Rankin casts out Walliams to claim seventh number one

Ian Rankin has brought David Walliams’ reign in the UK Official Top 50 number one spot to an end, after four weeks. Rather be the Devil (Orion), the 21st John Rebus title, leapfrogged The World’s Worst Children 2 (HarperCollins Children's) to swipe the top spot. It leapt 9.5% in volume week on week for the crime author’s seventh week in the overall number one position, and his first since September 2014.

Rather be the Devil has also become the fourth crime novel to hit the number one this year, after Val McDermid’s Out of Bounds (Sphere), Lee Child’s Night School (Bantam) and Paula Hawkins’ Into the Water (Doubleday).

In the wake of Father’s Day, paperback fiction jumped up the chart, with 16 titles in the overall top 20. Dilly Court's The Button Box (Harper) rose to third place, Harlan Coben’s Home (Arrow) hit the top 10 for the first time, and Lynda La Plante’s Hidden Killers (Simon & Schuster) boomeranged back up to sixth after falling to eighth a week ago. Emma Curtis’ One Little Mistake (Black Swan) was the highest new entry in 30th place, making it the third week the former Fiction Heatseekers number one has graduated into the Top 50.

The 1996 edition of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (Vintage) has shifted 20,002 copies since the television adaptation began on Channel 4. It was joined in the Top 50 last week by its 2017 tie-in edition, featuring star Elisabeth Moss on the cover. Combined, both editions sold 9,681 copies, enough to place inside the top 10.

Paula Hawkins’ Into the Water re-claimed the Original Fiction number one, shifting 4,163 copies to leapfrog both John Grisham’s Camino Island (Hodder & Stoughton) and Lee Child’s No Middle Name (Bantam). The psychological thriller has now spent six non-consecutive weeks in the Original Fiction top spot; the last book to do so was, of course, The Girl on the Train (Doubleday) in 2015.

While Joe Wicks’ Cooking for Family and Friends (Bluebird) held the Hardback Non-Fiction top spot for a fourth consecutive week, all the activity was going on below—Father’s Day gift titles How it Works: The Dad (Michael Joseph) and Five Lose Dad in the Garden Centre (Quercus) fell, allowing Brendan Cox’s Jo Cox: More in Common (Two Roads) to rise to third and Dan Toombs’ The Curry Guy (Quadrille) to rocket into fourth place.  

In Paperback Non-Fiction, Michael Mosley and Tanya Borowski’s The Clever Guts Diet (Short) returned to the number one spot for a fifth non-consecutive week, defeating Ben Macintyre’s SAS Rogue Heroes (Viking), which was also leapfrogged by Jo Scarratt-Jones’ Eat Well for Less: Family Feasts on a Budget (BBC). While Wicks’ million-copy-bestseller Lean in 15 (Bluebird) racked up a 78th week in the top 20, Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography (Elliott & Thomson_ scored its 48th—nearly a year on from being Waterstones Book of the Month in August 2016.

David Walliams may have lost his overall number one position, but he still achieved his 97th week as the Children’s number one. Six Walliams titles hit the Children’s and YA Fiction top 8, with a combined 329 weeks spent in the chart between them. But there were new entries, including Karen McManus’ YA mystery One of Us is Lying (Penguin) and David Baddiel’s AniMalcolm (HarperCollins Children's) which both hit the top 20 for the first time.