The Midnight Line clocks up second week at number one

Lee Child’s The Midnight Line (Bantam) has boomeranged back into the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, a week after it was displaced by Star Wars: The Last Jedi Junior Novel (Dean & Son). It sold 27,165 copies for £114,021, rocketing past the 100,000 copies sold milestone in just three weeks on sale. The 22nd Jack Reacher title is now the 11th bestselling title of 2018 to date, two places below Reacher short story collection No Middle Name, released in January.

Henry Firth and Ian Theasby’s BOSH! (HarperCollins), the vegan cookbook developed from the authors' YouTube channel, was the highest new entry in third place, shifting 16,617 copies and swiping the Hardback Non-Fiction number one from Tom Kerridge’s Lose Weight for Good (Absolute).

Former FBI director James Comey tapped into eighth place overall with his memoir A Higher Loyalty (Pan Macmillan), and scored second place in the Hardback Non-Fiction chart. Though it was no doubt helped by all the free publicity coming from the presidential Twitter account, this more sober appraisal of Donald Trump’s White House hasn’t quite hit the sales highs of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury (Little,Brown). Yet, even on this side of the Atlantic, books for people who don’t like the reality TV star-turned-president are now nearly a category of their own—in the last year and a half, titles ranging from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (Penguin) to Sam Bourne’s To Kill the President (HarperCollins) to Jill Twiss & E G Keller’s picture book A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo (Chronicle) have all experienced the Trump bump.

Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt (Picador) entered the chart in seventh place and beat the BBC Proms 2018 Festival Guide to the Paperback Non-Fiction number one. The comedian’s junior doctor memoir shifted a whisker under 100,000 copies in hardback and became—rarely, for a non-fiction title—a consistently-successful e-book hit too.

Ruth Jones’ Never Greener (Bantam) held the Original Fiction number one for a second week, selling 5,617 copies and improving on the week before by just over 100 copies. David Baldacci’s The Fallen (Macmillan) was the highest new entry in second place.

The Children’s number one was taken by a non-fiction title for the second time in April, as Matthew Syed’s You Are Awesome (Wren & Rook) sold 8,585 copies. Julia Donaldson and Lydia Monks’ What the Ladybird Heard on Holiday (Macmillan Children's) held the Pre-School number one, and David Walliams and Tony Ross’ The Midnight Gang (HarperCollins) returned to the Children’s and YA Fiction top spot. The older kids’ chart had only a single new entry, with Charlie Higson’s Fighting Fantasy: The Gates of Death (Schloastic) hitting sixth place.

Last week's unseasonal heatwave was even less helpful to the print market than the Beast from the East—sales plummented to their lowest level of the year, with just 2.6 million books sold for £22.3m. While week-on-week volume fell 12.5% and value 9.6%, the year-on-year figures actually held up well—up 1% in value on the same week in 2017.