Titles mentioned repeatedly as hot sellers and disappointments by a wide variety of booksellers for during the lead up to Christmas 2007
Top sellers
Titles mentioned repeatedly as hot sellers by a wide variety of booksellers for during the lead up to Christmas 2007 (in no particular order) included:
- The Uncommon Reader (Alan Bennett, Profile)
- The Six Sacred Stones (Matthew Reilly, Macmillan)
- Almost the Moon (Alice Sebold, Macmillan)
- Floodtide (Judy Nunn, Random)
- Monsoon (Di Morrissey, Macmillan)
- The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini, Bloomsbury)
- Mr Pip (Lloyd Jones, Text)
- Maggie's Harvest (Maggie Beer, Lantern)
- The Persimmon Tree (Bryce Courtenay, Viking)
- 1080 Recipes (Simone Ortega, Phaidon)
- Secrets of the Red Lantern (Pauline Nguyen, Murdoch)
- The Battle for Bennelong (Margot Saville, MUP)
- Poll Dancing (Mungo McCallum, Black Inc.)
- Landscape of Farewell (Alex Miller
- Gallop (Rufus Butler Seder, Workman Publishing)
- The Broken Shore (Peter Temple, Text)
- Nigella Express (Nigella Lawson, Random)
- Musicophilia (Oliver Sacks, Picador)
- The Memory Room (Christopher Koch, Vintage)
- Those Faraday Girls (Monica McInerney, Viking)
- 4 Ingredients (Kim McCosker & Rachael Bermingham, 4 Ingredients)
- The Dangerous Book for Boys (Conn Iggulden, HarperCollins)
- The Yacoubian Building (Alaa al Aswany, HarperCollins)
- Exit Music (Ian Rankin, Orion)
- Hot and Bothered (Michael Leunig, Penguin)
- A Thousand Splendid Suns (Khaled Hosseini, Bloomsbury)
- Atonement (Ian McEwan, Random)
- No Country for Old Men (Cormac McCarthy, Picador)
- World without End (Ken Follett, Pan Macmillan)
Disappointments
As in past years, what was a hit and what a miss depended on what sort of bookstore you were. Among the titles a variety of booksellers reported disappointing sales of were (again in no specific order):
- The Persimmon Tree (Bryce Courtenay, Viking)
- The Innocent Man (John Grisham, Random)
- Monsoon (Di Morrissey, Macmillan)
- The Shock Doctrine (Naomi Klein, Allen Lane)
- The Complete Stories (David Malouf, Random)
- Harry Potter boxed sets (Bloomsbury)
- Shakespeare's Wife (Germaine Greer, Bloomsbury)
- Maggie's Harvest (Maggie Beer, Lantern)
- Gentlemen of the Road (Michael Chabon, Hodder)
- The Portable Atheist (ed by Christopher Hitchens, Da Capo)
- 1080 Recipes (Simone Ortega, Phaidon)
- Nigella Express (Nigella Lawson, Random)
This article from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker