The Mirror and the Light top, but market data no longer available

Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light (Fourth Estate) has once again scored the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, charting top for a fourth straight week since publication at the start of March. Mantel's third Cromwell title is now the longest-running Adult Fiction title in the number one spot since Dan Brown's Origin (Bantam) in summer 2018.

However, because bookshops across the country have been closing in response to the coronavirus crisis, Nielsen BookScan is unable to report full market data for the week ending 28th March. As a result, the bestseller charts for the past week do not include volume or value figures or average selling prices. There is also no way to tell the size of the overall market, or what impact coronavirus is having on the book business. Nielsen has already communicated the change to its clients.

Nevertheless, surpassing the three weeks at the top notched up by Margaret Atwood's The Testaments (Chatto & Windus) in 2019 and Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman (Arrow) in 2015, The Mirror and the Light is now the longest-running hardback fiction title in over a decade, with (again) Brown's The Lost Symbol racking up six consecutive weeks in 2009. Charlie Mackesy's The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse held second place in the Top 50 and topped the Hardback Non-Fiction chart for an eighth straight week and a 10th week in total. Recently, the illustrated title surpassed 600,000 copies sold to date.

Daisy Upton's Five Minute Mum (Penguin) rocketed nine places to top the Paperback Non-Fiction chart. In surely one of the accidentally-perfectly-timed publications ever, Upton's book of quick-and-easy-to-set-up activities for parents to do with children also soared into sixth place in the Top 50. Jack Monroe's store-cupboard cookbook Tin Can Cook (Bluebird) also returned to the Paperback Non-Fiction top 10, and Joanna Basford's colouring book Enchanted Forest (Laurence King), not seen in the charts since the heady days of 2015 when the adult colouring trend was at its peak, boomeranged back into 16th.

Jeffrey Archer's Nothing Ventured (Pan) leapfrogged his Pan Macmillan stablemate David Baldacci's One Good Deed to claim the Mass Market Fiction number one, with James Patterson & Candice Fox's The Inn and Jeffery Deaver's The Never Game (HarperCollins) both climbing into the top three. Dean Koontz's pandemic thriller The Eyes of Darkness (Headline), a staple in the weekly e-book charts over the past month, hit the Mass Market Fiction top 20 for the first time.

The Children's charts were awash with early-learning activity books. Thirteen of the overall kids' top 20 were Collins learning guides, snapped up by home-schooling parents, with the Childen's bestseller Addition and Subtraction Ages 5-7 (Collins)—which also hit 10th in the Top 50. David Walliams and Tony Ross' latest release, Slime (HarperCollins), appeared in the Children's and YA Fiction chart a week ahead of its publication date, but had to settle for third place behind The Beast of Buckingham Palace and The Ice Monster.