You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Completely Five: Eleanor Oliphant continues run at the top of the chart
Gail Honeyman's Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (Harper) has once again held the UK Official Top 50 number one, with 24,729 copies through Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market.
With five non-consecutive weeks in the top spot now under its belt, Eleanor Oliphant... is the longest-running HarperCollins number one not written by David Walliams since 2002.
The title also claimed a 10th week as the Mass Market Fiction number one—only Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, E L James' Fifty Shades of Grey and Paula Hawkins' The Girl on the Train have spent longer in the top spot. And those four titles all shifted well in excess of a million copies apiece.
Irvine Welsh swiped his first Original Fiction number one since 2012 with Dead Men's Trousers (Jonathan Cape) selling 4,910 copies and displacing Clare Mackintosh's Let Me Lie (Sphere) in the top spot.
The run-up to Easter last week saw the Children's category boosted 33% in volume year on year, and Fiona Watt and Rachel Wells scored their first ever Children's number one with That's Not My Chick (Usborne), defeating Tom Fletcher and Shane Devries' Brain Freeze (Puffin). This is the first time the kids' pole has been taken by a female-authored title since October, when J K Rowling and Jim Kay's illustrated Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Bloomsbury) claimed the top spot. We're Going on a Egg Hunt (Bloomsbury Children's) also leapt up the Top 50, hitting 10th place overall.
Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep (Penguin) ascended to the top of the Paperback Non-Fiction chart, leapfrogging Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time (Bantam), while Mary Berry's Classic (BBC) held the Hardback Non-Fiction number one for a second week running.
Against a sluggish post-Mother's Day week in 2017, the print market maintained strong figures. Volume was 14% up year on year, and value was up 9.5%. While much of the gain came from Children's books, Adult Fiction also had a jump, posting a 14.6% boost in volume on the same week in 2017.
