Walliams' The Midnight Gang strikes number one again

David Walliams has clocked up his best-ever weekly volume with The Midnight Gang (HarperCollins Children's) for a second week running. The children’s novel increased 32% in volume on its record-breaking first three days on sale, selling 92,897 copies for £505,911 through Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market.

Despite Walliams' blockbuster figure, 2016 has been no ordinary year, and this is only the third highest weekly total for a children’s title, with Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (Little, Brown) shifting 847,886 copies in its first week and 168,389 in its second. Overall, The Midnight Gang beats the first week of Joe Wicks’ Lean in 15: The Shape Plan (Bluebird) by just 60 copies to secure the fourth-biggest-selling week of 2016 to date.

Not only is this Walliams’ 17th overall number one, it is HarperCollins’ 50th since BookScan records began. The last 20 of the publisher’s number one titles have all been Children’s books—the last adult title to go to number one was Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies (Fourth Estate) in May 2013.

Jeff Kinney’s Double Down (Puffin) held second place, but dipped 10% in volume to 56,698 copies. A week ago, Walliams and Kinney were 7,000 copies apart; now the gap has widened to 36,000 units. Let’s hope that doesn’t come up at their joint O2 event.

In third place, Lee Child’s new Jack Reacher title Night School (Bantam) sold 48,026 copies. The 21st book in the series, a prequel set in 1996 (if only we could make a joke about a Clinton being in the White House), bumped Jeffrey Archer’s This was a Man (Pan) off the Original Fiction top spot.

There were similar fisticuffs in the Mass Market Fiction top 20, where Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train (Black Swan) was denied a 25th week in the number one spot by David Baldacci’s The Last Mile (Pan), and Dilly Court’s The Christmas Card (Harper) hit second, pushing Hawkins’ paperback to fourth—below its own film tie-in—for the first time ever.

The Ladybird Books for Grown-Ups title How it Works: The Grandparent (Michael Joseph) is slowing climbing the chart, hitting 15th last week, but the rival Famous Five series’ crown jewel Five Go to Brexit Island (Quercus) had another sparkling week, shifting 16,332 copies—a neat 0.1% of all Remain voters—and rose to seventh place. The four Famous Five spoofs collectively sold 35,067 copies, beating the top four bestselling Ladybirds—but almost 50% of their total was earned by Five Go to Brexit Island, whereas the Ladybirds' sales are spread out more equally.