Prince Harry's Spare has become the United Kingdom's fastest selling non-fiction book ever, its publisher say, after days of TV interviews, leaks and a mistaken early release of the memoir containing intimate revelations about the British royal family.
Harry's book has garnered attention around the world with its disclosures about his personal struggles and its accusations about other royals, including his father King Charles III, stepmother Camilla, the Queen Consort, and elder brother Prince William.
"We always knew this book would fly but it is exceeding even our most bullish expectations," Transworld Penguin Random House Managing Director Larry Finlay said in a statement on Tuesday.
"As far as we know, the only books to have sold more in their first day are those starring the other Harry (Potter)."
Citing British sales figures, the publisher said it had sold 400,000 copies so far across hardback, e-book and audio formats.
"I like him, I like the royal family," said Lennon (59), the first and only person waiting to buy a copy from a Waterstone's bookshop in central London when it opened.
Despite the lack of queues, Waterstone's said there had been strong pre-orders for the memoir which currently ranks as the best-seller on Amazon's UK, US, Australian, German and Canadian websites.
In store, the book was being sold for £14 ($NZ26), half the usual price of £28.
"I know perhaps some of the things he says have rubbed different people the wrong way," Lai Jiang told Reuters after buying a copy in Singapore.
"And I know, definitely, there are a lot of people who say that he shouldn't come out and say the things he says, but I believe Harry should be given a chance to say what he wants to say."
Spare is the latest revelatory offering from Harry and his wife Meghan, known as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, since they stepped down from royal duties in 2020 and moved to California to forge a new life, and follows their Netflix documentary last month.
The royal family has not commented on the book or the interviews and is unlikely to do so.
Extracts from the book were leaked last Thursday when its Spanish language edition also went on sale by mistake in some bookshops in Spain.
Harry speaks of his grief and growing up after the death of his mother Princess Diana when he was just 12, his use of cocaine and other drugs to cope, how he killed 25 Taliban fighters while serving as a soldier in Afghanistan, and even how he lost his virginity.
He also reveals a heated row with William, the Prince of Wales and heir to the throne, saying his brother knocked him over, and how they had both begged his father not to marry Camilla, whom he wed in 2005.
In TV interviews ahead of the book launch, Harry has doubled down on his accusations that some royals, including Camilla and William, leaked stories to tabloid papers which had damaged either him or his wife Meghan in order to protect themselves or enhance their reputations.
"I think she (his mother Diana) would be heartbroken about the fact that William, his office, were part of these stories," he told Good Morning America (GMA).
In another interview with CBS show 60 minutes, he said Camilla had been a tabloid "villain" and needed to rehabilitate her image, which made her "dangerous".
"I don't regard her as an evil stepmother. I see someone who married into this institution and has done everything that she can to, you know, improve her reputation and her own image," he told GMA.
While Harry's revelations have dominated the headlines in the British media over the last week, the interest in his disclosures is far from universal.
"I was not planning to (read the book) as it so happens, or certainly not as an early priority," business minister Grant Shapps told Times Radio on Tuesday. "I've got one or two other things to do."
'Never let the light in'
"As Walter Bagehot said in the 19th century, never let the daylight in upon the magic, because if you do, the royal family become just like the hoi polloi, just like you and me," royal commentator Emily Andrews told Reuters.
"They cease to be special, they cease to be different. Then you wonder, 'Why is billions of taxpayer money going to fund this family that effectively act like the Kardashians?'."
The royal family have been here before, though.
In the 1990s, the breakdown of Charles' marriage to Princess Diana was played out in lurid colour in the pages of the British tabloid papers.
Both revealed extra-marital affairs in prime-time TV interviews, and in an authorised biography penned at about the same time, Charles bemoaned his unhappy childhood, with his mother Queen Elizabeth II cast as distant and his father, Prince Philip, as overbearing.
But media and public eventually moved on - although Harry argues poignantly in his book that he was given little help, at the age of 12, to come to terms with the death of his mother in a car crash in Paris - as she was herself fleeing the attentions of newspaper photographers.
Buckingham Palace can also take solace in the fact that the overwhelming majority of papers have sided with the royal family: unsurprising, given Harry and Meghan's views on the tabloids and the fact they have sued a number of publications.
"That said, you could argue it only reinforces the victim narrative from Harry and Meghan in America," a former aide said.
"The one thing the royal family has on its side is time. So it can play the long game - which Harry and Meghan maybe can't, in that they have to be telling their story now."
