Dan Brown claims 80th UK number one

Dan Brown’s Origin (Corgi) has held the UK Official Top 50 number one for a fourth week running—and the author’s 80th in total. The paperback title sold 28,069 copies to achieve the longest consecutive run for any title for the year to date.

With 80 weeks under his belt, Brown now draws level with J K Rowling—who surpassed him two years ago with Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (Little, Brown). If Origin can swipe another week in the top spot, as both previous paperback hits Inferno and The Lost Symbol did, Brown would be reinstated as the record holder for number of weeks at the overall number one. So far, Origin is selling strongly against 2014’s Inferno—with nearly 160,000 copies sold to date, it’s 8.15% ahead of its predecessor in volume terms.

Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (HarperCollins) has maintained second place alongside Origin for the entirety of its four-week run—and last week jumped 2.5% in volume week on week, after over six months on sale. In total, the Costa First Novel Award winner has clinched second place 11 times since publication, alongside its seven weeks as number one.

David Baldacci’s End Game (Pan)—the current bestseller of the latest Richard and Judy Book Club tranche—leapfrogged Peter May’s I’ll Keep You Safe (riverrun) to claim third place, with fellow titles Rachel Hore’s Last Letter Home (Simon & Schuster), Joanna Cannon’s Three Things About Elsie (The Borough Press), Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen’s The Wife Between Us (Pan) and Leila Slimani’s Lullaby (Faber) all charting in the top 20 for their second week on sale. Additionally, a summer 2017 Richard and Judy Book Club pick—and the bestselling fiction title of last year—Shari Lapena's The Couple Next Door (Corgi) bounced back into the Top 50, as the author's new hardback climbed the Original Fiction chart.

The new Waterstones Books of the Month for August also made their mark—Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years (Vintage) debuted straight into the Top 50, in 31st place, while the retailer’s children’s pick, Emma Carroll’s Secrets of a Sun King (Faber & Faber), charted eighth in the Children’s and YA Fiction top 20. The Small Publishers top 10 is now almost entirely made up of former Waterstones Book of the Month non-fiction picks, with August 2018’s The Billion Dollar Spy (Icon) joining August 2016’s Prisoners of Geography (Elliott & Thompson) and both James Hawes’ The Shortest History of Germany (Old Street) and Julia Boyd’s Travellers in the Third Reich (Elliott & Thompson) from earlier this year.

Elsewhere in non-fiction, Nadiya Hussain’s Nadiya’s Family Favourites (Michae Joseph) leapfrogged Matt Haig’s Notes from a Nervous Planet (Canongate) to claim the Hardback Non-Fiction number one after four weeks in the top spot for the mental health guide. Last summer, Nadiya’s British Food Adventure spent five weeks atop the category chart.

Gill Sims’ Why Mummy Swears (HarperCollins) cursed the Original Fiction number one for a fourth week, while the highest new entry in the chart was Jasper Fforde’s Early Riser (Hodder), in fifth.

In the Pre-School chart, there was only one new entry, and surprise surprise, it was a unicorn book—Rhiannon Fielding and Chris Chatterton’s Ten Minutes to Bed: Little Unicorn (Ladybird), which joins Where’s the Unicorn, Peppa’s Magical Unicorn, Magic Painting Unicorns, That’s Not My Unicorn and Little Sticker Dolly Dressing Unicorns in the top 20.

The school summer holidays seem to have given the print market a burst of momentum. Last week 3.5 million books sold for £28m - the second-highest volume and value for the year to date, behind only the early March post-Beast from the East boost, and for the first time since mid-June, both volume and value were ahead of the same week in 2017—by 1.8% and 4% respectively.