Fiction: For whom the Bella Tolls—Mackie tops pile
Bella Mackie’s How to Kill Your Family (The Borough Press) has buried the competition, leapfrogging The Official Highway Code (TSO) and Lee and Andrew Child’s Better Off Dead (Penguin) to claim the Official UK Top 50 number one and the Mass-Market Fiction top spot. The author’s fiction début is already more than halfway to outselling its total hardback sales after just a week and a half on the shelves in paperback form.
Santa Montefiore’s The Distant Shores and Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us (both S&S) zipped into the overall top four, as fellow S&S titles Hoover’s Ugly Love and Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo joined them in the overall top 20. Romance burned strongly in the charts, as Mhairi McFarlane’s Mad About You (HarperCollins) débuted in the Top 50, amid the continuing presence of TikTok-boosted love stories.
Douglas Stuart’s Young Mungo (Picador) leapt into the Original Fiction number one, selling 6,671 copies. This was, incredibly, the author’s first category chart pole, as despite Shuggie Bain’s sales success, it was beaten to the top of the charts by Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club (Penguin). Stuart’s Booker-winning début bounced back into the Top 50 during its follow-up’s first full week on sale.
