Fiction: Grisham returns to the Original Fiction pole
Richard Osman’s The Man Who Died Twice (Penguin) storms into a fourth week atop the UK Official Top 50, selling 26,121 copies. With 144,059 copies sold in total, the paperback crime title is already the fourth-bestselling Adult Fiction title of 2022 to date, and is within 1,500 copies of swiping third place from Colleen Hoover’s Ugly Love (S&S).
The Jubilee Bank Holiday weekend was great for the print market, which, after a bombastic start to 2022, has had a rather sluggish spring, as energy prices rise and the cost-of-living crisis looms, compared to 2021. However, the last fortnight has seen sales bounce upwards, with last week 4% up in volume and 7.2% up in value on the same week last year. Naturally, the Children’s category had an excellent half-term, with volume soar-ing 11.8% and value 13.8% against last year.
But Adult Fiction also continued its healthy streak. The category’s volume was 7.4% up year on year, with value rocketing 15.6%.With Osman thundering to a 35th week in the Mass-Market Fiction number one, in just over a year on the paperback shelves, the category chart’s top three stayed the same week on week, with Hoover’s TikTok-boosted It Ends with Us (S&S), still the bestselling title of the year to date overall through BookScan, and Bella Mackie’s How to Kill Your Family (The Borough Press) joining The Man Who Died Twice at the top. Jeffrey Archer’s Over My Dead Body (HarperCollins) bounced up to fourth place, with former President Bill Clinton and James Patterson’s The President’s Daughter (Penguin) débuting in fifth and Alex Michaelides’ follow-up to The Silent Patient, The Maidens (W&N), scoring 20th.
John Grisham’s Sparring Partners (Hodder) landed a blow on the Original Fiction chart number one in its first week on sale, selling 6,079 copies. This is the author’s first category chart pole since summer 2017, with Camino Island—in contrast, his Mass-Market Fiction pole record has flourished in the meantime, with long runs in both 2017 and 2018 and a five-week streak for The Reckoning across summer 2019. In total, he’s notched up 23 weeks in the Original Fiction top spot since records began, across nine different books, and 52 weeks in Mass-Market Fiction.
J M Miro’s Ordinary Monsters (Bloomsbury), Anthony Horowitz’s With a Line to Kill (Jonathan Cape) and M W Craven’s The Botanist (Constable) débuted in Original Fiction, with the previous week’s number one, Lucinda Riley’s The Murders at Fleat House (Macmillan), dropping to third and Bonnie Garmus’ Lessons in Chemistry (Doubleday) holding firm in second.
