Lucky 13 for Kinney as The Meltdown scores author's first number one in three years

Jeff Kinney’s 13th Wimpy Kid title The Meltdown (Puffin) has nipped into the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, selling 57,790 copies to claim the author’s first overall number one since November 2015. In recent years, the Wimpy Kid release date has clashed with the new David Walliams’ pre-Christmas run in the top spot, but The Meltdown’s publication a week ahead of The Ice Monster has given Kinney the opportunity to leapfrog Heather Morris’ The Tattooist of Auschwitz (Zaffre). 

This is the author and illustrator’s 11th number one in total, and his 57th week atop the Children’s chart. In fact, the only one of Kinney’s 13 Wimpy Kid titles not to top the kids’ chart is his debut, The Diary of a Wimpy Kid, despite it selling over a million copies. 

Though The Meltdown has racked up the biggest single-week volume for any title since Kinney’s frenemy Walliams earlier this year (with The World’s Worst Children 3 shifting 77,974 copies in June), this was Kinney’s lowest first-week sales since Cabin Fever in 2011, and 3.4% down on 2017’s The Getaway.

The Tattooist of Auschwitz settled back into second place, defending its now-five week reign in the Mass Market Fiction number one from Dilly Court’s The Christmas Rose (HarperCollins), which sold 16,582 copies in its first three days on sale—a record first week for the author. Court's The Mistletoe Seller and The Christmas Card have racked up her two biggest single-week volumes to date in their second weeks on sale, so expect The Christmas Rose to...rise.

Anna Burns’ Man Booker Prize winner Milkman (Faber & Faber) continued to float off the shelves. Despite dropping off its record-breaking 18,786 copies sold the previous week, its 11,480-copy volume last week puts the paperback’s total volume above the Lincoln in the Bardo paperback’s sales to date—two and half weeks after its win.

The Original Fiction chart was bombarded with new entries, but C J Sansom's Tombland (Mantle) held firm in the top spot for a third week. Jeffrey Archer's Heads You Win (Macmillan), Jodi Picoult's A Spark of Light (Hodder), Michael Connelly's Dark Sacred Night (Orion) and Stephen King's Elevation (Hodder) all entered the top five. 

Guinness World Records 2019 swiped the Hardback Non-Fiction number one from Noel Fitzpatrick’s Listening to the Animals (Trapeze), increasing 29% in volume week on week and graduating into the overall top five. Jason Fox’s Battle Scars (Bantam) was the highest new entry in fourth place, with Geraint Thomas’ The Tour According to G (Quercus) and The Book of the Year 2018 (Random House) hitting seventh and 10th respectively.

Though Paperback Non-Fiction titles were on thin ground in the Top 50—Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (Vintage) dropped out for the first time since March 2017, leaving just Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt (Picador) and Edith Eger’s The Choice (Rider & Co)—they both hit the overall top 20, with the junior doctor memoir racking up a 28th week as the Paperback Non-Fiction number one and The Choice increasing 103% in volume week on week and jumping 24 places up the chart to 18th. 

Craig Smith’s The Wonky Donkey (Scholastic) hit the Pre-School number one straight out of the gate. It became the first ever picture book to feature in the Bookseller’s Weekly E-Ranking top 20 last month, after a YouTube video of a Scottish grandmother reading the book aloud went viral and print copies became scarce. The newly-released edition sold 12,261 copies in its first three days on sale, the highest for any non-World Book Day Pre-School number one this year.

The market soared 7% in value and 6.8% in volume week on week, to 3.7 million books sold for £33.1m. Value rose 1.5% against the same week in 2017, the first year-on-year weekly boost since mid-September.