Lee Child strikes one with The Midnight Line

Lee Child’s The Midnight Line (Bantam) has ended Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine’s run in the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, selling 35,942 copies for £146,019. This is the sixth spring in a row the veteran crime author has shot straight into the number one spot with his newest paperback—in fact, since the start of the decade he has only failed to hit the top at all one year (2012). With the 22nd Jack Reacher title, Child has now spent 19 weeks at the top of the chart.

The Midnight Line in hardback racked up Child’s biggest single week of sales upon its release last November, beating its predecessing hardback Night School by a scant 788 copies, and the paperback demonstrated a similar consistency—at 35,942 copies sold, it sold just 209 copies fewer than Night School in paperback in its first week on sale in April 2017.

Child’s fellow Richard and Judy summer 2018 alumni joined him in the Top 50, with Dinah Jefferies’ The Sapphire Widow (Viking) in 10th, Erin Kelly’s He Said/She Said (Hodder) in 12th, Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere (Little, Brown) in 24th and Susie Steiner’s Persons Unknown (The Borough Press) in 25th.

In fact, the chart underwent something of a spring clean, with 22 new entries in the Top 50 and 12 in the Mass Market Fiction top 20. In the top five, Lucinda Riley’s The Pearl Sister (Pan), David Lagercrantz’s The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye (Maclehose Press) and Santa Montefiore’s The Last Secret of the Deverills (Simon & Schuster) were all new entries and, along with PRH’s The Midnight Line and Harper’s Eleanor Oliphant..., displayed a satisfyingly balanced showing for the Big Five publishers.

John Connolly’s The Woman in the Woods (Hodder & Stoughton) strode into the Original Fiction number one, bumping off Irvine Welsh’s Dead Men’s Trousers (Jonathan Cape). This is the third year in a row Connolly’s latest Charlie Parker thriller has gone straight to the top of the category chart. Jo Nesbo’s Macbeth (Hogarth), Danielle Steel’s Accidental Heroes (Macmillan) and Philip Kerr’s Greeks Bearing Gifts (Quercus) also entered the Original Fiction top five.

Ben Brooks and Quinton Winter’s Stories for Boys who Dare to Be Different (Quercus) thundered into the top 10 and swiped the Children’s number one from Fiona Watt and Rachel Wells’ That’s Not My Chick (Usborne)—the first time in nearly a year that a non-fiction title has topped the kids’ chart.

Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (Bantam) boomeranged back into the Paperback Non-Fiction number one, after being displaced a week ago by Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep (Penguin). Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (Vinatge) was in second place, with just a single copy separating them. As Sapiens has the sub-title A Brief History of Humankind, perhaps savvy booksellers have been running a two-for-one offer on the “brief histories” (which come to a total of around 660 pages combined).  

Jill Twiss and E G Keller’s A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo (Chronicle) hit 50th place, selling 3,406 copies and reaching second in the Children’s Pre-School chart. The picture book, dedicated to “every bunny who has ever felt different”, was launched on US chat show "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver", as a parody of a book by the family of US vice-president Mike Pence about their real-life pet rabbit. Twiss and Keller’s title is a celebration of same-sex marriage and will raise money for charities such as The Trevor Project and AIDS United. This is another example of the “Trump bump” crossing the Atlantic, after George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury rocketed in sales in the UK alongside stratospheric rises in the US. The Pence family’s title is yet to chart in the UK top 5,000.