Top sellers
Titles mentioned repeatedly as hot sellers by a wide variety of booksellers for during the lead up to Christmas 2007 (in no particular order) included:

• The Uncommon Reader (Alan Bennett, Profile)
• The Six Sacred Stones (Matthew Reilly, Macmillan)
• Almost the Moon (Alice Sebold, Macmillan)
• Floodtide (Judy Nunn, Random)
• Monsoon (Di Morrissey, Macmillan)
• The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini, Bloomsbury)
• Mr Pip (Lloyd Jones, Text)
• Maggie's Harvest (Maggie Beer, Lantern)
• The Persimmon Tree (Bryce Courtenay, Viking)
• 1080 Recipes (Simone Ortega, Phaidon)
• Secrets of the Red Lantern (Pauline Nguyen, Murdoch)
• The Battle for Bennelong (Margot Saville, MUP)
• Poll Dancing (Mungo McCallum, Black Inc.)
• Landscape of Farewell (Alex Miller
• Gallop (Rufus Butler Seder, Workman Publishing)
• The Broken Shore (Peter Temple, Text)
• Nigella Express (Nigella Lawson, Random)
• Musicophilia (Oliver Sacks, Picador)
• The Memory Room (Christopher Koch, Vintage)
• Those Faraday Girls (Monica McInerney, Viking)
• 4 Ingredients (Kim McCosker & Rachael Bermingham, 4 Ingredients)
• The Dangerous Book for Boys (Conn Iggulden, HarperCollins)
• The Yacoubian Building (Alaa al Aswany, HarperCollins)
• Exit Music (Ian Rankin, Orion)
• Hot and Bothered (Michael Leunig, Penguin)
• A Thousand Splendid Suns (Khaled Hosseini, Bloomsbury)
• Atonement (Ian McEwan, Random)
• No Country for Old Men (Cormac McCarthy, Picador)
• World without End (Ken Follett, Pan Macmillan)

Disappointments
As in past years, what was a hit and what a miss depended on what sort of bookstore you were. Among the titles a variety of booksellers reported disappointing sales of were (again in no specific order):

• The Persimmon Tree (Bryce Courtenay, Viking)
• The Innocent Man (John Grisham, Random)
• Monsoon (Di Morrissey, Macmillan)
• The Shock Doctrine (Naomi Klein, Allen Lane)
• The Complete Stories (David Malouf, Random)
• Harry Potter boxed sets (Bloomsbury)
• Shakespeare's Wife (Germaine Greer, Bloomsbury)
• Maggie's Harvest (Maggie Beer, Lantern)
• Gentlemen of the Road (Michael Chabon, Hodder)
• The Portable Atheist (ed by Christopher Hitchens, Da Capo)
• 1080 Recipes (Simone Ortega, Phaidon)
• Nigella Express (Nigella Lawson, Random)

This article from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker