Atlas – the story of Pa Saltthe eighth and final part in the popular Seven Sistersseries by the late author Lucinda Riley, has sold between 100,000 and 150,000 copies in one day. Xander Uitgevers estimates this on Friday based on sales figures from the five largest retail chains to which the company supplies books.
If the estimate is correct, these are sales figures that “have not occurred in decades,” a spokesperson for umbrella organization CPNB told ANP news agency. And also according to the Groep Algemene Uitgevers, the umbrella organization of Dutch publishers, these kinds of numbers have been “since the first Harry Potterparts a quarter of a century ago, no longer passed through any book”. The organizations cannot say whether this is an absolute record.
Read also: This 2019 interview with Lucinda Riley
“This really exceeds all expectations,” says a spokesperson for Xander Uitgevers. “We had certainly hoped for a lot of sales, but we had not seen such a stampede coming.” The publisher also sees an increase in sales of the first part due to the media attention. “We conclude that there will also be a lot of new readers.”
The book series is about a group of sisters who come together in their parental country house on Lake Geneva after the sudden death of their father. The sisters are all adopted, and after the death of their father, they each received a mysterious letter about their parentage. In each book, one of the sisters traces her background and finds the love of her life. “A modern-day romance thus becomes embroiled in a historical narrative, which often also involves the artistry of ancestors,” wrote NRC in 2021.
Actually, the seventh book was supposed to be the last, but Riley needed more pages to complete the story. She promised her fans an eighth book, in which she would answer the question of who the mysterious adoptive father Pa Salt is. Before her death – she passed away from cancer at the age of 55 – in June 2021, Riley completed a number of important passages of her book. She also made notes about the plot. Harry Whittaker, her eldest son, completed the book.
Popularity
The DNA quest that the sisters each go through is a theme that often works well on television, and this is also the case with this series. Which further contributes to the popularity of the Seven Sisters is that the books are easy to follow and easy to read. In addition, they were marketed as a literary series with the appearance of a lovely bouquet series. Still, not everyone agrees that the books deliver on those promises; NRC previously questioned the literary value of the books.
Riley often received bad reviews for her books, although that doesn’t seem to bother her many readers. Riley herself thought it was a shame, but winning literary prizes was never her goal, she said in an interview in 2019. “I don’t want to write literary fiction that will be read by 2,500 people, but by everyone. No matter what book I write, I always end with hope. Anything rather than a 250-page novel with a dry, plotless narrative, where every sentence is beautifully sculpted, but where the author has forgotten to tell a story.”
It is striking that the books sell well, especially in the Netherlands. This is partly because the Irish Lucinda Riley suffered from a reputation problem in the United Kingdom. In 2000 she published a thriller about the British Royal Family, Seeing Double. Unfortunately, that book was published just after the death of Princess Diana, which caused Riley a lot of criticism. With great effort she then rebuilt her reputation as a writer. In the Netherlands this did not bother her, and the books appeared more quickly one after the other.
The book is expected to be sold more often in the coming months. The seventh edition of the series was sold more than 300,000 times in the Netherlands. Next Friday, Xander Publishers will receive the final figures of the first day of sales of the latest book.