Fiction: Lee and Andrew Child notch up a third week at the top with Better Off Dead

Lee and Andrew Child’s Better Off Dead (Penguin) held the Mass-Market Fiction number one for a third straight week, as Bella Mackie’s How to Kill Your Family (The Borough Press) sliced into second place, selling 12,544 copies in its first week in paperback. Mackie’s fiction début, which has sold more than 50,000 copies in hardback, was the highest new entry in the Top 50, in third. Santa Montefiore’s The Distant Shores (S&S) also débuted in the Mass-Market Fiction top 10.

Grace D Li’s Portrait of a Thief (Coronet) zipped into the Original Fiction number one, closely followed by Douglas Stuart’s Young Mungo (Picador). The two hardback titles sold within 225 copies of each other, scoring fifth and sixth in the Top 50. There was a flurry of new entries into the category chart, with Wilbur Smith and Tom Harper’s Storm Tide (Zaffre), Beth O’Leary’s The No-Show (Quercus), Carrie Hope Fletcher’s With This Kiss (HQ) and David Baldacci’s Dream Town (Macmillan) barrelling into the top 10.