Lee Child elbows Joe Wicks off the top spot for 14th number one

Lee Child has claimed his 14th number one as Make Me (Bantam), the 20th Jack Reacher novel, swiped the top spot from Joe Wicks’ Lean in 15 (Bluebird).

Make Me sold 34,662 copies for £131,652, according to Nielsen Bookscan’s Total Consumer Market.

This is Child’s third springtime number one in a row, after Never Go Back (Bantam) topped the chart across April and May 2014 and Personal (Bantam) in April 2015. Make Me has already taken the Original Fiction number one three times in hardback, but was denied the overall top spot last autumn by Jamie Oliver’s Everyday Super Food (Michael Joseph). However, Make Me shifted a robust 175,657 copies over the Christmas period, a 9.8% increase in volume on Child’s previous hardback, Personal. If Make Me experiences a similar boost in paperback, it could become Child's second-bestselling title to date.

Make Me also took the Mass Market Fiction number one from Mark Billingham’s Time of Death (Sphere), and becomes the first paperback fiction title to take the overall number one since James Patterson’s 14th Deadly Sin (Arrow) in August 2015. Its volume is the highest since the bestselling title of last year, E L James’ Grey (Arrow), topped the Mass Market Fiction top 20 in July 2015.

Though Lean in 15 dropped to second place, Wicks’ volume increased 4,056 copies on the week before and topped the Paperback Non-Fiction chart for a 13th consecutive week. The debut cookbook, now at 556,665 copies sold total, is just 24,000 copies away from becoming one of the top 50 bestselling non-fiction titles since records began.

Alfie Deyes' new entry The Scrapbook of My Life (Blink) took third place, with 15,352 copies sold. Roald Dahl’s World Book Day title The Great Mouse Plot (Puffin) slipped to fourth place, holding the Children’s number one for a third week, and beating Julie Heaberlin’s psychological thriller Black-Eyed Susans (Michael Joseph) by just 76 copies.

Wilbur Smith and Tom Cain’s Predator (HarperCollins) knocked L S Hilton’s Maestra (Zaffre) off the Original Fiction number one, for a 23rd week at the top for the veteran author.

After the BBC TV adaptation’s conclusion on Easter Sunday, John le Carre’s The Night Manager (Penguin) squeaked back into the Top 50, in 49th place.