Our top 10 bestsellers of the week

1. The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
2. Phosphorescence by Julia Baird
3. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
4. The Good Turn by Dervla McTiernan
5. Cry Me A River: The Tragedy of the Murray-Darling Basin (Quarterly Essay 77) by Margaret Simons
6. Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
7. Beatrix Bakes by Natalie Paull
8. Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
9. Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton
10. Weather by Jenny Offill

Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light has retained the throne for another week. Also on the list are a number of stellar fiction titles: the absorbing Where the Crawdads Sing; heavy hitting US titles Weather and Such a Fun Age; and the 2019 Booker Prize-winning Girl, Woman, Other. As well as these international titles, there are two excellent Australian offerings: Dervla McTiernan’s addictive crime-thriller The Good Turn, and Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe.

Julia Baird’s newly-released memoir on searching for the ‘light within’, Phosphorescence, and Margaret Simons’s Cry Me A River are books whose releases we were planning to celebrate in the physical world, and even though those plans couldn’t go ahead, they are clearly still finding their way into the hands of readers.