Fiction: Hoover vacuums up sales at the top

Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us (Simon & Schuster) boomeranged back into the Mass Market Fiction top spot for a second week in total, a week after Mark Billingham’s Rabbit Hole (Sphere) hopped over it. Hoover’s TikTok-boosted backlist vacuumed up the places in the chart, with Ugly Love and Verity both scoring top 20 spots. In TikTok boom news, Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (S&S) climbed into 10th, Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis (Sphere) jumped into 12th place and Elena Armas’ The Spanish Love Deception (S&S) made its debut in Mass Market Fiction, alongside the various YA hits in the Children’s and YA Fiction chart. 

However, Val McDermid’s 1979 (Sphere) was the highest new entry in Mass Market Fiction, with 10,926 copies sold, and Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Costa First Novel Award winner Open Water (Viking) also debuted, in 16th place. 

Elly Griffiths’ The Locked Room (Quercus) put a padlock on the Original Fiction number one, selling 6,129 copies in its first week on sale. Griffiths’ sales have been consistently growing with each new publication in her Dr Ruth Galloway series, with her standalone titles also performing more and more strongly each year. This is her first ever number one in either the Original Fiction or Mass Market Fiction top 20s.  

There was a flood of new entries into Original Fiction last week, with Rosie Andrews’ The Leviathan (Raven) conjuring up third place, Linwood Barclay’s Take Your Breath Away (HQ) puffing into fifth place, Jessie Keane’s Diamond (Hodder & Stoughton) polishing off seventh and Monica Ali’s Love Marriage (Virago) forming a union with eighth.