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Amazon Charts: Secret Commonwealth steams into number one
Philip Pullman's The Secret Commonwealth (Penguin/David Fickling) has soared 15 places to top the Amazon Charts Most-Sold: Fiction chart, in the same week it sold 54,301 copies in hardback through Nielsen BookScan's TCM. Though its predecessor in Pullman's Book of Dust series, La Belle Sauvage, became the first Children's title to top The Bookseller's Weekly E-Book Ranking in 2017, The Secret Commonwealth was more listened to on Audible than read on Kindle last week, no doubt helped by the dulcet tones of narrator Michael Sheen.
Self-published author L J Ross' Borderlands scored the runner-up spot to push previous number one Margaret Atwood's The Testaments (Vintage) into third. Heather Morris' Tattooist of Auschwitz sequel Cilka's Journey (Zaffre) was the next-highest charting new entry, following in the footsteps of its e-book behemoth predecessor.
Borderlands may have missed out on a Most-Sold number one to The Secret Commonwealth, but it swiped the Most-Read: Fiction number one from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Pottermore/Bloomsbury), with Pullman's sequel ten places below. Ross' DCI Ryan also earned the "most anticipated" tag, as the most pre-ordered book on the Most-Read list.
Bill Bryson's The Body (Transworld) rose to the top of Most-Sold: Non-Fiction, the same week it topped the Hardback Non-Fiction top 20 through the TCM. Andrew Ridgeley's Wham! George & Me (Penguin) made its debut in fifth place, and though Adam Kay's unstoppable This is Going to Hurt (Picador) slipped one place, its follow-up Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas rose to eighth place, with two weeks still to go until publication.
Louis Theroux's Gotta Get Theroux This (Macmillan) achieved the unthinkable—it toppled Michelle Obama's Becoming (Penguin) in the Most-Read: Non-Fiction number one spot after an eleven-week reign for the former First Lady. Theroux's memoir was also the most quotable book in the chart, with Kindle owners highlighting passages more frequently than any other title.
