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Strong Island: Colm Tóibín heads up Ireland’s fiction windfall
The Irish market may have contracted, but it is still on track for a solid year.
Tom Tivnan is the managing editor of The Bookseller.
Tom Tivnan is the managing editor of The Bookseller.
Irish book buyers have backed homegrown talent in 2024, with Colm Tóibín leading a pack in which 13 of the top 20 bestsellers of the year have come from Ireland-born or based authors. And while the overall market in the country has contracted year-on-year, 2024 is still shaping up to be one of the strongest this century.
Though that market tumble is not inconsequential: in the first 33 weeks of the year, €82.8m has been sold through Nielsen BookScan’s Irish Consumer Market, a 7% drop over the same period in 2023.
Yet contextually this is not a bad result, as Ireland is coming off two consecutive best-ever years, and 2024 is the fourth-strongest return through the ICM at this point of the year since records began.
Fiction has been the driver, at least at the top of the charts. In Ireland’s Top 5,000 titles of the year (which accounts for 56% of that €82.8m), 42.7% has been generated in the ICM’s Adult Fiction category—compared with a 28.9% share for Children’s and 28.4% for Trade and Specialist Non-Fiction combined.
Tóibín’s Long Island—a return to both the characters of his all-time bestseller, Brooklyn, and to Picador after publishing eight novels with Viking—easily claimed the overall Ireland number one thus far in 2024, shifting just over 34,000 copies, 12,000 more than the next bestseller.
In fact, Long Island’s ICM performance outstripped its UK volume sales (31,000). One out of every 150 people in Ireland have bought a copy of Long Island this year; that same ratio in Britain would generate sales of 446,000 units.
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Tóibín leads the Fiction charts, which have a strong literary bent—not surprising given the oft-commented-upon current flowering of Irish letters. The Booker Prize has played a part. The “two Pauls” of the 2023 award both have first format and mass-market paperback editions of their nominated titles in the Fiction top 20: winner Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song is in sixth and 18th place while shortlistee Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting bags eighth and 10th. Both authors have sold a nearly identical circa-23,000 copies across all titles this year.
Meanwhile, Claire Keegan continues the fine run she has had since being shortlisted for the Booker in 2022. That shortlisting, Small Things Like These, has been Ireland’s number-two bestseller this year, while she has a trio more—Antarctica, So Late in the Day and Foster (all Faber)—in the overall top 75. All told, Keegan has shifted almost 46,000 copies through the ICM in 2024 to date, 5,000 more units than any other literary author.
One might think the masses of coverage of the Booker triumphs, Sally Rooney and the inevitable next big thing to leap out of the pages of The Stinging Fly might exaggerate Ireland’s more literary bent, but this side of the market over-indexes compared with the landscape across the Irish Sea. Almost €8m through the 2024’s ICM Top 5,000 derives from BookScan’s General & Literary Fiction genre, a whopping 65% greater than Crime, Thriller & Adventure. Compare that against the UK TCM Top 5,000 in 2024, in which Crime… is the bigger partner—£53.6m to General & Literary Fiction’s £50.1m.
Almost €8m through the 2024’s ICM Top 5,000 derives from General & Literary Fiction, a whopping 65% greater than Crime, Thriller & Adventure
But Ireland looks to its own in genre fiction, too. At just over 19,000 copies, icon Marian Keyes’ My Favourite Mistake crowns Romance & Sagas, 5,000 units ahead of Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us, while Dubliner Sinéad Moriarty’s Good Sisters is in fourth. The top four titles in Ireland’s Crime, Thriller & Adventure category are all from homegrown writers, the top two by Andrea Mara. Perhaps the biggest point of difference between the Irish and UK Fiction charts is the former not completely boarding the starship SFF. In Britain, Science Fiction & Fantasy TCM revenues are now almost 60% of those generated by the Crime… and General & Literary categories, but in Ireland SFF is just a quarter of the two biggest Fiction sub-categories. The leading SFF authors are similar in both countries—Sarah J Maas, Rebecca Yarros, adaptation-boosted Frank Herbert and R F Kuang—but their chart positions are much more reduced in Ireland versus Blighty.
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Dav Pilkey is by far the biggest star in Children’s, actually the overall biggest star full stop: the Dog Man creator has sold €1.1m through the ICM Top 5,000 this year, the only writer to eclipse seven figures, with Julia Donaldson a distant second (€646,000), followed by Jeff Kinney (€636,000), while Tóibín leads adult authors (€627,000). With Pilkey, a brace from Jamie Smart, plus John Patrick Green, Christopher Hastings and illustrator Pat Lewis’ World Book Day entry High-Rise Hijinks, eight of 2024’s top 20 kids’ books this year are from the comics sector.
Replete with US and UK big-brand authors, Children’s is the least local of these three Irish bestseller lists. Of the top 50 kids’ titles in 2024, only three are homegrown: Alan Nolan’s World Book Day title The Curious Case of the Irish Yeti; Grow in Love, the religious studies primary textbook published by the Catholic church-owned Veritas (which announced it would shutter its operations this year); and the late Belfast-born Sam McBratney and illustrator Anita Jeram’s classic, Guess How Much I Love You? (Walker).
Conversely, Non-Fiction is Irish-author heavy, with 14 homegrown titles in the top 20—led by three Bored of Lunch titles by Northern Irishman Nathan Anthony—and topped by Formulae and Tables, the dual-language Irish and English maths Leaving Certificate companion (which probably should be coded for a children’s study guides category).
