Audible Charts: Secret Service sneaks into the top

Tom Bradby's Secret Service (Penguin Audio), narrated by Juliet Aubrey, has zipped into the Audible weekly number one spot for the week ending 26th April. It's rare for a fiction book to swipe the non-fiction-heavy chart's top spot, with Margaret Atwood's The Testaments (Chatto & Windus) the last fiction title to hit the monthly number one, back in September 2019.

Isaac Asimov's Foundation (HarperCollins) rocketed into second place, voiced by William Hope. The originally 1951-published title concerns a gigantic, crumbling empire, making it perhaps not the most comforting lockdown listening, but science fiction and fantasy has always done well in audio format—both George R R Martin's A Game of Thrones and Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens hit the monthly Audible number one in 2019.

Michelle Obama's Becoming (Penguin) and Stephen Fry's Mythos (Penguin) were still mainstays, hitting fourth and fifth place respectively. The Fry-narrated Sherlock Holmes: The Definitive Collection (Audible) also charted, in sixth—it's been a constant in the monthly charts since its release in 2017.

David Baldacci's Walk the Wire (Macmillan) and Delia Owens' Where the Crawdads Sing (Little,Brown) performed strongly in e-book last week, but many fans plumped for audio too, with both titles charting in the top 10.