Fiction: Osman runs on as Coles’ cosy crime débuts

Richard Osman’s The Man Who Died Twice (Penguin) booked in for a fifth week as the Official UK Top 50 number one, selling 23,224 copies. Osman’s cosy crime sequel held steady against the début of two new big fiction titles—Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You (Faber) and Reverend Richard Coles’ Murder Before Evensong (W&N).

The Man Who Died Twice is already the sixth-bestselling book of the year, now potentially within a week of leapfrogging its predecessor The Thursday Murder Club in third place, and has notched up the longest consecutive streak in the top spot since David Walliams and Tony Ross’ Megamonster (HarperCollins) across summer 2021. No Adult Fiction title has reigned for five weeks or more since Dan Brown’s Origin (Corgi) in summer 2018—even The Thursday Murder Club’s paperback, now within 10,000 units of the million-units mark, had its streak interrupted by E L James’ Freed (Arrow) in early summer 2021.

Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You débuted in the over-all number one upon its hardback publication last September, but its paperback had to settle for the runner-up spot in both the Top 50 and the Mass-Market Fiction chart. Normal People (2018) famously soared up the chart during the Nielsen BookScan sales blackout over Lockdown 1.0, as the BBC Three adaptation entertained a quarantined nation. Last year, Beautiful World, Where Are You’s hardback notched up Rooney’s best weekly volume to date (outside lockdown weeks), topping the charts at 46,065 copies. The hardback is easily Rooney’s bestseller in the format, well out-selling even Normal People—which, long before its promotion to lockdown cultural touchstone, exploded in sales following its Waterstones Book Prize of the Year win. However, the paperback, a slower starter than the hardback, could be a consistent seller across the summer.

In public-figure-writes-cosy-crime-title news, Coles’ Murder Before Evensong (W&N) débuted atop Original Fiction, trailing Rooney in the Top 50 by just 571 copies.

Elsewhere in Original Fiction, Joanna Quinn’s The Whalebone Theatre (Fig Tree), Mark Billingham’s The Murder Book (Little,Brown), M J Arlidge’s Cat and Mouse (Orion) and Fern Britton’s The Good Servant (HarperCollins) thundered into the top 10. Heather Morris returned to Mass-Market Fiction with Three Sisters (Zaffre)—her The Tattooist of Auschwitz spent 17 weeks in the chart top spot across late 2018 and early 2019.