Handmaid's sales: Margaret Atwood's The Testaments is immediate hit

A hardback copy of Margaret Atwood’s follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, was sold every four seconds in the UK last week, according to sales figures that show the dystopian novel racing to the top of this week’s book charts.

Published at midnight on Monday, The Testaments had sold 103,177 hardbacks by Saturday, according to official book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan. Set 15 years after the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, the novel traces the continued evolution of Atwood’s totalitarian state of Gilead, where women

are reduced to their wombs and justification is found in the Bible for every abuse of power.

Publisher Vintage said that the sales made The Testaments the biggest hardback fiction title of the year, with sales of more than double those of any other hardback novel published to date in just five days in shops. Demand for Atwood’s dystopian vision also sent The Handmaid’s Tale back into the paperback charts in second place, 34 years after it was first published.

The sales make The Testaments this week’s fastest seller by far. But they fail to overtake Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchmen, which sold 168,455 print copies in its first week on sale in 2015. Both pale beside first-week sales of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, which sold 551,000 print copies in its first week in 2009, JK Rowling’s script for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which sold more than 680,000 copies in the UK in three days in 2016, and Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which sold 1.8m copies of the children’s edition and 780,000 copies of the adult edition in 2007.

Waterstones held more than 150 events to mark publication of The Testaments. “We expected The Testaments to be our biggest release of 2019 and it landed in our shops with a suitable bang,” said fiction buyer Bea Carvalho. “It is, predictably, our current bestseller – a position we’d expect it to hold for some time – and we can confidently predict that it will be our fiction bestseller this Christmas.”

Carvalho praised the “passion and creativity” that had gone into publication. “A book release which gets the whole country talking, and which draws regular and occasional readers alike into bookshops is hugely special, and an opportunity for bookshops to connect with their wider communities. This truly felt like the publishing event of the year,” she said. “We have been preparing for this release for nearly a year and it has been worth the wait: it’s a brilliant book – an instant classic – and we’re so pleased to be able to share it with our customers.”

Independent booksellers have also been seeing copies fly off their shelves. “Our sales have gone through the roof,” said Henry Layte, owner of The Book Hive in Norwich, home to the writers’ booth where Atwood finished off her novel The Heart Goes Last. “We didn’t need to have a launch party, everyone just came running through the doors and they haven’t stopped.”

As well as proving popular with devoted Atwood fans, Layte said the release has also brought in new customers. “Every time she has a new book out, it’s cause for good sales. She is a zeitgeist, and such a brilliant writer. Her new book is so timely,” he said.

Sam Fisher of Burley Fisher Books, Haggerston’s independent bookshop, has also noticed a sharp increase in sales.“Normally, we don’t do that well with big flashy releases,” Fisher said. “But it’s a book that people, even those who don’t buy a lot of books, will buy.

The book has been making waves on both sides of the Atlantic, with sales of over 125,000 copies across all formats in the US, according to its publisher, which printed an initial 500,000 copies of The Testaments and has already gone back to press twice.

Chicago feminist bookshop Women & Children First said it had seen record sales of the title. “We had a midnight release party for about 40 attendees,” said the bookshop’s co-owner Sarah Hollenbeck. “We sold about two dozen books at 12:01. However, because folks heard about the party and our excitement over the book, we became a destination for where to buy it and we ended up selling a hundred copies in the first few days after its release.

“It has a notable cross-generational appeal. I am seeing older customers buy it who adored The Handmaid’s Tale when it was first released and much younger customers pick it up who may have only discovered it only after the Hulu series was released. It also is extraordinarily and terrifyingly timely.”