The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by is the best-selling novel by a British writer of the past decade, new figures show.
Mark Haddon's (pictured) book about an autistic teenager has sold more than 2 million copies. It was only beaten on British sales by US author Dan Brown’s novels The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, which sold 5.2 million and 3.17 million copies respectively.
Two other Brown novels, Deception Point and Digital Fortress, took fourth and fifth places in the list compiled for The Sunday Times by the Bookseller Magazine.
They were followed by Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones in sixth, which tells the story of a teenage girl in heaven coming to terms with her death after being raped and murdered.
Ian McEwan’s Atonement, which was adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, came seventh, selling 1.52 million copies.
The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Sons, both by Khaled Hosseini, and The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, claimed eighth, ninth and tenth places respectively.
Fiction sales were far ahead of non-fiction, the figures showed. Even Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, which topped the non-fiction category has only sold 1,749,369 since 2003.
In a separate list for children’s books, the top seven places were taken by JK Rowling with her Harry Potter novels. At the top is The Deathly Hallows, her final book in the series. Since it came out in 2007, it has sold 4,369,994 copies, just beating The Order of the Phoenix, followed closely by the Half-Blood Prince.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time tells the story of a 15-year-old boy with Asperger’s living in Swindon.
Released in 2003, it won that year’s Whitbread Book of the Year and the 2004 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book.
Monday, December 14, 2009
In UK, novel about teen with Asperger's best-selling book of the decade by a British author
From The Telegraph in the UK: