Fiction: Moriarty Falls on her feet at the summit
Liane Moriarty’s Apples Never Fall (Penguin) barrelled into the Official UK Top 50 number one spot, selling 19,598 copies in its first full week on sale. Débuting in fifth place a week ago, it led an all-new fiction top three, joined by John Grisham’s The Judge’s List (Hodder) and Paula Hawkins’ A Slow Fire Burning (Penguin).
Apples Never Fall notched up the Australian author’s first overall top spot in the UK; her Nine Perfect Strangers previously topped the Mass-Market Fiction top 20, in March 2019. Though Moriarty’s Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers have been adapted into international blockbuster TV series, 2013’s The Husband’s Secret is her bestseller through Nielsen BookScan’s TCM. Picked for that autumn’s Richard & Judy Book Club, the paperback has shifted 515,222 copies since publication.
Adult Fiction once again dominated the Top 50, with Margolyes’ former number one This Much is True (John Murray) and David Walliams and Adam Stower’s The World’s Worst Pets (HarperCollins) the only non-fiction and children’s titles to chart in the top 20. With the print market up 5.7% in volume and 6.2% in value against the same week last year, it was fiction really boosting the overall numbers, up 17.6% in volume and 22.3% in value. Children’s also had a strong week, rising 4% in volume and 3% in value year on year.
Delia Owens’ lockdown stalwart Where the Crawdads Sing (Corsair) returned to the Mass-Market Fiction top five, in the run-up to its film adaptation hitting UK cinemas on Friday—and, with cinemas one of the few places in the UK to be reliably air-conditioned, the source material could be about to see a huge boost in sales.
Lucy Clarke’s One of the Girls (HarperCollins) and Ken Follett’s Never (Pan) climbed the top 20 as Patricia Cornwall’s Autopsy (HarperCollins) and Rosie Goodwin’s A Daughter’s Destiny (Zaffre) débuted.
Jessie Burton’s The House of Fortune (Picador) leapfrogged Reverend Richard Coles’ Murder Before Evensong (W&N) to claim the Original Fiction number one, after missing out by the skin of its teeth in its launch week. It is Burton’s first top spot in the category chart since 2016’s The Muse, after The Miniaturist reigned for two weeks in 2014.
Rachel Smythe’s Lore Olympus Volume Two (Del Rey) bounced into third place, as Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s Heaven Official’s Blessing (Seven Seas) and Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Chatto & Windus) made their débuts.
