You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Six weeks in a row for chart-topping Walliams
David Walliams' Awful Auntie (HarperCollins) retains pole position at the top of the official UK Top 50 for a record-breaking sixth week selling another 31,012 copies in the seven days ending 1st November. Volume sales were down 13% week on week but the bestseller has yet to sell less than 30,000 copies per week since its publication on the 25th of September.
Six weeks for the children's novel marks the longest tally for a single edition of a children's book at the top of the chart for over a decade. No single edition has had a longer run since the hardback of J K Rowling's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Bloomsbury) topped the chart for seven weeks back in the summer of 2003.To date Awful Auntie has sold 247,855 copies.
C J Sansom, Peter James, Lynda Bellingham and Alfie Deyes all retained their positions at the top of the Fiction and Non-fiction charts respectively in a quiet release week, which saw just one new entry into the Top 50 chart inside the Top 20. The World of Ice and Fire (HarperVoyager), George R R Martin's sprawling history and folklore of the fictional continents of Westeros and Essos upon which the author's dynastic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire takes place, was a new entry at number eight selling 13,187 copies. In value terms, it was the fiction top seller worth nearly £200,000 to booksellers last week. By volume, C J Sansom's Lamentation (Mantle) retained top spot in original Fiction for a second week selling 16,338 copies. Recent new entries for Bernard Cornwell's The Empty Throne (HarperCollins, 10,286 copies) and John Grisham's legal thriller Gray Mountain (Hodder, 7,327 copies) remain in the top five at three and four respectively.
An abandoned street cat providing comfort and companionship might sound like a familiar non-fiction tale courtesy of James Bowen and his street cat Bob but it actually forms the central premise of Rachel Wells fiction debut Alfie the Doorstep Cat (HarperCollins), which climbs from 14 to eighth place in Original Fiction selling 4,203 copies up 76% week on week in volume terms. Ahead of a new full-length instalment of the Kingkiller Chronicles, fans snapped up 3,936 copies of Patrick Rothfuss' short novella The Slow Regard of Silent Things (Gollancz), which was the chart's other new entry at number 10.
Meanwhile, on the Mass Market fiction chart, Peter James scores a second week at the top with his latest thriller Want You Dead (Macmillan). Sales jumped 21% week on week selling 20,530 copies. For a third week in a row, the standard edition of Gillian Flynn's thriller Gone Girl (Phoenix) remains at number two selling 15,582 copies last week. Combined with the film tie-in, the novel sold just under 28,000 copies.
Christmas-themed fiction also proved popular at the top of the chart with robust sales for Katie Flynn's A Family Christmas (Arrow) jumping seven places to number three and selling nearly 13,000 copies (from 8,232 the previous week) and Carole Matthews' The Christmas Party (Sphere) also gained in volume shifting an additional 10,250 copies despite being a non-mover at eight.
In Hardback Non-fiction, the late actress Lynda Bellingham's poignant memoir There's Something I've Been Dying to Tell You (Coronet) remained at number one selling 29,258 copies. Guinness World Records 2015 (GWR, 16,729 copies) moved up one place to number two with sales gaining 15% week on week. Sustained publicity and a full week of sales for Russell Brand's Revolution (Century) helped bolster its chart position in its second week on the chart. The autobiographical polemic jumped into the top three with sales lifting 120% on its debut week and selling 15,172 copies.
Last week's half term propelled the Natural History Museum's Souvenir Guide (NHM) back into a largely unchanged top 10 Non-fiction paperback list. Alfie Deyes retained number one for a seventh non-consecutive week with the Pointless Book (Blink) also gaining on its previous week's sales performance selling 10,742 copies, up 29% week on week.
Overall, 3.5m book sales registered through Nielsen BookScan last week for a combined value of £28.8m, up 1.5% on week on week but down 5.2% on the same week last year.
