Claire Douglas’ Wrong Sister makes a right at number one in charts

Claire Douglas’ 10th novel, The Wrong Sister (Penguin), rose from third place to pole position week-on-week handing Douglas her first ever Official UK Top 50 number one and her fourth Mass-Market Fiction number one.

The book sold 19,644 copies last week through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market – an increase of nearly 8,500 copies from the prior seven-day period – and replaced previous chart-topper, Reckless by Lauren Roberts (Simon & Schuster), which slipped to sixth. Roberts did, however, hang onto the top spot in the Children’s and Young Adult chart, shifting nearly 11,000 copies.

While the launch week result of The Wrong Sister was 2,000 copies behind first seven-day results of the mass-market editions of her previous two novels, it has now caught up and is tracking ahead of both The Woman Who Lied, which was released in July 2023, and The Girls Who Disappeared (both Penguin), released in September 2022.

The current Waterstones’ Thriller of the Month, Murder on Lake Garda by Tom Hindle (Penguin Cornerstone), also made gains last week, ascending from fourth to second place with 14,074 copies sold. Last week’s Original Fiction (OF) leader, Resurrection by Danielle Steel (Macmillan), was less fortunate. Steel’s latest fell from 66th in the overall chart to 84th. It was supplanted by The Wren in the Holly Library by K A Linde (Tor).

FairyLoot’s magic touch helped two subscription-box picks enter the top 50 last week including American author Linde’s novel, which shifted more than 5,000 copies for 29th place, boosted by FairyLoot’s Romantasy box. Linde made her top 50 début alongside Kalynn Bayron. A limited edition of Bayron’s Sleep Like Death (Bloomsbury), which appeared in seventh place in the overall chart and second in the Children’s and YA chart, featured in both FairyLoot and OwlCrate’s YA boxes for July.

Kay and Kate Allinson’s Pinch of Nom Air Fryer (Bluebird) maintained a solid lead in Hardback Non-Fiction with a buffer of more than 10,000 copies between it and Paul Ainsworth’s For the Love of Food (Pavilion) in second. Rory Stewart’s lead was less pronounced, but Politics on the Edge (Vintage) has now hit number one in Paperback Non-Fiction (PNF) six times in a row. It was also the top title among independent booksellers last week.

Lower down in PNF, Damien Lewis made an astonishing leap into 17th place as The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (Quercus) shifted 2,042 copies. Prior to that, it had sold an average of just 31 copies per week since its release on 11th April. The April publication date was tied to the cinematic release of Guy Ritchie’s film of the same name starring Henry Cavill (“Witcher”) in the US, which is skipping UK cinemas and heading directly to Prime Video on 25th July.

Romance author and TikTokker Shain Rose made a similar surprise entrance as the first three books in her Hardy Billionaires series bounced into the Fiction Heatseeker top 10. Until this point, the trio has had an average weekly sale of only 13 copies since all three hit shelves on 26th March. The fourth book in the series, Between Desire and Denial (Hodder), is due to be released in September this year.

In a bit of cheerful news, a crocheted-postbox-topper tribute to The Tiger Who Came to Tea by Judith Kerr (HarperCollins Children’s) has been spotted in Barnes this summer. Kerr’s classic picture book is a regular fixture in the Children’s Pre-School charts and ranked 18th last week in that chart.

The market held steady last week with no more than a 1.6% drop in TCM value to £30.8m with 3.4 million books sold. In the same seven-day period last year, TCM value reached £32.4m.