Singapore loves romance and potboilers

SINGAPORE - This year, Singaporeans raced to buy steamy chick lit and dystopian teen tragedies, according to The Straits Times' bestseller lists.

It was also the first time in five years that books by Singapore authors made it to the weekly Top 10 chart, but hopefully, not the last.

For at least 15 years, The Straits Times has compiled a weekly list of the best-selling books in Singapore, collating sales figures supplied by major bookstores at the time. Currently, these are Books Kinokuniya, Popular, MPH and Times.

Books on the bestseller list thus indicate what Singaporeans are buying at physical bookstores, while online purchases unfortunately remain a mystery. This is because analytical groups such as Nielsen BookScan do not operate here and the newspaper's previous requests for hard data to online retailers such as Amazon have gone unanswered.

So what were Singaporeans reading this year? Romance and potboilers are perennial favourites and indeed, the biggest fiction bestsellers flying out of stores this year included the steamy Fifty Shades Of Grey trilogy by E.L. James and the new Dan Brown thriller Inferno.

The bestseller lists of 2013 look oddly like those of the past five years. Apart from relative newcomer James, who rose to prominence only in the middle of last year and paved the way for other writers of adult romance such as Sylvia Day, certain fictionauts dominated, with novels that sell as much on the strength of the author's name as content.

Brown, of course, brought a smile to booksellers with Angels & Demons in 2009, The Lost Symbol a year later and Inferno this year. Feel-good guru Mitch Albom is back in first place as well, with The First Phone Call From Heaven, not to be confused with the big bestseller of 2009, The Five People You Meet In Heaven. Chick-lit queen Sophie Kinsella has not quite regained the stature of her well-known Shopaholic series but this year's offering, Wedding Night, has been firmly ensconced midway on the bestseller list for six months. Lauren Weisberger continues her gossipy tales of high life (Chasing Harry Winston, 2009 and Last Night At Chateau Marmont, 2010) with the obvious hit, Revenge Wears Prada, her sequel to the 2004 book that made her name, The Devil Wears Prada.

Other writers who will not be budged include the prolific James Patterson, who writes solo and with collaborators. He has a hit every year, starting with Alex Cross' Trial in 2009 to this year's Alex Cross, Run. It is the same for John Grisham, whose heartwarming baseball story of last year, Calico Joe, seems to have done almost as well as legal thrillers from The Associate (2009) to this year's Sycamore Row.

New movie adaptations of text also propel some denser, more literary titles to a few weeks on the list.

This year, these included 1920s romance The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Yann Martel's allegorical tale Life Of Pi and David Mitchell's complex story about reincarnation, Cloud Atlas.

Yet a few trends set this year apart when compared with reader favourites from 2009 onwards.

This was the first time in more than five years that books by Singapore-born authors made it to the adult fiction bestseller list, following Catherine Lim's romance novella Leap Of Love in 2008.

The star this year was Kevin Kwan's send-up of Singapore's wealthy, Crazy Rich Asians, followed by playwright Ovidia Yu's new mystery about a Peranakan cook with a nose for crime, Aunty Lee's Delights. Readers clearly have an appetite for Asian fiction set in and around the region, given that the bestseller list also included Five Star Billionaire, Malaysian writer Tash Aw's story of South-east Asians trying to make it big in China.

Second, 2013 is when young adult science fiction and fantasy truly came into its own, after the success of Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games series last year.

In past years, the children's bestseller list has been dominated by catchy cartoonish adventures for a younger set, including the Geronimo Stilton series of books ostensibly written by a mouse of the same name, and illustrated school adventures such as Jeff Kinney's The Diary Of A Wimpy Kid.

While children's tales still retain top spot, this year also saw a best-selling wave of darker and more complex tales for older readers. Top of the list were Veronica Roth's trilogy about a dystopian society with a deadly caste system: Divergent, Insurgent and Allegiant; as well as Fall Of Five by Pittacus Lore, the new instalment in the writing team's Lorien Legacies series, about alien teens on the run.

Also doing very well is John Green's best-selling story about two teen cancer patients who fall in love, The Fault In Our Stars, though its themes and sexual content have lead to some confusion among booksellers about whether the book should be classified as adult fiction or not.

Another interesting feature of this year's lists is the noticeable absence of a Man Booker Prize trend, for now.

Traditionally, the announcement of the winner of the £50,000 (S$102,000) prize is followed by skyrocketing sales for several months. Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger took top spot in 2009 for that reason, while Julian Barnes' novella The Sense Of An Ending held its own in 2011 against big names such as the new Haruki Murakami book 1Q84.

So what happened with this year's winner, historical novel The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton? One possibility suggested by distributor Pansing is that the heft of the nearly 900-page book is putting off many readers. They might be racing to download it on e-readers instead, a statistic that cannot be captured by the Straits Times' list, or waiting for the smaller print paperback coming out next month, which will be substantially lighter to carry.

Which books will then top next year's lists? Apart from name-brand releases from Patterson and romance queen Cecelia Ahern (How To Fall In Love, in stores soon), strong contenders include fiction from literary stars Chang-Rae Lee and Booker finalist Emma Donoghue, as well as new local writer Kirstin Chen, whose Soy Sauce For Beginners, about a Singapore girl who takes over the family business, is slated to be in bookstores by year-end.

Then again, filming has begun on the Fifty Shades Of Grey movie, to be released in 2015. If the publisher re-releases the trilogy next year with all new covers and exclusive photos from the set, it could be yet another year dominated by adult romance.

akshitan@sph.com.sg

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