Amazon’s UK best sellers list is dominated by books on racial themes

Amazon’s UK’s best selling books list was today dominated by novels that centred around racial themes.

The book list, which is updated hourly, saw books including Reni Eddo Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race and Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other climb to the top of Amazon’s list of best sellers.

The chart, which is able to record the most read and most sold titles for both fiction and non-fiction across the popular site, also featured the 2020 novel Me And White Supremacy. 

It comes as hundreds of Britons across the country stepped outside their doorsteps last night to demand justice for the American police killing of George Floyd that is provoking increasing global anger. 

Following a campaign organised by Stand up to Racism, families and emergency services have been showing their support for the Black Lives Matter movement by standing outside their homes in solidarity with protesters in the U.S.

George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man, died after police officer Derek Chauvin put his knee on his neck in Minneapolis on May 25 for nine minutes.  

The Sunday Tines bestseller Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race sparked a national conversation when it was first published in 2017. 

The debut novel by Reni Eddo Lodge sees the writer explore the discussions held around race, gender and class in the UK.

Meanwhile Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, revolves around the lives of 12 different characters, who are mostly women, black and British, as they share their experiences and struggles about life.  

Also making it on the list was Me And White Supremacy by Layla Saad which explores the theme of white privilege and helps readers understand how to stop inflicting damage to those of another race.   

Natives: Race And Class In The Ruins Of Empire by the BAFTA and MOBO award-winning musician Akala also hit number eight in the best sellers list. 

The novel, which was published in 2018, follows the encounters that shaped the author’s life, from coming face to face with racist teachers to realising his mother was white.

Speaking in 2018 about his book the author told ITV’s Peston on Sunday about the moment he realised his mother was a different race to him.

He said: ‘Well I think the idea of racial identity first occurred to me at that point. 

He added: ‘This comes back to the larger discussion in the way in which the British education system is very much stratified by class. 

‘We are not interested in turning kids in Easterhouse in Glasgow into rocket scientists and so this inevitably produces conflict with children who are too bright or get ideas above their station and so I sort of fit into that narrative and was put in this special needs group which isn’t very uncommon.

‘We used to have schools for the mentally subnormal, they then went into schools for the educationally subnormal.  

‘There’s a lot of good literature on post-war British education that deals with the conflict between the ambitions of incoming migrants to the country with the reality of a very heavily-classes stratified education system and that’s some of what I try to highlight in the book.’ 

Also making an appearance on the best sellers list was the 2019 novel Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, Queenie by Candace Carty-Williams and Sally Rooney’s Normal People.

MailOnline has contacted Amazon for comment.