The Girl on the Train is tops again, steams towards one million mark

The Girl on the Train (Black Swan) has run away with the Official UK Top 50 number one spot for a second week, selling 89,852 copies for £347,113, according to Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market. This is a 51.9% increase in volume on its first week at the top.

Paula Hawkins’ psychological thriller is currently the fastest-selling fiction title of 2016 and the fifth bestselling overall, after fewer than two weeks on sale. In the paperback fiction chart for the year to date, it is already in third place, only a handful of copies behind Transworld stablemates Lee Child’s Make Me (Bantam) and Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins (Black Swan). Incidentally, the hardback is currently the biggest-selling hardback fiction title of 2016, despite being released in January 2015. The paperback’s sales have now pushed the combined volume across all the title’s print editions past the 900,000-copies-sold mark, with the one-million-milestone just around the corner.

The Girl on the Train is also now the fastest-selling Crime, Thriller & Adventure paperback since Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol (Corgi) in 2010. Hawkins’ crime début and Brown’s third Robert Langdon title have some interesting parallels—The Girl on the Train broke The Lost Symbol’s record for number of weeks as Original Fiction number one last year, and both have achieved the extremely rare feat of hitting the overall number one spot in both hardback and paperback. It should be taken into account, though, that The Lost Symbol was Brown’s follow-up to second-bestselling-book-of-all-time The Da Vinci Code (Corgi), which racked up 50 non-consecutive weeks as the overall number one. In comparison, Hawkins’ last title The Reunion (Arrow), written under the pseudonym Amy Silver, has sold 611 copies to date.

All the Richard & Judy Summer Book Club titles charted inside the top 30, except for Jackie Copleton’s A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding (Windmill), which hit 69th and took the Fiction Heatseeker top spot. John Grisham’s Rogue Lawyer (Hodder) displaced Joe Wicks’ Lean in 15 (Bluebird) to take second place, selling 17,643 copies, and Dawn French’s According to Yes (Penguin) jumped to fifth. William Boyd’s Sweet Caress (Bloomsbury) climbed to ninth, making four out of the eight Richard & Judy titles inside the top 10.

Chris Packham’s Fingers in the Sparkle Jar (Ebury) took the Hardback Non-Fiction number one, outselling Louise Parker’s The Louise Parker Method: Lean for Life (Mitchell Beazley), in second, by just 190 copies. S J Parris’ Conspiracy (HarperCollins) swiped the Original Fiction top spot, a first for the author. Parris is the fifth author to début in the Original Fiction number one this year, after Julian Barnes, L S Hilton, John Connolly and David Baldacci all hit the top spot for the first time.

Liz Pichon’s latest Tom Gates title Super Good Skills (Almost) (Scholastic) climbed to 10th place, holding the Children’s number one for a second week. This is the author’s 10th week atop the chart in total.