Weekly E-Ranking: Kay prescribed his second number one

Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt (Picador) has topped the Weekly E-Ranking top 20 for a second consecutive week, becoming only the second non-fiction title (after Michael Wolff’s White House expose Fire and Fury) to hold the top spot for longer than one week.

In its 31st week in the chart, the junior doctor memoir topped a familiar-looking trio atop the E-Ranking: this was the fourth week in a row that the top three was made up of various iterations of Kay’s debut, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (HarperCollins) and The Tattooist of Auschwitz (Zaffre), and the sixth time in total. In fact, Eleanor Oliphant has appeared in the top three for every week since mid-January, with The Tattooist of Auschwitz, yet to drop out of the chart’s podium positions since publication in February, alongside Eleanor for the last 21 weeks.

But there was also new blood in the chart, with Karin Slaughter’s new title Pieces of Her (HarperCollins) in fifth place, the highest new entry. Laura Marshall’s Friend Request (Little, Brown) debuted in sixth place. Despite being published in spring 2017, the psychological thriller has been perennially priced at £1.99 or below, making in ineligible for the Weekly E-Ranking. However, since the start of August, Friend Request’s digital list price has been bumped up to £2.99—expect it to create big waves in the August monthly e-book chart.

A similar move for Elizabeth Day’s The Party (Fourth Estate) also saw it return to the E-Ranking in seventh place, after an extended period at 99p. Though Richard and Judy Book Club picks generally fall from the print charts as soon as their successors are announced, anarchy reigns on the digital side—Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere (Little, Brown) has even climbed the e-book chart since the spring 2018 tranche dropped from the print Top 50, and autumn 2017’s Ruth Hogan’s The Keeper of Lost Things (Hodder) makes an appearance in the digital top 20 every other week.