Claire Douglas’ The Wrong Sister boomerangs back to the top

Claire Douglas won her second Official UK Top 50 number one last week as The Wrong Sister (Penguin) reclaimed the top spot after a brief, one-week interlude. Douglas’ 10th novel is now on a four-week hot streak as the number one paperback in Mass-Market Fiction (MMF), shifting a further 15,504 copies through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market. It is tracking well ahead of her previous novel, The Woman Who Lied (Penguin), which was released in paperback on 6th July 2023, with sales currently 21% up after four weeks in the market.

Tom Hindle trailed Douglas by roughly 3,000 copies as his Waterstones’ Thriller of the Month for July, Murder on Lake Garda (Penguin Cornerstone), landed in second place above previous chart-topper, The Majorly Awkward BFF Dramas of Lottie Brooks by Katie Kirby (Puffin). Kirby may have lost the overall lead, but she retained her position atop the Children’s and Young Adult chart for the second week in a row and became the bestselling book among independent retailers.

A paperback edition of Robodog by David Walliams and illustrated by Adam Stower (HarperCollins) was the highest new entry in Children’s and YA, fetching 2,794 copies for 12th place. Meanwhile, the highest new entrant for Children’s Preschool titles was a lift-the-flap/pop-up board book from Julia Donaldson and illustrator Axel Scheffler, Happy Birthday, Gruffalo! (Macmillan Children’s), which popped up in second place with 2,755 copies sold. At the halfway point of 2024, Donaldson was named the UK’s bestselling author for the first half of 2024 and looks likely to claim the title for a fifth time.

A new edition of a beloved novel by Colleen Hoover entered the top 50 in 25th place in the lead-up to the cinematic release of “It Ends with Us” on 9th August starring Blake Lively, who has sent Marvel fans into a frenzy this week by appearing as Lady Deadpool in the summer blockbuster “Deadpool & Wolverine”. All up, Hoover held three spots in both the main chart and MMF chart with two editions of It Ends with Us and It Starts with Us (all Simon & Schuster) combining to sell more than 22,000 copies.

The Book of Everything — a team-up between Hollywood actor Keanu Reeves and author China Miéville from Penguin Cornerstone — debuted at 37th in the top 50 and at second in Original Fiction (OF) with 4,576 copies sold. New Zealand-born author Sarah A Parker’s debut romantasy, When the Moon Hatched (HarperVoyager) returned to number one in OF last week after previously topping the chart in the seven-day period ending 15th June.

While Pinch of Nom creators Kate and Kay Allinson didn’t budge from the top spot in Hardback Non-Fiction, Miriam Margolyes finally unseated Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge (Vintage) in Paperback Non-Fiction after chasing it for several weeks. The paperback edition of Oh Miriam! (John Murray) sold 7,292 copies, bringing the total lifetime sales of her second memoir to more than 115,000 copies. The paperback edition of her first memoir, This Much Is True (John Murray), crowned the chart for eight weeks through July and August 2022.

Following the shock announcement on 21st July that President Joe Biden would be backing Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee, there was some renewed interest from UK readers in Harris’ memoir The Truths We Hold (Vintage). Prior to last week, this year’s sales of the paperback edition had been trickling by in single digits, but it made a substantial jump last week to 183 copies.  

However, the Republican vice-presidential candidate J D Vance has enjoyed a more substantial boost to his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy (William Collins), over the past fortnight. Though it fell to 18th, it remained among the top 20 paperback non-fiction titles while also hanging on to a top three position in Audible’s top 20 audiobooks.

The value of the TCM contracted to £31.3m last week — a 2% drop on the previous week — as 3.6 million books exchanged hands. The seven-day period was not far off the same period last year, which totalled £32.3m off the back of 3.7 million books sold.