The Life of Pi, the Booker Prize winning novel published by Canongate books, has raced to the top of the best seller lists.
The novel, by Yann Martel, is the first hardback fiction book released by the Edinburgh-based independent publishers to reach the top of the British charts.
Sales of the book in the week of the prize announcement, according to sales monitor Nielsen BookScan, topped 7100, enough to make it the 19th best-selling book in Britain, and the highest selling work of fiction in hardback.
Waterstone's alone sold more than 1000 copies on the day after the announcement.
The sales, described as a ''quantum leap'' by David Graham, the managing director of Canongate, are more than double those of last year's Booker winner, The True History of the Kelly Gang, by Peter Carey.
Last night, Mr Graham said he was particularly pleased to have reached the top spot in the chart as The Life of Pi was up against other critically acclaimed books by Donna Tartt and James Patterson.
He said: ''It's been startling because all the booksellers I have been speaking to have said there is almost a glut of good fiction out at the moment.
''It is particularly pleasing because something like Donna Tartt's The Little Friend was already in the shops in large numbers, and we had to quickly release more books, which was a real challenge.''
Although there have been stock shortages of the book, Canongate has now promised that 159,500 copies will be in print and available for export by the end of next week.
Published in May, the sales of The Life of Pi had levelled out to just 150 per week before the Booker short list announcement - but jumped to 500-700 per week after it.
Mr Graham, said that the company expects to sell between 80,000 and 100,000 copies of the hardback in the UK alone.
When it is released in paperback next year, Mr Graham expects The Life of Pi to sell ''several 100,000 copies more.''
The sales will mean Canongate has achieved a record year, and it is hoped that Life of Pi will go on to achieve the sales of a million or more copies, a sale achieved by past Booker winners such as Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally, Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.
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