Weekly E-Ranking: Eleanor Oliphant still Completely Fine

For a fourth consecutive week, and a fifth in total, Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine tops the Weekly E-Book Ranking. If it can get just one more week under its belt, it will have scored the longest run of consecutive top spots for any title since Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train, which all roads in the e-book chart led back to in October 2016. After a male-dominated autumn, Eleanor Oliphant... and Jojo Moyes’ Still Me have kept the e-book number one in a female lockdown for the past seven weeks, with Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury the only male-authored number one so far this year.

This chart covers the week (ending 3rd March) that saw most of the nation house-bound due to snowfall, and while we can’t say if the e-book market as a whole was boosted in the wake of falling print volumes, it shook up the weekly ranking in some interesting ways. Dan Brown’s Origin and Lee Child’s The Midnight Line—
both former number ones that had dropped out of the chart—made strong returns to the top 20, as did 2017 non-fiction hit Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt. It suggests that perhaps more casual read on their favourite author’s latest, or got round to reading that book everyone was recommending over Christmas, fired up their Kindle in an attempt to stave off cabin fever. Jane Harper’s The Dry—set during a heatwave in the Australian Outback, so perfect for snowbound escapism—rose into the top five, as did A J Finn’s The Woman in the Window—about an agoraphobic woman stuck in her New York apartment.

Heather Morris’ The Tattooist of Auschwitz leapfrogged Jojo Moyes’ Still Me to take second place. It’s proving a slow burner which, after six weeks in the ranking, has only charted outside the top 10 once (in its first week) yet this is its highest position. If The Tattooist... did manage to remove Eleanor Oliphant... from the top spot, it would be publisher Bonnier’s first e-book pole.

Jason Matthews’ Red Sparrow charted eighth, as its Jennifer Lawrence-led film adaptation hit UK cinemas. Spy thrillers have been slowly coming back to the fore, with Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb series rising in sales—his Slow Horses is back in the ranking in 15th. With events in the UK mirroring a John le Carré novel in the past week or so, the genre could yet enjoy an even stronger resurgence.