Fiction: Buyers return unanimous verdict for Court

Dilly Court’s Sunday’s Child (HarperCollins) toddled to the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, selling 21,180 copies and ending Richard Osman’s six-week run at the top. This is Court’s first overall number one and her first launch week sale above 20,000 units, though her first-week sales have been rising for some time. Since 2016, her Christmas titles have been notching up particularly stellar sales, but 2020 represented a real turning point—Court notched up her first Mass Market Fiction number one in early March, followed by two more in June and October. That month’s Rag-and-Bone Christmas was Court’s fastest seller until last week, and has sold just under 110,000 copies since release.  

Sunday’s Child is also the first Romance & Sagas title to hit the overall top spot since E L James’ Freed (Arrow) in June 2021, despite soaring sales for the genre so far in 2022. Against 2019, the category’s year-to-date volume is 85% up, to 4.02 million books sold, and nearly double in value, to £21m. Even against spring 2021—which, to reiterate, included the sales of a Fifty Shades of Grey title— Romance & Sagas is still a whopping 32% up in volume and 46% up in value. While TikTok’s influence is clear—Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us and Ugly Love (S&S), published in 2016 and 2014 respectively, top the category chart for 2022, with Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis (Little, Brown) in third—sagas have also soared in sales since the pandemic. Court’s February 2022 release, Runaway Widow, is a hefty 40,000 copies up on February 2019’s A Constant Heart, with Rosie Goodwin, Katie Flynn and Nancy Revell also seeing their spring sales rising on 2019. Perhaps the comfort-reading revolution of lockdown has now carried over into a year which in six short months have seen war break out, a refugee crisis and inflation at 9%.

Sophie Kinsella’s The Party Crasher (Penguin) also invited itself into the Mass Market Fiction top 20 in 11th place, with David Baldacci’s Mercy (Pan) throwing itself on 15th place and James Patterson’s The Noise (Penguin) thundering into 20th. 

Reverend Richard Coles’ Murder Before Evensong (W&N) charted in the Original Fiction pole for a third week running, with Karin Slaughter’s Girl, Forgotten (HarperCollins), Saara El-Arifi’s fantasy title The Final Strife (HarperVoyager) and Jane Fallon’s Just Got Real (Michael Joseph) débuted in the top five.