Hislop's 'Cartes Postales' puts stamp on bestseller chart

Victoria Hislop has posted her 14th number one, with Cartes Postales from Greece (Headline) selling 22,798 copies for £94,497. The Richard and Judy Book Club pick is Hislop’s fourth straight title to go to the top spot.

Cartes Postales from Greece also swipes the Mass Market Fiction chart—no Hislop paperback has taken the category top 20 number one without also clinching the overall one—becoming the first non-crime title to take the pole since Phillippa Gregory’s Three Sisters, Three Queens (Simon & Schuster) in late March.

While Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (Sphere) slipped to second place, another Richard and Judy title was in third—though from the summer tranche; Shari Lapena’s The Couple Next Door (Corgi) has spent 17 weeks inside the overall top 10.

From the latest Book Club, announced a week ago, Sandrone Dazieri’s Kill the Father (Simon & Schuster) hit 18th place, with 7,050 copies sold; Ruth Hogan’s The Keeper of Lost Things (Two Roads) went to 21st. selling 6,967 copies, Fiona Neill’s The Betrayals (Penguin) was in 27th place and Ali Land’s Good Me Bad Me (Penguin) in 28th. Danzieri’s success follows in the footsteps of fellow translated crime writer Samuel Bjork, who was the third-bestselling author of the Winter 2017 tranche with I'm Travelling Alone. Rachel Rhys’ Dangerous Crossing (Black Swan) sailed into the Fiction Heatseekers number one, just eight places away from the Top 50.

Gregory’s new hardback The Last Tudor (Simon & Schuster) was first into the Original Fiction chart, with 13,324 copies sold—the second-highest opening week for any hardback fiction this year, after Paula Hawkins’ Into the Water (Doubleday).

For a fourth week running, both non-fiction number ones stayed the same: Nadiya’s British Food Adventure (Michael Joseph) for Hardback Non-Fiction and Joshua Levine’s Dunkirk (William Collins) for Paperback Non-Fiction. However, Nadiya’s British Food Adventure is shifting double what second-placed hardback Joe Wicks’ Cooking for Family and Friends (Bluebird) is, while Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (Vintage) is fewer than 400 copies away from toppling Dunkirk in the paperback chart.

In Children’s, Cursed Child and Fiona Watt and Rachel Wells’ That’s Not My Unicorn (Usborne) held their number one spots. Nicola Yoon’s Everything, Everything (Corgi Children's) bounded up the Children’s and YA Fiction, as the buzz for its film adaptation grows, hitting seventh place.

The print market continued to post healthy figures—despite a 4.3% drop in volume week on week, it surpassed 100 million books sold for the year to date, keeping pace with 2016 (and two weeks earlier than 2015). Despite the hardback edition of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child shifting 168,389 copies this time last year, volume and value were only down year on year by 1.3% and 1% respectively, with average selling price 0.3% up.