Out of Bounds trespasses into second week at number one

Val McDermid’s Out of Bounds (Sphere) has maintained a steely grip on the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, topping the charts for a second week in a row, according to Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market. The crime title sold 17,130 copies for £67,978, a 28% jump in volume on its first week in the top spot.

Louise Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard (Faber & Faber) climbed one place to second, boosted by its BBC adaptation, and Susan Lewis’ The Moment She Left (Arrow) leapt 12 places to claim third, for the first all-fiction top three since October 2016 (when two of those three were The Girl on the Train).  

It was quite the week for female fiction authors—Sarah Pinborough’s Behind Her Eyes (HarperCollins) swiped the Original Fiction number one from Gregg Andrew Hurwitz’s The Nowhere Man (Michael Joseph), outselling the Costa Book Award winner Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End (Faber & Faber) to claim Pinborough’s first top spot.

Ann Cleeves’ Cold Earth (Pan) rose to sixth, the author’s highest ranking to date, and Joanna Cannon’s The Trouble with Goats and Sheep (The Borough Press) seems to have pulled off a Missing, Presumed—like her HarperCollins stablemate Susie Steiner, Cannon’s Richard and Judy Book Club pick is emerging as the winter tranche’s most consistent seller. It is the only one yet to fall out of the overall top 10, after five weeks on sale.

However, non-fiction was still a boys’ club. Deliciously Ella lost her Hardback Non-Fiction crown to a resurgent Tom Kerridge’s Dopamine Diet (Absolute)—a diet book recommending pork crackling beat a diet book recommending kale, who would have thought—and Joe Wicks once again scored the Paperback Non-Fiction number one with Lean in 15 (Bluebird): his 49th in total, more than any other author.

The current US number one, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (Penguin), rocketed in UK sales for a second week, cresting the Fiction Heatseekers chart and jumping 29% in volume. It is now just four places outside the Top 50. However, amongst 20th century political dystopian novel writers, Sinclair Lewis has dramatically leapfrogged Orwell, entering the Top 50 for the first time in 42nd place. It Can’t Happen Here (Penguin Classics), written in the 1930s, is about a belligerent, bombastic fascist dictator who is elected as US president after "promising wealth for all" and turns America into a totalitarian police state. At the time, Lewis claimed it was set in an alternate universe, although with recent events it's clear he obviously had a time machine.

All those dystopian fiction sales (or do we have to call it "current affairs" now?) help to boost the print market. In value, it was up 2.2% on the week before and squeaked 0.1% up year on year, earning an extra £19,000 on the same week in 2016.