Book sales surge as self-isolating readers buy ‘bucket list’ novels

In the week the UK’s biggest book chain, Waterstones, finally shut its stores after staff complained that they felt at risk from the coronavirus, its online sales were up by 400% week on week. It reported a “significant uplift” on classic – and often timely – titles including Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.

Waterstones also reported a boost for lengthy modern novels, headed by the new bestseller Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, but also including Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and The Secret History, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. Dystopian tales are also selling well, particularly Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

Nielsen BookScan, the UK’s official book sales monitor, also reported nationwide increases in sales for War and Peace, The Lord of the Rings and the first instalment of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

“Our bestseller is Hilary Mantel – those 900 pages aren’t going to seem daunting any more and it’s doing really well,” said Waterstones’ Bea Carvalho. “And we’ve seen really good sales for the classics – those bucket list books, the ‘I’ve always wanted to read it’ type things such as Infinite Jest.”

Total physical book sales in the UK jumped 6% in the week to Saturday 21 March, according to Nielsen, noting a 212% growth in volume sales for “home learning” titles, a 77% boost for school textbooks and study guides, and a 35% week-on-week boost for paperback fiction, driven by supermarket shoppers. Arts and crafts book sales were also up by 38% week on week.

Adult non-fiction, however, was down by 13%, as readers sought solace in imaginary worlds.

“The sales data suggests that the UK population has indeed been preparing for long periods of isolation,” said Philip Stone at Nielsen.

Authors have reported that they are also attempting classic novels for the first time, including Stephen King, who announced on Twitter he had “finally got around” to James Joyce’s notoriously challenging Ulysses. “I understand it better than I expected, but I have to say it’s really fucking Irish,” the horror novelist wrote.

Children’s author Tom Mitchell told the Guardian he had tried to read Middlemarch “two or three times before abandoning it in the past”, but is now using his enforced time at home to tackle and conquer George Eliot’s classic novel once and for all. “It’s early days and one of the difficulties is holding the massive thing [but] I’m fully transported to the early 19th-century Midlands … as opposed to quarantine-era Orpington,” said Mitchell. “Eliot would have some wry observations to make about social distancing. I mean, Dorothea marrying Casaubon is a kind of self-inflicted social distancing.”

Lockdowns around the world have lead to the creation of many digital reading groups. Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford has launched an “I Always Meant to Read That” reading group on Facebook, where followers will be meeting every Monday to discuss classic fiction, starting with Pride and Prejudice. Publisher Dialogue Books has started a reading group, with participants able to put questions to the authors directly on a weekly Instagram Live broadcast. And author Yiyun Li, with non-profit quarterly A Public Space, has launched a virtual book club tackling War and Peace. Using the estimate that it would take people 30 minutes to read 12-15 pages, Li suggested that everyone in the group could finish it in three months, “just in time for summer, and with our spirits restored”.

“I have found that the more uncertain life is, the more solidity and structure Tolstoy’s novels provide. In these times, one does want to read an author who is so deeply moved by the world that he could appear unmoved in his writing,” she wrote.