What’s selling down under

A guide to household finance has topped the bestsellers chart in Australia for the second year running, with nearly one million Australians now owning a copy of financial commentator and writer Scott Pape’s The Barefoot Investor (Wiley). Pape’s follow-up book The Barefoot Investor for Families (HarperCollins) also came in fifth place.

Local authors continue to sell strongly in Australia, with half of the top 10 in 2018 taken up by Australian titles. These include Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton’s junior fiction book The 104-Storey Treehouse (Pan), Liane Moriarty’s adult fiction Nine Perfect Strangers (Macmillan) and Heather Morris’ historical novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz (Echo Publishing). The Tattooist, also a bestseller in the UK and US, will soon be joined by a sequel.

The winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards made international headlines last month. Behrouz Boochani, author of the prize-winning No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (Picador), is being detained on a small island in the Pacific as part of the Australian government’s offshore detention policy for asylum seekers. He wrote the book via WhatsApp messages sent to his translator.

If you’re heading to the London Book Fair next month, you can find a number of independent Australian publishers at their stands, including Text Publishing, NewSouth Publishing, Melbourne University Press, Exisle Publishing and Lake Press, while many more Australian publishers and literary agents will be roaming the halls.

Andrea Hanke
Editor
Think Australian
andrea@booksandpublishing.com.au

Category: Think Australian editorial