Reacher reigns again

Lee and Andrew Child’s Better Off Dead (Bantam) has claimed the Official UK Top 50 number one spot for a second week, selling 22,666 copies through Nielsen BookScan’s TCM. The 26th Jack Reacher title beat J K Rowling’s The Christmas Pig (Little, Brown) by just 289 copies to grant the elder Child brother his 27th week in the overall number one. It also notched up his 53rd Original Fiction number one

Damon Galgut’s Booker winner The Promise (Chatto & Windus) zipped up to fourth place in Original Fiction, selling 6,139 copies. This was 1,550% up on the previous week’s 372 copies sold. Traditionally, Booker winners that are only out in hardback at the time of the announcement tend to suffer sales-wise, yet both 2019’s winner Girl, Woman, Other (by Bernardine Evaristo, issued by Hamish Hamilton) and 2020’s victor Shuggie Bain (by Douglas Stuart, released by Picador) notched up eye-watering paperback sales in the spring following their respective wins. Over in the Amazon Charts The Promise hit the top of the Amazon Charts’ Most-Sold: Fiction top 20.

With Halloween out of the way, the charts were unashamedly decked out for Christmas, with wintery fiction such as Sarah Morgan’s The Christmas Escape (HQ) and John Banville’s Snow (Faber) soaring up the Mass-Market Fiction top 20 and festive classics such as Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s The Jolly Christmas Postman (Puffin) and Rod Campbell’s Dear Santa (Macmillan Children’s) hitting the Pre-school chart. Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s Squirrel’s Snowman (Macmillan Children’s) was the highest new entry in the Children’s chart, hitting fifth.

Guinness World Records 2022 (GWR) bounced into the Hardback Non-fiction chart for the first time this year, as Paul McCartney’s The Lyrics (Allen Lane) debuted in fifth.

Captain Sir Tom Moore’s Tomorrow Will be a Good Day (Michael Joseph) was the highest new entry in Paperback Non-fiction, as Tim Marshall’s The Power of Geography (Elliott & Thompson) and Yotam Ottolenghi’s Ottolenghi Test Kitchen (Ebury) remained solid in the top two.

The print market slid marginally on the week before, by 0.8% in volume to 4.5 million books sold, and fell by 2.1% in value, to £40.1m. Sales were also down against last year, by 7.4% in volume and 5.7% in value, though the comparable weeks in 2020 were especially strong, being the last few weeks before 2020’s second lockdown.