Saturday's Crowds

by Daisy Maryles -- Publishers Weekly, 4/4/2005

More than 550 people showed up at Manhattan's Union Square Barnes & Noble on March 30 to hear Ian McEwan read from his new bestseller, Saturday. One day later, he was at Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C., where advance ticket sales of about 600 moved the event offsite. Harvard Book Store in Boston booked the Brattleboro Theater for McEwan. The author's fans were in stores nationwide as soon as Saturday hit the shelves, and the book lands on PW's list in the #3 position, McEwan's highest placement on our weekly charts. That's a very impressive debut for literary fiction. Saturday was published earlier this year in London, and topped the bestseller charts there. The Doubleday/Talese title already boasts 240,000 copies after three trips to press. McEwan's 1998 Booker Prize winner, Amsterdam, expanded his readership in the U.S. To date, the most successful Booker winner is Yann Martel's Life of Pi (2002), with sales of more than two million in the U.S.