Casual Vacancy keeps pole position

J K Rowling's The Casual Vacancy (Little, Brown) has retained pole position in the bestseller charts. The novel, her first for adult audiences, sold 69,604 copies in the seven days to 6th October—down 44% from her first-week sale of 124,600 copies, but comfortably ahead of the second bestselling book of the week, Jamie Oliver's Jamie's 15-minute Meals (Michael Joseph). The latter climbs five places in the Official UK Top 50
thanks to a 19% uplift in sales on the previous week, to 24,523 copies sold.

Helped by a £2.99 deal at Tesco, Peter James' eighth Roy Grace thriller, Not Dead Yet (Pan), was the bestselling paperback novel of the week and takes third position in the Official UK Top 50 with a 24,175 sale. It tops this week's Mass-market Fiction chart, bringing E L James' mammoth 25-week run at the summit to an end. It is the first time since April, when Philippa Gregory scored pole position in the list with The Lady of the Rivers (Simon & Schuster), that someone other than E L James has topped the chart.

New entries into the Official UK Top 50 include: Tulisa Contostavlos' memoir, Honest (Headline); Iain M Banks' new Culture novel, The Hydrogen Sonata (Orbit); and Rick Riordan's third Heroes of Olympus novel, The Mark of Athena (Puffin). The latter sold 15,997 copies in its first week on sale, and was second only to David Walliams' Ratburger (HarperCollins) as the bestselling children's book of the week.

In total, £33.9m was spent on printed books at UK booksellers in the seven days to 6th October—up 5.3% (£1.7m) week on week, but down 1.6% (£0.5m) on the same week last year. Despite new titles from Arnold Schwarzenegger (Total Recall, Simon & Schuster) and Andrew Marr (A History of the World, Macmillan) hitting the bestseller lists this week, sales of hardback non-fiction titles through BookScan's Top 5,000 bestseller list were down 17% year on year.

However, there were uplifts in the hardback fiction sector (driven by sales of The Casual Vacancy), and the children's market where the pre-school (+4%), fiction (+18%), and non-fiction sectors (+13%) all enjoyed solid growth on the same week last year.