A Grecian earn: Victoria Hislop’s Aegean-set The Figurine launches into number one

Victoria Hislop’s The Figurine has become the UK Official Top 50 number one in its mass-market fiction paperback launch week, just edging out Claire Douglas’ The Wrong Sister (Penguin), which had earned two out of the previous three pole positions.

The Figurine – Hislop’s eighth book set in Greece – shifted 13,919 units through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM) in its release week, edging out Douglas’ previous chart-topper by just 348 copies. This is the first time publisher Headline has claimed an overall number one in three years, since Hislop last performed the feat with One August Night in July 2021. Hislop, recently appointed a Royal Society of Literature fellow, has now claimed her 17th Top 50 number one and her 22nd in Mass Market Fiction.

Hislop leads a chart that has Freida McFadden, Colleen Hoover and Sarah J Maas all notching three places in the Top 50. McFadden and Hoover are surging: the former with three books in the top 14, all of which moved up week-on-week; the latter’s trio are all in the top 10, two of which are versions of It Ends With Us (Simon & Schuster), ahead of the Blake Lively-starring adaptation launching in UK cinemas this Friday (9th August). 

Helped by a marketing and publicity push into Waterstones and independent bookshops in particular, historical fiction legend Barbara Erskine has scored her first number one since accurate records began, with The Story Spinner (HarperCollins) selling 3,418 copies to easily top Original Fiction. That 3,418 unit-sale is a hardback launch-week record for Erskine in the TCM era and exceeds the first seven-day total for her last outing, 2021’s The Dream Weavers (HarperCollins) by some 28%. This should mean a happy birthday for the author, who turns 80 this week (10th August).

The biggest hardback launch of the week was foodie influencer turned bestselling author Jane Dunn’s latest, Jane’s Patisserie Easy Favourites (Ebury Spotlight), moving just over 9,400 copies to stop Kay and Kate Allinson’s Pinch of Nom Air Fryer’s (Bluebird) six-week run at the top of the Hardback Non-Fiction (HBNF) chart. All four of Dunn’s books have now notched up HBNF pole positions, though Jane’s Patisserie Easy Favourites’ first-week sales are some 30% down on the launch of Jane’s Patisserie Everyday (Ebury Spotlight) at this time in 2023. Cookery authors have dominated HBNF in general, though, with 26 number ones in the first 31 weeks of 2024.

A changing at the guard in Paperback Non-Fiction, though to a familiar face as Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge (Vintage, 5,528 copies) returned to the summit for an eighth time in nine weeks, after it was unseated in the last chart by Miriam Margolyes’ Oh Miriam! (John Murray).

A light publication week in the kids’ sector saw little change in the Children’s charts as Katie Kirby’s The Majorly Awkward BFF Dramas of Lottie Brooks (Puffin) retained its overall Children’s and Children’s and Young Adult Fiction crowns for a third week on the trot, while Tom Fletcher, Dougie Poynter and illustrator Garry Parsons’ The Dinosaur That Pooped a Superhero (Puffin) made it two in a row atop Children’s Preschool.

Overall, £29.4m was sold through the TCM last week, representing an 8% tumble on both the previous seven days and the same period in 2023, the market perhaps affected by the relatively good weather across the UK, a packed Olympics schedule and, distressingly, the political violence that has hit a number of city centres.