Fiction: Osman reigns again
Richard Osman’s The Bullet that Missed (Viking) held its runner-up spot in the Top 50 to Guinness World Records 2023 (GWR). The newest Thursday Murder Club hardback was also lagging behind 2021’s The Man Who Died Twice, with last week’s sales roughly 10,000 copies down on its predecessor a year ago. However, The Bullet that Missed’s blockbuster first-week sales of more than 127,000 copies have stood it in good stead—it’s still just ahead (by 4%) of The Man Who Died Twice’s volume at the same point in 2021.
The Bullet that Missed claimed the Original Fiction number one for an eighth week in total, with Bob Mortimer’s The Satsuma Complex (S&S) rolling into second place as Colleen Hoover’s It Starts with Us (S&S) slipped to third.
Its predecessor It Ends with Us swiped the Mass-Market Fiction number one for a 14th time in total, with the chart returning an identical top seven on the week before. Osman’s two previous Thursday Murder Club titles
held second and third, with Bella Mackie’s springtime number one How to Kill Your Family (The Borough Press), perhaps benefiting from readers experiencing fraught festive planning, maintaining fourth.
