The Irish monthly bestseller charts, with figures supplied by Nielsen Bookdata
Our featured bookshop this month is Chapters Bookstore in Dublin
by Fiona Murphy
While the weather right now might not feel like it, autumn is on its way and now that we’re into September the change of seasons brings the changing of the bestseller charts here at Books Ireland. Rounding off the summer with the analysis of the bestsellers in August, we’ll walk you through what books Irish readers couldn’t live without on their shelves or in their beach bag this summer.
Children’s books
Sarah Webb’s campaign to see more Irish-written and published children’s books on the bestseller charts is getting underway and with good reason – not a single Irish author or publisher appears on this month’s charts.
Covering the four-week period ending the 2nd of September, we’ve seen very little movement in the top 10 children’s charts this month with Dog Man 11: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under the Sea (Scholastic US) and Peppa Pig Goes to Ireland (Ladybird) maintaining their 2nd and 3rd places. The Outsiders (Penguin Books) took the top spot once more – just like this time last year – thanks to its popularity as a choice on the Junior Cert English curriculum.
We have only one new entry to the charts this month, Trash by Andy Mulligan, originally published in 2010 and made into a movie by 2014. We’re unsure about the reason for its sudden resurgence in the Irish children’s charts – perhaps it has recently become available on a streaming service? Either way, it seems to have captured the imagination of young Irish readers. Jenny Han’s series, The Summer I Turned Pretty (Penguin Books) being turned into a hit Amazon Prime show continues to bolster its presence in the charts, with It’s Not Summer Without You to We’ll Always Have Summer taking spots in the top 10.
Non-fiction
Nonfiction is perhaps where we’ve seen the most movement, with the heart wrenching Poor by Katriona O’Sullivan (Sandycove) knocked from the top spot it’s held for almost the last two months into 3rd place. Replacing it is Rememberings (Penguin Books) by Sinéad O’Connor, with the singer and activist’s candid and unapologetic memoir allowing us to remember her in her own words.
Nonfiction sales are up this month, with July’s lowest volume of books sold amounting to 888 and August’s lowest volume clocking in at 1,168. However, this is probably no surprise with many addictive true crime reads climbing the charts, like Christy Mangan’s Cracking the Case: Inside the mind of a top garda (Sandycove), The Padre: The True Story of the Irish Priest who armed the IRA with Gaddafi’s Money (Merrion Press) and The Monk: The Life and Crimes of Ireland’s Most Enigmatic Gang Boss (Atlantic Books).
Fiction
In the fiction charts, to nobody’s surprise, the phenomenally successful finale to the What a Complete Aisling series, Aisling Ever After (Gill Books) tops the charts with a whopping 8,458 books sold up to the 2nd of September. With the book only released on August 31st, the sales are a staggering a testament to the heroine’s popularity.
We have some new entries to this chart, like the Booker-nominated The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (Hamish-Hamilton), nabbing that 5th top spot as well as Claire Keegan’s latest offering, So Late in the Day (Faber). Spanning the length of just 64 pages, it’s highly unusual to see a work of this length in the top ten, a sure sign of Keegan’s hold on us as a writer.
We’re still sinking our teeth into some spine-chilling Irish thrillers, with Catherine Ryan Howard’s The Trap (Bantam, Transworld) and Andrea Mara’s No One Saw a Thing (Bantam, Transwordl) making their way into the 3rd and 4th top spots, while Colleen Hoover’s ever-present It Ends with Us (Simon & Schuster) duology makes another unsurprising appearance in the top ten fiction choices of the late summer.
Check out our full Irish bestseller charts here!
