charted above Shuggie Bain in the Borders region, scoring fourth to Shuggie Bain's fifth. In Northern Scotland, the Booker-winner hit second place with Rankin in third.

In Wales and the West, Ruth Jones' Us Three (Black Swan) charted in the top 10, over-indexing for its UK-wide ranking by eight places. The Bridgend-born actor and writer famously wrote and starred in the partly-Wales set BBC TV show "Gavin and Stacey".

Raynor Winn's The Wild Silence (Penguin), the sequel to the South West Coast Road-set The Salt Path (Penguin), scored highly in the South West region. The Cornwall-set title charted 70 places above its UK-wide position. Similarly, Emma Stonex's debut The Lamplighters (Picador), also set in Cornwall, hit eighth place in the South West, compared to 329th in the UK as a whole. Of its total volume, 32% was sold in the region.