The bestselling books that defined each decade

Does the name Jack Higgins ring a bell? What about Jacob Bronowski? Or Pierre Dukan? Once upon a time, these men were authors: of a Second World War thriller, a history of human development and a bizarre diet plan. And not only that, their books were so successful they ranked among the top ten bestselling books of their respective decades.
It’s easy to forget the literary obsessions of yesteryear. To celebrate 50 years of the Sunday Times bestseller list, we have calculated the bestselling books of every decade, from the 1970s to the 2020s. You’ll be happy to hear that other names are more familiar: David Attenborough, Delia Smith, Sue Townsend and Jeremy Clarkson are jostling for space through the years. The former Sunday Times literary editor John Walsh looks back at the trends that have gripped British readers, from eco-anxiety to pandemic escapism, and plenty of misery memoirs.
• Read the full list of the top 100 bestsellers of the past 50 years
Long before the words “climate change” were given initial capitals, concerns had been raised in the 1960s about the fate of the environment in JG Ballard’s disaster novels (The Drought, The Drowned World) and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. By the 1970s “nature dramatised” was a popular theme. Jaws by Peter Benchley, about a man-eating shark attacking a Long Island beach resort, sold ten million copies in the US and three million in the UK, despite the remote likelihood of British readers ever meeting a shark in, say, Skegness. In Richard Adams’s Watership Down, a colony of rabbits learns of the imminent destruction of their home fields and hops heroically through perilous adventures to the titular bunny paradise.
In a milder register, the stories of James Herriot, about life as a vet in the 1930s Yorkshire Dales, nabbed three of the Top Ten places. They combined nostalgia for the prewar countryside, picturesque gore (with birthing lambs), Herriot’s courtship of the local beauty, Helen, and the patrician put-downs of Mrs Pumphrey and her pampered pekinese, Tricki Woo.
TV tie-in books nabbed the top slots (Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man and Alistair Cooke’s America) but the nation’s favourite book was arguably Edith Holden’s Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady. It offered a vision of Eden in miniature: nature notes in Holden’s elegant handwriting and drawings of birds and flowers from her Warwickshire garden on yellowed paper. If you were a British grandmothers in 1978, this was a guaranteed Christmas present.
It may have been counterintuitive in the decade of Mrs Thatcher and the Falklands conflict, but comic writing was buoyant in the 1980s. Readers devoured The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Book of Heroic Failures, The Henry Root Letters and The Sloane Ranger Handbook — but eclipsing them all was a novel about a specky teenager growing up in Ashby-de-la-Zouch. Adrian Mole is embarrassed by dysfunctional parents, in love with the horsey Pandora Braithwaite and obsessed by the dimensions of his “thing” (11cm). The only bestselling political book was The Complete Yes Minister, where fans of TV’s Sir Humphrey Appleby could study the byzantine circumlocutions of the civil service in print.
The decade ushered in a dazzling renaissance of serious British fiction spearheaded by the “Amis generation” (Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Rose Tremain, William Boyd, Pat Barker, Kazuo Ishiguro) who won the big prizes and sold thousands but were eclipsed, sales-wise, by Anita Brookner and her cardiganed, romantic-novelist heroine, Hope.
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Elsewhere, a book without a molecule of humour swept the board. Stephen Hawking’s “history of time” considered the origin, structure and fate of the universe, taking in quarks, black holes and gravity. It was stunningly opaque, but an ideal Christmas gift for the brother-in-law whose intelligence you wished to flatter. Two future national treasures dominated. also made their mark. With a huge-eyed green tree frog on its cover, David Attenborough’s Life on Earth kicked off nine TV tie-ins on conservation issues. Delia Smith combined three no-nonsense recipe books (Delia Smith’s Cookery Course 1978, 1979 and 1980) to form a culinary mega-seller that featured on wedding lists throughout the 1980s.
As Delia Smith and Stephen Hawking threatened to hog Bestseller Land for ever, four newcomers pitched their tents. The Iowa-born Bill Bryson made his debut with The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America, returning to his home and hitting the road. His wry, genial, piss-taking observations of everyday Americana made him an ideal travel companion. In Notes on a Small Island (1995) he pootled around the UK and told readers how he loved it. (“Marmite, village fêtes, country lanes, people saying ‘mustn’t grumble’, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, stinging nettles …”) The Brits lapped it up. Bryson became Middle England’s new best friend.
Peter Mayle was the director of an advertising agency when he moved with his wife and dogs to a derelict farmhouse in the south of France. His battles with venal builders, frustrated donkeys and a clarinet-playing plumber delighted a generation of French-hating Brits long before the advent of Nigel Farage.
More serious family traumas were charted in Wild Swans. The Chinese-born, London-based Jung Chang’s grandmother was given away by her father as a concubine to a high-ranking warlord. Chang’s mother, pregnant at 15, underwent gruelling military training for Mao’s Red Army. Jung joined the Red Guards and witnessed her father being tortured in public during the Cultural Revolution. Published in 1991, it sold 13 million copies — the first sighting of the misery memoir, which crammed bestseller lists at the fin de siècle. A later incarnation was the bleak, haunting, grimly comic Angela’s Ashes (1996) by the Irish-American author Frank McCourt, which centred on his wretched childhood in Limerick surviving poverty, a derelict home and his father’s alcoholism.
In the Noughties the misery memoir reached its zenith with Dave Pelzer’s three-course banquet of child abuse, A Child Called It, The Lost Boy and A Man Named Dave. The first reported how, between the ages of 4 and 12, his mother beat him, starved him, burnt his arms, stabbed him in the stomach, made him drink ammonia and eat dog shit. He was reckoned to be “the third worst abuse victim in California state history” (the other two were dead). At 12 he was put into foster care, and his crawl back to self-esteem generated huge sales of the other books, predominately by male readers.
Bill Bryson, having exhausted his travels across the US, Europe and the UK, drove into new territory — the world of science; a folksy American landgrab on hallowed turf, recently colonised by Stephen Hawking. A Short History of Nearly Everything offered a benign layman’s guide to the big bang, the solar system, earth science, quarks, protons and the likelihood of Earth being struck by a meteorite. Millions of readers, it seems, wanted to start the new century by finding out about Everything.
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Another American dominated bestselling fiction: Dan Brown, a songwriter and composer from New Hampshire, who began writing mystery thrillers and went global with The Da Vinci Code. It hit the bestseller list in its first week and sold 81 million copies, despite its clunking style and accusations that its plot, about the descendants from the supposed union of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, owed a lot to the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.
The popularity of the vast Soup-to-Nuts history book — The Ascent of Man, Life on Earth, A Brief History of Time and A Short History of Nearly Everything — continued with a new contender. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by a 35-year-old, Oxford-educated Israeli medievalist eclipsed them all with its narrative sweep from atoms to intelligent design. Harari’s forte was his clarity and thrilling connections across eons. (“The process that began in the Euphrates valley 5,000 years ago, when Sumerian geeks outsourced data-processing from the human brain to a clay tablet, would culminate in Silicon Valley with the victory of the tablet.”) Among many high-profile fans were Barack Obama and Bill Gates.
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The other top books of the 2010s were a mixed bag: a cute pet here, a trendy diet there, a Holocaust-memory novel — and a Hitchcockian thriller by Paula Hawkins, narrated by a hard-drinking commuter, not quite certain if she’s witnessing passion or murder in a garden that she whizzes past in a chardonnay haze. This Is Going to Hurt offereda collection of sparkling-but-mostly-disgusting stories of NHS patients in an obstetrics and gynaecology ward, told by Adam Kay during his tenure as a junior doctor. No one who read it will forget the female patient inside whom Kay discovered a Kinder Egg, containing an engagement ring wrapped in tissue paper, waiting to be discovered by the lady’s lucky boyfriend. Gail Honeyman’sfirst novel, narrated by a socially dyslexic woman who starts to make connections with the mystifying world around her, spawned a mini-genre called “up-lit” (as in uplifting) and sold 1.8 million copies worldwide.
Four years into the 2020s and one tendency is apparent: infantilism, a fondness for the childish, the cosy, the oversimplified. Four “self-help” titles promise benefits by working on “personal development”. Atomic Habits by James Clear suggests that we acquire some (unspecified) daily habits to make us feel better. Good Vibes, Good Life: How Self-Love Is the Key to Unlocking Your Greatness by Vex King collects inspirational thoughts that “transform negative emotions into positive ones”. In Surrounded by Idiots, the Swedish behaviourist Thomas Erikson defines four key “behaviour types” and suggests how you might relate to such people. In the archly titled Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? the TikTok star Julia Smith offers guidance for “any woman seeking to empower herself and lead a fulfilling life”.
Even crime fiction became snug. Richard Osman’s runaway bestseller featured a quartet of elderly crime solvers chatting in a retirement village in Kent. The Thursday Murder Club and its sequels might deal in murder but they’re as cosy as a family of yaks wrapped in a 900-tog eiderdown duvet. And Charlie Mackesy’s world-conquering picture book is all about helping others. What, the Boy asks the Mole, does he want to be when he grows up? “Kind,” says the Mole.
What inspired this need for reassurance? One word: Covid. It spread worldwide in early 2020. No wonder British readers, virtually imprisoned at home, scared witless by coughs, sick relatives and the outside world, pulled up the blankets and read books that told them, basically, they’d be fine.