EL James’s move away from the whips and handcuffs of Christian Grey to the more straightforward sexual predilections of a British aristocrat and his Albanian cleaner has landed her at the top of this week’s book charts.
The Mister, James’s first novel outside the world of Fifty Shades of Grey, focuses on the romance between Maxim Trevelyan, an earl, model, photographer and DJ, and his sex-trafficked cleaner Alessia. It sold 52,674 physical copies in its first week on sale, according to sales monitor Nielsen BookScan. This places it at No 1 on the book charts, ahead of titles by authors including Lee Child, cleaning guru Mrs Hinch, and the hit cookbook Pinch of Nom.
Reviewers have not been kind. “Is EL James’s ghastly post-Fifty Shades book her worst yet?” asked the Telegraph, giving it one star; while the Atlantic said: “It’s not just that The Mister is bad. It’s that it’s bad in ways that seem to cause the space-time continuum itself to wobble, slightly, as the words on the page rearrange themselves into kaleidoscopic fragments of repetition and product placement.” But according to the Bookseller, this is the highest single week of sales for an adult novel since Dan Brown released Origin in July 2018, and the highest first-week sales for any novel since James’s own Darker in November 2017.
But while readers might have preferred James’s latest erotic offering to anything else on the shelves last week, sales of The Mister fall short of the Fifty Shades books, revealing the public’s partiality for kink. Darker, which retold the second book in the Fifty Shades trilogy from the perspective of Christian Grey instead of his paramour Anastasia Steele, sold 86,000 physical copies in its first week on sale, while Grey, its predecessor, sold almost 400,000 physical copies in its first week. Fifty Shades of Grey, James’s first novel, has sold more than 6m copies to date and is the bestselling novel of all time in Britain.
“Goodness, what could compete with Fifty Shades, though? That was a phenomenon,” said Kate McHale, fiction buyer at Waterstones. “The Mister was down on Darker’s first day, which is not unexpected; Darker was part of a series that connected to so many people. This was something new, and we’d expected it to follow this pattern.”
McHale predicted that The Mister would continue to sell well in weeks to come. “It’s one of those big momentous books which comes into stores and causes excitement. She’s got such a wonderful fanbase. Fans really connected to those characters in the first books. I think the romance of this will resonate with a lot of people as well,” she said.
