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Bestsellers
Hardback
  1. Red Mist Patricia Cornwell
  2. Steve Jobs Walter Isaacson
  3. Hawk Quest Robert Lyndon
  4. The Piccadilly Plot Susanna Gregory
Paperback
  1. The Map T S Learner
  2. She's Never Coming Back Hans Koppel
  3. The Paris Wife Paula McLain
  4. Never Knowing Chevy Stevens
Audio
  1. Of Mice and Men John Steinbeck Read by Clarke Peters
  2. The Forgotten Highlander Alistair Urquhart Read by David Rintoul
  3. The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party Alexander McCall Smith Read by Adjoa Andoh
  4. Lucia in London E F Benson Read by Miriam Margolyes

Abacus

In 2003 Abacus celebrated thirty years of publishing. In the early days it was strictly a non-fiction list with something of an ecological flavour, producing classics such as Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful and McLuhan's Touch the Earth.


Primo Levi's series of masterworks, including If this is a Man, The Periodic Table and Moments of Reprieve, was soon added and a tradition of bestselling high-quality memoir was established: Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom; Gore Vidal's Palimpsest and Point to Point Navigation; and historian William Woodruff's double No. 1 bestsellers The Road to Nab End and Beyond Nab End.

Abacus were one of the first publishers of behavioural economics with the groundbreaking Malcolm Gladwell book The Tipping Point, followed by the bestselling Tim Harford Undercover Economist series. In 2009 we published Gillian Tett’s award winning work on the financial crisis, Fool’s Gold.

Our fiction publishing began with Jane Gardam, whose Old Filth was just pipped at the post for the Orange Prize. Gardam has twice won the Whitbread Novel Award, part of an excellent Whitbread record that includes Joan Brady's Book of the Year for Theory of War, Beryl Bainbridge's Novel Award for Every Man for Himself and Christopher Wilson’s shortlisting for The Ballad of Lee Cotton. Valerie Martin won the Orange Prize for Property, and in 2009 Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Abacus publishes some original paperback fiction and non-fiction and has had great success in this format with the likes of José Carlos Somoza (whose Athenian Murders won the CWA Gold Dagger), Guillermo Martínez, Charlie Connelly and Michele Giuttari.