It ends with Colleen Hoover at number one while Kate Atkinson débuts atop Original Fiction

Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us has held onto the UK Official Top 50 pole position for the second week in a row, with the film adaptation-boosted novel shifting 20,780 copies through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market. The title’s sequel, It Starts with Us, also retained the number two spot week-on-week. Though it was not all good news for “CoHo”; the film tie-in edition of It Ends with Us tumbled from third all the way down to ninth place.

With last week’s push, It Ends with Us has now crossed the 1.5 million-unit mark through the TCM in all editions. Hoover’s number one also marks publisher Simon & Schuster’s 20th turn as the overall top spot since accurate records began, 12 of which have come in just the last two years.    

The top new title was Kate Atkinson’s return to Jackson Brodie after five years with Death at the Sign of the Rook (Doubleday), which moved 10,126 copies to claim ninth place overall and the Original Fiction (OF) number one. Somewhat surprisingly, it is only Atkinson’s second OF number one, after the previous Jackson Brodie title, Big Sky (Doubleday), did the trick in June 2019. Yet her latest marks the author’s best first week total in hardback⁠—and the only time she has shifted over 10,000 units at launch⁠—and was 15% up on her last HB outing, 2022’s Shrines of Gaiety (Bantam).

Atkinson easily outpaced the other big hardback fiction release, Pat Barker’s third retelling of the Iliad, The Voyage Home (Hamish Hamilton), which sold 3,819 copies to hit second in the OF chart. Meanwhile, BookTok seems to have finally discovered Naomi Novik, with two backlist hardbacks in the fantasy author’s Scholomance series, 2022’s The Golden Enclaves and 2020’s A Deadly Education (both Del Rey), hitting the OF chart for the first time.

There was little movement in the Mass Market Fiction (MMF) as Hoover retained the number one for a third straight week. Susan Lewis’ A Sicilian Affair (HarperCollins) jumped 17 spots in the overall chart to make its first appearance in the MMF top 20, while L J Ross’ The Haven (Dark Skies) also débuted in its launch week.

After being displaced last week by musician Yungblud, Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge (Vintage) returned to bag the Paperback Non-Fiction number one for a 10th time. And it was a ninth non-consecutive top spot for Kay and Kate Allinson’s Pinch of Nom Air Fryer (Bluebird) at the Hardback Non-Fiction summit. The Nommers beat off strong competition in Luis Elizondo’s Imminent (John Blake), the former US Army counterintelligence agent’s contention that that Pentagon is hiding information about UFOs. which received scads of press in its launch week.

The Swifties ruled for another week in Children’s as Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara and illustrator Borghild Fallberg’s Taylor Swift (Frances Lincoln) notched a sixth number one. And a clue that it was a bank holiday weekend could be found in the Children’s Preschool chart with Bluey: Road Trip (Labybird) hitting the top spot.

That bank holiday was solid for UK booksellers: £30.4m was sold through the tills last week, flat on the previous week but 6.2% up on this point in 2023.