Bryson takes the Road to number one

Bill Bryson has claimed his 10th week as the UK official number one with The Road to Little Dribbling (Black Swan)— his first top spot in nine years, since The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (Black Swan) took the number one in 2007.  

Bryson displaced Sylvia Day’s One with You (Penguin) from the summit, with The Road to Little Dribbling jumping four places on its first week of paperback sale. The sequel to Notes from a Small Island sold 28,730 copies for £127,383, according to Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market.

Bryson’s real stomping ground is the Paperback Non-Fiction number one—this is his 43rd time to take the title, ending Lean in 15 (Bluebird)’s 15-week consecutive run. Only Jeremy Clarkson has spent longer in that chart’s top spot than Bryson, at 47 weeks.

In total, Bryson has sold 9.1m books in the UK since Nielsen records began in 1998, for £76.6m. The hardback edition of The Road to Little Dribbling (Doubleday) was a Christmas 2015 hit, shifting 296,648 copies to date, and currently stands as Bryson’s second-bestselling title in hardback.

Another big autumn 2015 hardback release, David Lagercrantz’s The Girl in the Spider’s Web (Maclehose Press), increased in volume by 28.6%, rose to second place and displaced One with You as Mass Market Fiction number one.

Lagercrantz’s reboot of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, which has shifted 41,710 copies since its release, is currently outselling The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire (both Maclehose Press) in their first two weeks in paperback, at 16,999 and 37,836 copies sold respectively. However, it falls long short of Larsson’s final book The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, which shifted 158,375 copies inside its first fortnight in paperback in April 2010 and went on to spend a total of four non-consecutive weeks as the overall number one. The original trilogy sold over six million copies in the UK, and the hardback of …Spider’s Web has already shifted 100,000 copies.

John Connolly’s A Time of Torment (Hodder & Stoughton) held the Original Fiction number one for a second week running, and was the only hardback fiction title in the Top 50. After eight non-consecutive weeks, Mary Berry’s Foolproof Cooking (BBC) finally conceded the Hardback Non-Fiction number one, to blogger Sarah “the Unmumsy Mum” Turner. Her parenting guide bounced back into the Top 50 after slumping to 89th place a week ago.

Aside from Lagercrantz and The Unmumsy Mum, it was an excellent week for first-time authors (…Spider’s Web is Lagercrantz’s fiction début), with Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney (John Murray) rising into 14th place and Hannah Rothschild’s Baileys-shortlisted The Improbability of Love (Bloomsbury) hitting 21st. Début crime author Debbie Howells’ The Bones of You (Pan) made a return to the Top 50, and B A Paris’ Behind Closed Doors (Mira) rose 14 places after just scraping 50th place the week before. And though Joe Wicks dropped to fourth, his début cookbook is the most valuable title in the Top 50 for a fourth week running.

However, not every début had a stellar week - David Solomons’ Waterstones Children’s Book Prize winner My Brother is a Superhero (Nosy Crow) was knocked off the Children’s number one spot by seasoned author J K Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Bloomsbury). Rowling’s 2009 title, boosted by the release of the film adaptation’s trailer, rose from 111th place to hit 29th, one place above the Harry Potter Colouring Book (Studio Press). Though the same title took the overall number one for three weeks in 2001, this is its first time atop the Children’s chart, which didn’t exist until 2003.