Waterstones and Blackwell's reveal December hits

Waterstones and Blackwell's have both reported good sales for December with books by Charlie Mackesy and Maggie O'Farrell among those proving huge hits.

However, Waterstones chief operating officer Kate Skipper said the month had been a “story of two halves”, ending with its stores in Wales, London and the south-east of England closing from 20th December, Scotland and Northern Ireland following suit on Boxing Day, and additional Tier 4 closures and Ireland's lockdown on 1st January. A fresh lockdown has since followed in England.

Skipper said: “The month was initially very positive. We were blessed with fantastic books and an extraordinary performance from our booksellers. Readers demonstrated that the pleasures of browsing in a good bookshop have not been removed by the pandemic, while human, knowledgeable recommendation remains incomparable; it was very cheering to see such good bookselling in action.”

She added: “There was standout publishing across the genres which is reflected by our bestsellers, which were led by our Waterstones Book of the Year, Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet (Headline), followed by Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain (Picador), Richard Osman's The Thursday Murder Club (Viking), J K Rowling's The Ickabog (Little, Brown), Barack Obama's A Promised Land (Viking), David Walliams' Code Name Bananas (HarperCollins Children's Books), Miriam Elia's We Do Lockdown (Dung Beetle Press), Tim Harford's How to Make the World Add Up (Bridge Street Press) and Lu Fraser and Kate Hindley's The Littlest Yak (S&S Children's).”

At Blackwell's, head of marketing and publicity Zool Verjee said: “We sold a staggering number of Charlie Mackesy's The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse (Ebury) - both the 2020 and the 2019 editions. Combined sales made this comfortably our bestseller for Christmas 2020 and we cannot remember another book topping our Christmas bestsellers two years in a row.

“As far as fiction is concerned, two titles vied for the top spot and in the end, Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club just pipped Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain to the post. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (Canongate) was also on the podium, and we have to mention fantastic sales of Anne-Louise Avery’s Reynard the Fox (The Bodleian Library) as well.”

In cookery, Verjee said new books from Nigella Lawson, Dishoom and Dessert Person performed well, while Yotam Ottolenghi's Flavour (Ebury) was top of the menu for shoppers.

He added: “In non-fiction, we did spectacularly well with Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life (Bodley Head) and it benefited enormously from its slot as Radio 4 "Book of the Week". Again a book that has done exceptionally well for us since publication but got another boost at Christmas was Women Don’t Owe You Pretty by Florence Given (Cassell).

“In the children’s books category, the bestsellers were a mixture of new titles and established classics, and included Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris' The Lost Spells (Hamish Hamilton), Alan and Janet Ahlberg's The Jolly Christmas Postman (Puffin) and Where Snow Angels Go (Walker) by Maggie O'Farrell and Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzini.”