Hawkins holds off Walliams in battle for number one

Paula Hawkins has withstood a robust first week challenge from David Walliams, as The Girl on the Train (Black Swan) rolled into the Official UK Top 50 number one spot for a third consecutive week. According to Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market, Hawkins’ thriller sold 61,401 copies for £261,050, just 2,089 copies more than Walliams’ short story collection The World’s Worst Children (HarperCollins Children’s).

The Girl on the Train mass market paperback has now surpassed the 200,000 copies sold mark—over a third what it has sold in hardback—and has become the bestselling fiction title of the year to date, leapfrogging Lee Child’s Make Me (Bantam) and Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins (Black Swan). That means that Transworld, impressively, holds 2016’s top three bestselling fiction titles. The Girl on the Train is also the overall bestselling title released in 2016 so far, given that Joe Wicks’ Lean in 15 (Bluebird) was published in the last week of December 2015.

Despite missing out on the top spot, Walliams achieved his best-ever first-week sales, of 59,312 copies sold, the highest for a Children’s title since Mog’s Christmas Calamity (HarperCollins Children’s) in November 2015. The World’s Worst Children also decisively beat The Girl on the Train in value, bringing in £157,832 more than the paperback thriller. It swiped the Children’s number one from Liz Pichon’s Super Good Skills (Almost…) (Scholastic), for Walliams’ 60th week atop the chart. And next week could see the comedian-turned-author triumph on the overall chart; his last title, Grandpa’s Great Escape, increased 34% in volume in its second week on sale.

With the occasional rare appearance of sunshine between thunderstorms last week, the prospect of summer prompted a flurry of healthy-eating cookbook purchases, with new releases such as the Hairy Dieters’ Fast Food (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) and Alice Liveing’s Clean Eating Alice (Harper Thorsons) joining Top 50 re-entries Dr Michael Mosley’s The 8-Week Blood Sugar Diet (Short) and Charlotte Crosby’s Live Fast Lose Weight (Headline). The Hairy Dieters, who shifted 17,506 copies of their fourth healthy eating title last week, ended Joe Wicks’ 18-week run at the top of the Paperback Non-Fiction chart, despite Lean in 15 selling an extra 155 copies week on week and surpassing 700,000 copies sold to date.

Peter James’ Love You Dead (Macmillan) took the Original Fiction number one, shifting 9,134 copies, the highest for a title at the top of the chart since L S Hilton’s Maestra (Zaffre) in mid-March.

Father’s Day is approaching, heralded by the release of the now-inevitable Ladybird Books for Grown-Ups tie-in: How it Works: The Dad (Michael Joseph) hit 14th place in its first week on sale, shifting 8,695 copies. This was lower than How it Works: The Mum’s first week sale of 11,112 copies in February, but higher than series frontrunner How it Works: The Husband’s 5,516 in October 2015. The Husband has now sold over 320,000 copies, and The Mum 126,000. In total the series has made exactly £10m for Penguin since the original crop was released ahead of Christmas 2015.

How it Works: The Dad also took the Hardback Non-Fiction number one from Chris Packham’s Fingers in the Sparkle Jar (Ebury). For dads unaffected by nostalgia-driven spoof titles, Alex Ferguson’s Leading (Hodder & Stoughton) sneaked into the Top 50 in 49th place, following its paperback release, and Anthony Horowitz’s James Bond novel Trigger Mortis (Orion) sold exactly 3,999 copies to chart 40th.