Hilary Mantel’s much-anticipated The Mirror and the Light has been selling a copy every 2.7 seconds since its release last Thursday, with the final book in the two-time Booker winner’s trilogy selling more than 95,000 print copies in just three days.

According to figures from sales monitor Nielsen BookScan, 5p in every £1 spent on books in the UK last week went towards a copy of The Mirror and the Light. After an eight-year wait since the last book, 2012’s Bring Up the Bodies, excited fans lined up to buy the novel at bookshops around the UK at midnight on Wednesday.

The new novel follows 2009’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies to complete Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy. Widely praised by critics, a good number of whom predicted that it will win Mantel her third Booker prize, the 900-page novel follows Cromwell’s final ascent to unprecedented riches and honour in the service of King Henry VIII, before his abrupt fall from royal favour and public execution at Tower Hill in 1540.

The fortunes of Mantel’s trilogy have been nowhere near as turbulent. Bolstered by two Booker prize wins, a West End play and a BBC miniseries Wolf Hall made Mantel the first Booker winner to win the UK overall No 1 spot. The first two books have sold more than 1.5m copies around the world.

The Mirror and the Light is also on track to overtake sales of Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, which sold 103,177 copies in its first five days. Neither, however, overtook Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchmen, which sold 168,455 print copies in its first week in 2015. Other titles that have seen huge first-week sales include Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, which sold 551,000 copies in 2009; JK Rowling’s script for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which sold more than 680,000 copies in three days in 2016; and Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which sold more than 2.5m copies in one week in July 2007.

