Annihilate the last Houellebecq logically at the top of book sales

 Annihilate: the last Houellebecq logically at the top of book sales.

Highly anticipated ahead of its release, Michel Houellebecq's latest novel, Anéantir, reportedly sold nearly 75,000 copies in the space of a weekend.

Annihilate the last Houellebecq logically at the top of book sales

First printed in 300,000 copies, annihilating (Flammarion) was the media event of this literary season. The first figures now reflect the immediate success of this publication, despite very mixed reviews: according to the Edistat ranking, the new book by Michel Houellebecq, published on January 7, would have sold more than 69,000 copies on the single period from January 3 to 9, 2022 – 75,000 according to GfK, another main ranking tool in the sector – logically taking the lead in the weekly ranking ahead of Asterix and the Griffin, the new volume of the adventures of Asterix which had to give way after 12 consecutive weeks at the top of sales (and more than 1.5 million copies sold).

According to Edistat figures, more than 35,000 copies of annihilate have been sold in bookstores (the rest divided between large specialized and food stores). However, we will have to wait for more figures to be able to measure the success of annihilate compared to his previous works: in 2015, Submission had sold more than 155,000 copies at the end of its first week of marketing, against 115 000 for Serotonin (2019). It remains to be seen whether the cost and size of the book – 26€, more than 730 pages – will not constitute, in the long term, a major obstacle to the success of the book. In any case, the leak of the manuscript on the internet a few days before its release does not seem to have had a major impact on the sales of annihilating.

In the rest of the Edistat ranking for the week of January 3 to 9, the winner of the last Goncourt Prize, The most secret memory of men (Mohamed Mbougar Sarr), remains at the top of the ranking and has around 400,000 copies. As for Karine Tuil's latest novel, The decision (Gallimard, 2022), with a print run of 80,000 copies, this one is also doing well by climbing to fourth place in the ranking and should continue its ascent over the coming weeks. .