Walliams and Bellingham top bestseller charts

David Walliams has retained pole position in the UK Official Top 50 for the fifth consecutive week, narrowly eclipsing Lynda Bellingham's memoir, in the week that the TV star lost her battle to cancer. 

Walliams' Awful Auntie (HarperCollins Childrens Books) sold 35,504 copies through Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market last week, just 420 units more than second-placed Bellingham's There's Something I've Been Dying to Tell You (Coronet). Awful Auntie has now chalked up the longest consecutive run atop the overall chart for a children's book since J K Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Bloomsbury) also recorded five straight weeks starting in July 2007.        

Bellingham's success at the tills occurred, of course, sadly in the week which she passed away and ITV broadcast her heartbreaking final appearance on "Loose Women". Her memoir may have lost out on the overall number one, but it easily topped Hardback Non-Fiction, besting Roy Keane and Roddy Doyle's The Second Half (Weidenfeld) by a whopping 21,000 units.    

Despite Walliams' and Bellingham's successes there was a dip in the market in a "mini-Super Thursday" week which had high-profile releases including Boris Johnson's The Churchill Factor (Hodder, 7,006 units sold), Russell Brand's Revolution (Century, 6,884) and Anthony Horowitz's Sherlock Holmes reboot, Moriarty (Orion, 5,757). Overall, sales through BookScan were £28.3m, 8.5% down week on week, but a shallower 2% drop in the same week in 2013. 

Yet, it was an excellent week for Pan Macmillan in adult fiction, with the publisher notching up both The Bookseller Original Fiction and Mass Market number ones, the first time it has ever accomplished that feat in the same week. C J Sansom scored his second-ever Original Fiction number one with the sixth title in the Tudor-set Shardlake series, Lamentation (Mantle). Lamentation shifted 25,779 units through the tills,  Sansom's best weekly total for a hardback, 200 copies better than the last Shardlake, Heartstone, sold in its first week of sale in September 2010. 

It has been an impressive hardback growth curve for Sansom's series. The first, Dissolution, sold just over 2,900 units when published in 2003, and each subsequent title has outstripped its predecessor by a factor of three, with Heartstone notching up sales of just over 134,000 hardbacks. All told, Sansom has been worth £18.3m to UK booksellers in the last 11 years. 

Meanwhile, Peter James'  10th DS Roy Grace novel Want You Dead (Macmillan) sold 16,931 copies, displacing James Patterson's Cross My Heart (Arrow, 15,025 units) as the Mass Market Fiction number one. This is James' fifth straight Grace title to hit the Mass Market top spot. Although, it should be noted once again that if combined, the original and film tie-in editions of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl (Phoenix) would comfortably be at the top of Mass Market Fiction with 30,052 copies sold.  

In Paperback Non-Fiction, YouTube star Alfie Deyes returns to number one for the sixth time in the last eight weeks. Deyes' The Pointless Book (Blink) sold 8,357 units, bumping Dave Myers and Si King's The Hairy Dieters: Good Eating (Weidenfeld, 7,941 copies sold) from the summit after two straight weeks.