Fiction: Hoover remains on top by a margin
Colleen Hoover’s It Starts with Us (S&S) has held on to the UK Official Top 50 number one spot by the skin of its teeth, outselling Matthew Perry’s Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing (Headline) by just 738 copies.
Hoover defied the power of “Friends” to claim her fifth week atop the overall charts this year, with It Starts with Us and It Ends with Us once again notching up double fiction poles.
With the Original Fiction chart returning a blockbuster top five, featuring Lee and Andrew Child, Richard Osman, Ian Rankin and Bob Mortimer’s fiction début The Satsuma Complex (S&S) alongside It Starts with Us, eponymous new entry Garth Marenghi’s TerrorTome (Hodder Studio) settled for sixth place.
Sarah Morgan’s Snowed in for Christmas (HQ) held the runner-up spot for Mass Market Fiction, below It Ends with Us, as Danielle Steel’s Flying Angels (Pan) and Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (Faber) made their débuts. Keegan’s Booker-shortlisted novel is the Waterstones Fiction Book of the Month for November, selling 6,766 copies in paperback in its first week on sale. Despite missing out on the big prize, Small Things Like These has so far outsold Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Sort Of) quite handsomely, though the Booker winner’s paperback won’t be out until next April
