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With days to go before the winner is announced, Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This (Bloomsbury Circus) leads the Booker Prize shortlist in sales terms, though all six nominated titles have sold within 5,000 copies of each other outside of lockdown periods.
While Kazuo Ishiguro’s longlisted Klara and the Sun (Faber) has sold nearly double the entire shortlist’s volume to date, the eventual winner, announced on 3rd November, will likely experience the "Booker boost" and see a dramatic increase in sales. In recent years, the Booker winner has drawn more attention than ever, with both Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton) and Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain (Picador) charting in the top 50 bestselling of books of 2020. Shuggie Bain’s paperback is currently the sixth bestselling fiction title of 2021, excluding lockdown weeks.
No One is Talking About This is currently the bestseller of this year's Booker shortlist, with 9,541 copies sold. Published in February, during the third national lockdown when Nielsen BookScan was unable to report weekly sales figures, the book is missing a chunk of its early sales.
The title, also shortlisted for the 2021 Women’s Prize, has so far had its biggest sales during the week of the Booker shortlist in mid-September. With No One is Talking About This her fiction debut, Lockwood could become the seventh author to win with her first novel, following Stuart’s Shuggie Bain last year.
Bookies' favourite Damon Galgut’s The Promise (Jonathan Cape) has so far sold 8,844 copies in hardback. Its sales leapt 241% to 1,036 copies sold in the week of the shortlist’s announcement in September. Galgut has been shortlisted twice before, with The Good Doctor (Atlantic) in 2003 In a Strange Room (Atlantic) in 2010.
Richard Powers’ Bewilderment (William Heinemann) was only published in September but has sold quickly enough to catch up with its fellow nominees, selling 7,188 copies so far in hardback. The title has notched up the biggest single week of sales for any of the shortlisted titles, at 2,635 copies in its first full week on the shelves. Bewilderment is Powers’ second shortlisted title, after The Overstory (William Heinemann) in 2018. Orfeo (Atlantic) was longlisted in 2014.
Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle (Doubleday) has sold 6,819 copies since its publication in hardback in May. Along with Powers and Lockwood, Shipstead is one of three American authors shortlisted. A win for any of them would see the first American winner since George Saunders in 2017.
Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men (Viking) has shifted 5,969 copies so far. As the sole UK author on the shortlist, a win for Mohamed would continue the run that has seen Stuart, Evaristo (jointly with Canadian Margaret Atwood) and Anna Burns triumph in the past three years.
Anuk Arudpragasum’s A Passage North (Granta) has sold 4,766 copies to date, since its publication in July. Both Arudpragasum and Shipstead have previously been nominated for the Dylan Thomas Prize, with Arudpragasum’s debut, The Story of a Brief Marriage (Granta), longlisted in 2016 and Shipstead’s first novel, Seating Arrangements (Knopf), winning in 2012.