Books

Read all about it: Ireland’s best-selling books of 2021

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy takes top spot for second year

Illustration from The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy/Ebury Press

Martin Doyle's face
Martin Doyle
Wed Dec 22 2021 - 13:00

If you’re wondering what that gift-wrapped but book-shaped present under the Christmas tree might be – spoiler alert! Ireland’s best-selling book this Christmas is Guinness World Records 2022, with 5,516 sales last week, pipping Claire Keegan’s acclaimed novella, Small Things Like These by just over 100 copies, with Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 fewer than 50 sales behind in third place.

Aisling and the City by Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen also sold more than 5,000 copies last week, with Irish rugby international Keith Earls’s autobiography, Fight or Flight: My Life, just behind in fifth place.

The best-selling book of 2021, however, for the second year in a row, by a margin of more than 10,000 sales, is The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy, which sold 52,699 copies in 2021 up to last Saturday, according to Nielsen BookScan, which compiles the publishing industry’s official charts. The beautifully illustrated book of uplifting life lessons imparted via Charlie’s conversations with his animal friends has proven a worldwide hit. Last year the title, first published in October 20019, sold 67,926 copies here.

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney, probably the most anticipated book the year after the huge success of her previous novel, Normal People, and its TV adaptation, came second with 39,837 sales, ahead of the Aisling and the City, the latest in the phenomenally successful series.

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The Midnight Library by Matt Haig came next, just ahead of Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, another title from 2019 whose popularity shows no signs of abating. That hardy perennial, Guinness World Records, was sixth, followed by Big Shot by Jeff Kinney, the 16th and latest in his Diary of a Wimpy Kid series for children.