Fiction: Cormoran Strike: Black at the top
Robert Galbraith’s The Ink Black Heart (Sphere) has thundered into the Official UK Top 50 number one spot, selling 50,738 copies in its first week on the shelves. Though this was 21% in volume down on Troubled Blood’s launch in September 2020, it’s the highest single week for any Adult Fiction title since Richard Osman’s The Man Who Died Twice (Penguin) launched nearly a year ago, on more than 114,000 units sold.
The Cormoran Strike titles have sold in shedloads since J K Rowling was unmasked as the pseudonymous author in summer 2013, and have spiked even further since the launch of the BBC TV series “Strike”, starring Tom Burke and Holliday Grainger in August 2017. The crime series has, in print, made the same switch the Harry Potter titles did circa 2001, and now the hardback edition sells more than the paperback. The Ink Black Heart’s predecessor, 2020’s Troubled Blood, is Galbraith’s bestseller in the format, on over 150,000 copies sold, around 25,000 copies more than its 2021 paperback.
The Ink Black Heart cruised into the Original Fiction number one, topping a chart with 11 new entries. R F Kuang’s Babel (HarperVoyager) scored second place, with Robert Harris’ Act of Oblivion, Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Carrie Soto is Back (both Hutchinson), Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait (Tinder Press) and Ann Cleeves’ The Rising Tide (Macmillan) debuting into the top six.
