The World's Worst Children 2 straight in at number one

David Walliams' The World's Worst Children 2 (HarperCollins Children's) has rocketed into the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, shifting 58,481 copies for £423,282—making it the fastest-selling book of the year to date, beating his own World Book Day title Blob. This is the comedian-turned-author's 27th week in the top spot overall—and his 14th in the last year. It is also HarperCollins' 101st week to claim the Children's number one—93 of which are courtesy of Walliams.

The World's Worst Children 2 is just a scant 1.4% down in volume on its predecessor's first week, which went on to sell 540,066 copies in total and spent two weeks in the overall number one spot in May and June 2016. Walliams' titles have a tendency to shoot up in volume on their second week in the charts—the original World's Worst Children jumped 8% week on week after its launch and his Christmas number one The Midnight Gang leapt a whopping 32%. Given this week is half term, expect The World's Worst Children 2 to crest 60,000 copies in the next chart.

A new Walliams flying off the shelves always gives the author's ever-growing backlist a boost—Grandpa's Great Escape hit 34th place; unsurprisingly, the original collection of short stories crept back into the Top 50, and perennial hit Gangsta Granny, which has racked up 219 consecutive weeks in the Children's Fiction top 20, slipped in in 48th place. It's not just his own books—Walliams' HarperCollins stablemate and fellow comedian David Baddiel saw his 2016 title The Person Controller soar into 11th place, jumping 1,399% week on week. A Sainsbury's deal offering The World's Worst Children 2 for £6.99 and The Person Controller for free may have helped.

Michael Connelly's The Wrong Side of Goodbye (Orion) said hello to second place, with 16,445 copies sold— just 42,036 below Walliams. He knocked Shari Lapena's The Couple Next Door (Corgi) off the Mass Market Fiction top spot and consigned the previous number one, The Clever Guts Diet (Short), to third place.

Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo's Kickstarter-funded Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls (Particular) spent a fifth week in the Hardback Non-Fiction number one—the longest consecutive run since Jamie Oliver's Super Food Family Classics (Michael Joseph) in July 2016. While the snap election's very nature prevents it from having too much impact on the charts—the bestselling politics book last week was Matthew D'Ancona's Post-Truth (Ebury)— two anti-EU books feature in last week's Hardback Non-Fiction top 10; Douglas Murray's The Strange Death of Europe (Bloomsbury) in second place and Yanis Varoufakis' Adults in the Room (The Bodley Head) in sixth.

The beautiful weather last week did no favours to the print market—at 2.7 million books sold, volume hit a low for 2017 to date, and both volume and value fell 5.6% on the week before.