Fiction: Sunday's best as Court tops the charts

The chart displayed its Sunday best as Dilly Court spent a second week in the Official UK Top 50 number one spot. Court’s Sunday’s Child (HarperCollins) sold 16,233 copies in its first full week on the shelves, in a stunning week for the Adult Fiction category. Adult Fiction titles performed a clean sweep of the top 12 overall bestsellers, with 1.2 million books shifted last week in total—a rise of 13.6% against the same week in 2021. Value, at £8.8m, was up an even more eye-watering 19.9%.

Fiction is still yet to see the pandemic reading bubble burst, while the TikTok boom has helped romance and fantasy sales spike. The latter has especially seen a rush on hardbacks, helping bump up value to its new dizzying height. Against even a particularly healthy period for fiction in 2021, spring 2022 has shifted over a million more books and brought in £15m extra.

Additionally, a Nielsen report earlier this spring found that e-book sales dropped to their lowest point since 2012 last year. With the digital market famously taking its biggest bite out of print fiction sales in the past few years, perhaps this resurgence also represents former Kindle owners returning to paperbacks.

Sunday’s Child led a top four identical to the week before, with Richard Osman’s The Man Who Died Twice (Penguin), Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us (S&S) and Bella Mackie’s How to Kill Your Family (The Borough Press) holding firm. Osman’s cosy crime sequel has now officially overtaken its predecessor’s paperback sales for the year to date, after a six-week run in the top spot, and is swiftly closing in on the quarter million copies sold mark. Yet TikTok darling Hoover’s novel is still far and away the bestselling book of the year.

Sophie Kinsella’s The Party Crasher (Penguin) gatecrashed fifth place in both the Top 50 and the Mass-Market Fiction top 20, as Jane Corry’s We All Have Our Secrets (Penguin) and Clare Mackintosh’s Hostage (Sphere) made their débuts.

Reverend Richard Coles’ Murder Before Evensong (W&N) had its prayers answered with a fourth week in the Original Fiction pole, as Bonnie Garmus’ Lessons in Chemistry (Doubleday) and Karin Slaughter’s Girl, Forgotten (HarperCollins) traded places in the top three. Victoria Aveyard’s Blade Breaker (Orion) was the highest new entry, in fourth place.