Prince Harry’s ‘SPARE’ opens with record breaking sales 

By Dana Malcolm 

Staff Writer 

#USA, January 15, 2023 –  “Once upon a time, this was going to be my forever home.  Instead it had proved to be just another brief stop. When my wife and I fled this place, in fear for our sanity and physical safety, I wasn’t sure when I’d ever come back.”

Some of the first words that greeted a record breaking 1.4 million people when they opened the pages of their newest literary acquisition, Spare, Prince Harry’s tell all memoir. The book on only the first day of publication recorded the highest ever nonfiction sales from the largest publishing house in the world with people lining up overnight to get their hands on it.

The sales count includes ebooks, audiobooks (narrated by Harry himself) and physical tomes in the US, Canada and UK alone. With a whopping two million physical copies printed in the US the book has already gone back to print to meet the voracious demand.

Gina Centrello, President and Publisher of the Random House Group, said , “While many books by public figures can be fairly categorized as ‘celebrity memoir,’ SPARE is not that. Vulnerable and heartfelt, brave and intimate, SPARE is the story of someone we may have thought we already knew, but now we can truly come to understand Prince Harry through his own words.  Looking at these extraordinary first day sales, readers clearly agree, SPARE is a book that demands to be read, and it is a book we are proud to publish.”

Separated into three parts headed ‘Out of the Night that Covers Me’, ‘Bloody but Unbowed’ and ‘Captain of My Soul’; 400 pages in print and 15 hours long in audio format the book has the potential to cause a serious stir among the Royal Family. Harry spared no one, exposing the deeply personal moments; both the hurtful and the beautiful. He did not even spare himself; in one instance he describes a conversation with a journalist where he described his life as living in a fishbowl, a phenomenon which he said no one but he and his brother could understand.

Informal and vulnerable it eschews the titles and rigidity often expected of royals, Willy, Pa, Mummy and Grandpa are the titles he uses to refer to his family throughout.  And in the first chapter as he walked to meet them again after his grandfather’s funeral, he had one thought, a refrain that lasts throughout the book.

“OK, Mummy- Here goes. Wish me luck.”