According to Yes24, a major bookstore in South Korea, the most sold book over the past ten years is Han Kang’s novel “The Boy is Coming.” In honor of World Book Day on April 23, Yes24 analyzed their bestsellers from January 1, 2016, to April 20, 2025, and found that “The Boy is Coming” ranked first overall in sales.
Han Kang’s other novel “The Vegetarian” ranked sixth, and “No Goodbye” ranked seventh. This means three of Han Kang’s novels made it into the top ten.
The second place went to the self-help book “Seino’s Teachings,” which topped the charts for 22 weeks. The third spot was taken by Lee Ki-joo’s essay “The Temperature of Language,” which spent 17 weeks at number one. Yuval Harari’s “Sapiens,” a steady seller, maintained a spot in the top ten of the humanities category for 360 weeks and claimed the fourth position.
Other books in the top ten included Seol Min-seok’s “Annals of the Joseon Dynasty” (5th), Jo Nam-joo’s novel “Kim Ji-young, Born 1982” (8th), Yoon Hong-keun’s humanities book “Self-Esteem Lesson” (9th), and Keigo Higashino’s novel “The Miracles of the Namiya General Store” (10th).
By category, Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” took the top spot in the socio-political field, Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” led in natural sciences, and Kim Seung-ho’s “The Nature of Money” was first in the economics and business category.