British fantasy has had a split-screen sort of week. On one side of the screen, Sarah J. Maas has sold more copies of a fantasy novel in five days than anyone in the UK since records began. On the other, China Miéville has won one of the country’s most highbrow literary prizes with a book that runs to more than 1,200 pages. The same genre, more or less. The same shelf, if your bookshop is generous. Two completely different planets.
First, the numbers. A Court of Splintered Harmony, the sixth book in Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series, sold 188,914 copies in the UK between 27 and 31 October, according to NielsenIQ BookData. That makes it the fastest-selling adult fantasy novel since UK sales records began in 1998. It comfortably beats the previous holder, Rebecca Yarros’s Onyx Storm, which sold 155,141 in its opening week in January 2025, and it is the fastest-selling hardback of any kind since Dan Brown’s Inferno in 2013. Bloomsbury says it is the biggest single week for any adult novel in the UK since Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman in 2015. Worldwide, the publisher counts 1.7 million English-language copies in pre-orders and first-day sales.
There is one record she hasn’t taken. “Harry Potter has the record for the highest ever weekly sale for a fantasy novel,” NielsenIQ’s Philip Stone told the Guardian, “but it’s the biggest sale since our records began for an adult fantasy novel.” So the boy wizard keeps his crown, and the faeries will have to make do with being the biggest thing to happen to grown-up fantasy in the history of the barcode. We imagine they’ll cope.
Then, on Wednesday night in London, Miéville won the £10,000 Goldsmiths Prize for The Rouse, published by Picador. The Goldsmiths exists to reward fiction that breaks the mould, which is a reasonably accurate description of most of Miéville’s career. Judging panel chair Francis Spufford said it seemed only right to give the prize to the book that, “in terms of ambition, bold use of history, linguistic experiment and sheer scale, broke most explosively with expectation.” Fellow judge Hari Kunzru called it “a monumental work”, an “enormous, exuberant, overflowing book” that reminds us “the novel is capable of containing multitudes.” It’s the longest book to win since the prize was launched in 2013. It beat a shortlist that included Polly Barton, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Keith Ridgway, Aea Varfis-van Warmelo and Missouri Williams, none of whom, as far as we know, had to have their books delivered by forklift.
It’s tempting to cast all this as a culture war, romantasy against the New Weird, the TikTok shelf against the broadsheet review pages. Plenty of people will. They’ll be missing the more interesting point. Both books are fantasy, and fantasy is now, by any measure, the dominant force in British fiction, whether you count the money or the medals. Thirty years ago, a dragon on the cover was a reliable way of getting a novel ignored by literary prize juries and shelved somewhere near the back of the shop, between the war memoirs and the jigsaws. This week a fantasy novel set the sales record and another won the prize that exists to reward literary daring. That’s not a split in the genre. It’s a takeover.
Miéville, of course, has been knocking on the literary establishment’s door for a quarter of a century, ever since Perdido Street Station turned up in 2000 with its cactus people and its weaponised moths. He has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award three times, which remains the record, and he has always insisted that genre fiction can do anything literary fiction can do, with better monsters. Maas, meanwhile, has done something just as remarkable from the other direction: she has got millions of people who swore they didn’t read fantasy buying it in hardback at midnight launches. Fantasy has been fighting for respect from the critics and for readers in the shops for decades. This week it won both.
As for that page count, the Guardian puts The Rouse at 1,264 pages. Multiply that by the 188,914 copies of Maas now being carried home in tote bags, and this has been a very good week for British fantasy and an even better one for British chiropractors.
Sources: Goldsmiths Prize; The Guardian (Maas); The Guardian (Miéville); File 770.
Join the conversation (0)