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Star Wars: Rogue One rockets into the top spot
Matt Forbeck’s Star Wars: Rogue One (Egmont) has knocked Lee Child’s Night School (Bantam) off the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, shifting a stellar 57,949 copies according to Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market. The novelisation of the film, released on DVD and Blu-Ray last week, is the second film tie-in to hit the top spot in the last three weeks, after Ian Nathan’s Inside the Magic: The Making of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (HarperCollins) crested the chart at the beginning of April.
Night School had to settle for second place, but its volume jumped a hefty 28% week on week, to 46,344 copies—Child’s biggest single week volume for a paperback title. After two weeks, the Jack Reacher prequel is already the eighth bestselling fiction title of the year to date. It also gripped the Mass Market Fiction top spot for a second week, the author’s 24th week in the category top spot.
John Connolly’s A Game of Ghosts (Hodder & Stoughton) held the Original Fiction top spot for a second week, with another Star Wars title, Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn (Century), the highest new entry in third.
Mary Berry kept her Hardback Non-Fiction title with Mary Berry Everyday (BBC) for a sixth non-consecutive week, the longest run for any Hardback Non-Fiction book since Jamie Oliver’s Super Food Family Classics (Michael Joseph) in July 2016. But James Wong’s How to Eat Better (Mitchell Beazley) made gains, jumping into the Top 50 for the first time and finishing in second place in the Hardback Non-Fiction chart.
Yuval Noah Harari reclaimed his Paperback Non-Fiction number one after a fortnight’s hiatus, with Sapiens (Vintage). Both his debut and follow-up Homo Deus charted in the overall top 20.
Peppa Pig really capitalised on Easter weekend; 2013 title Peppa’s Easter Egg Hunt (Ladybird) soared into fifth place, with 2016’s Peppa Pig: Happy Easter jumping 60 places to 28th, and Peppa Goes to London hitting 39th. Jay Asher's YA title Thirteen Reasons Why (Penguin), originally published eight years ago, got a Netflix-adaptation-release boost into the Top 50, hitting 27th place.
The market's overall value was marginally down week on week, by 2.1%—but volume was up 2%. Year on year, volume leapt 10%, its biggest rise since mid-December 2016, and value posted a 6.9% bump, its sixth consecutive year-on-year increase.
