Irish Bestsellers 12th September 2020

Welcome back to this week’s charts, where we’re still seeing the shake-up effect of last week’s slew of new releases. It’s a good sign for book sales, too, with over half of the Top 20 scoring over a thousand sales in a week. Hopefully that will continue to increase as we begin Christmas-shopping – assuming Christmas isn’t cancelled this year!

Top of this week’s charts is the beautiful The Gift by Auschwitz survivor Dr Edith Eger. Her lessons on how to face suffering will hopefully help a good few people in these turbulent times. On a lighter note, there’s also success for Richard Osman, as The Thursday Murder Club is not only at no. 5 in the Top 20, but has two entries in the Original Fiction Top 10, at nos. 3 and 7; this looks set to be a highly popular new series, so we’d recommend everyone gets ahead now!

The Children’s chart is probably the most shaken-up it’s been in a long time; presumably an after-effect of returning to school, we have ten different authors, which is highly unusual even at World Book Day time, including a few classics such as The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton, and the Once series by Morris Gleitzman: Once/Now/Then/After. A newer book of note here is Jacqui Hurley’s Girls Play Too: Inspiring Stories of Irish Sportswomen, which is a good candidate for any small bookworm’s Christmas list!

This week’s featured book is the prose debut of bilingual poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat. This beautiful book is at no. 5 in Paperback Non-Fiction and no. 18 in the Top 20. Here’s the blurb:

A true original. In this stunningly unusual prose debut, Doireann Ní Ghríofa sculpts essay and autofiction to explore inner life and the deep connection felt between two writers centuries apart. In the 1700s, an Irish noblewoman, on discovering her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary poem. Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, famously referred to by Peter Levi, Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, as ‘the greatest poem written in either Ireland or Britain during the eighteenth century.’ In the present day, a young mother narrowly avoids tragedy. On encountering the poem, she becomes obsessed with its parallels with her own life, and sets out to track down the rest of the story. A Ghost in the Throat is a devastating and timeless tale about one woman freeing her voice by reaching into the past and finding another’s.

And now this week’s charts, with the Top 20 followed by the Top 10 in each category: