Jojo still has her mojo; Moyes' Still Me hits top spot

Jojo Moyes’ Still Me (Penguin) has soared into the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, selling 34,426 copies through the Nielsen BookScan Total Consumer Market and scoring the highest number one single-week volume since Joe Wicks’ Veggie Lean in 15 (Bluebird) in the first week of 2019. 

Still Me becomes the author’s third title to hit the top spot, after shifting over 100,000 copies in hardback over 2018, after its trilogy predecessor After You, in summer 2016, and standalone title The One Plus One, in August 2014. Despite Me Before You selling a whisker under a million copies in paperback (and a further 258,219 for the film tie-in), it never once went to number one, or even the Mass-Market Fiction number one.

Val McDermid’s Broken Ground (Little, Brown) was the second-highest new entry, selling 16,413 copies to claim third—the author’s second-bestselling launch week sale, after 2011’s Trick of the Dark. 

Bad press doesn’t seem to have hurt sales of The Woman in the Window (HarperCollins)—after a week in which the New Yorker published an expose of its author Daniel Mallory (writing as A J Finn) and his Talented Mr Ripley-esque route up the ladder within the publishing industry, the psychological thriller improved by 495 copies week on week, rising two places in the Top 50. 

The Original Fiction chart saw a rush of new entries, with Sophie Kinsella’s I Owe You One (Bantam) bringing Sally Rooney’s six-week run at number one to an end. Kimberley Chambers’ The Sting (HarperCollins), a scant 217 down on I Owe You One, claimed the runner-up spot. The debut of The Bookseller’s former media editor Stacey Halls, The Familiars (Zaffre), whirled into the Top 50 in its very first week on sale in hardback, selling 3,500 copies to push Rooney's Normal People (Faber) down to fourth place in Original Fiction. Halls follows in the footsteps of Imogen Hermes Gowar and Bridget Collins to join a select group of authors who have bypassed the Fiction Heatseekers chart entirely, hitting the Top 50 in their first ever week of release. 

Bart van Es’s Costa Book of the Year The Cut-Out Girl (Penguin) improved by 32% for the first full week after its win, jumping five places to 13th—although shortlisted Costa Biography title (and current Waterstones’ Non-Fiction Book of the Month) Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path (Penguin) leapfrogged it into 12th place, improving 41% week on week. 

The Wonky Donkey (Scholastic) is officially the longest-running picture book in the overall Children’s number one, shifting 6,548 copies in its fifth week at the top. It held off a challenge from new Walliams paperback Bad Dad (HarperCollins Children's), which claimed the Children’s and YA Fiction number one instead. 

Moyes helped the print market achieve a stunning week—it hit its highest volume for the year to date, improving 6.2% week on week (and 5.2% in value). For the first time since the first week of January, 2019 solidly beat the equivalent week in 2018 in both volume and value.