Holy Gail: Eleanor Oliphant returns to number one

Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (Harper) has boomeranged back into the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, claiming a fourth non-consecutive week at the top and displacing Tom Fletcher and Shane Devries’ World Book Day title Brain Freeze (Puffin). The debut fiction title’s volume of 22,860 copies sold last week is a 2.75% bump on the week before, inching towards a total of a quarter of a million copies sold. In its nine weeks on sale, Eleanor Oliphant… has only sold fewer than 20,000 copies twice—in its launch week, when it was only available for three days, and the week of the "Beast from the East", which brought heavy snow to much of the UK at the end of February.

In 2017, no fiction title held the number one spot for more than three non-consecutive weeks. Eleanor Oliphant… becomes the longest-running fiction book at the top since The Girl on the Train’s 12-week run across 2016.

Professor Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (Bantam) soared up the chart following his death, hitting sixth place overall and swiping the Paperback Non-Fiction number one spot from Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (Vintage). Its volume rocketed 344% week on week, to 14,197 copies sold. This is the scientist’s first category number one in the post-1998 BookScan era—although his ex-wife Jane Hawking scored an overall number one in May 2015 with her autobiography Travelling to Infinity (Alma), which was adapted into the Oscar-winning biopic "The Theory of Everything".

Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep (Penguin) was another fast-rising Paperback Non-Fiction title, rising to seventh in the overall chart and knocking Sapiens into third in the category chart. The title, which has sold 70,046 copies since January, takes particular umbrage with British Summer Time, pointing out that car accidents increase in the last month of March due to the nation being deprived of an hour of sleep. Its 204% boost in volume last week may have been the result of astute booksellers pushing a topical sale.

Mary Berry’s Classic (BBC) leapfrogged Tom Kerridge’s 10-week Hardback Non-Fiction number one Lose Weight for Good (Absolute) to take the category top spot, the first female author to do so since Nadiya Hussain’s Nadiya’s British Food Adventure (Michael Joseph) in summer last year. With Clare Mackintosh’s Let Me Lie (Sphere) holding the Original Fiction number one for a second week, this is the first week that the five main category number one spots have been taken by more female-authored titles than male ones since the week ending 19th August 2017.

After a few rollercoaster weeks for the print market, last week posted a relatively sedate volume of 3.3 million books sold for £26m—up 3.3% and 4.4% respectively, on the week before, though down on 2017 due to last year's later Mother's Day date. For the first 12 weeks of the year, volume was up marginally by 0.24%, to 38.9 million books sold, and value up 1.62%, to £319m, against the same period in 2017.