Hamnet heads back to top spot as print market jumps by a third

Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet (Tinder Press) has bounced back into the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, the week bookshops reopened across England following the third national lockdown.

With 3.7 million books sold for £31.4m last week, the print market jumped by 33% in volume and 32.5% in value week on week. Though there are no comparative weekly figures for this time last year, at the start of Lockdown 1.0, this was a 13% rise in volume and a 16% increase in value on the same week in 2019.

O'Farrell's Women's Prize-winning Hamnet sold 22,149 copies in paperback for its second full week on the shelves, rising back into both the overall and Mass Market Fiction number one. It was followed closely by Douglas Stuart's Booker Prize-winner Shuggie Bain (Picador), which debuted in the Top 50 in second place in paperback, on 17,879 copies sold.

Vex King's Healing is the New High (Hay House) was the highest new non-fiction title, swiping fifth place overall and the Paperback Non-Fiction number one, with 13,780 copies sold in its first week on sale. Fellow Lockdown 1.0 success Daisy Upton's Five Minute Mum: Time for School (Penguin), charted second in the category chart.

Grace Beverley's Working Hard, Hardly Working (Hutchinson) debuted atop the Hardback Non-Fiction chart, shifting 12,029 copies in its first week on sale and elbowing long-running bestseller Charlie Mackesy's The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse (Ebury) into second.

Dav Pilkey's Dog Man 10: Mothering Heights (Scholastic) re-claimed the Children's number one from Jeff Kinney's Rowley Jefferson's Awesome Friendly Spooky Stories (Puffin). Clare Balding's Fall Off, Get Back On, Keep Going was the highest new entry in the kids' chart, hitting fourth overall and claiming the Children's Non-Fiction number one.

Nielsen BookScan's independent bookseller chart was fiction-heavy for the week ending 17th April, as indie bookshops in England opened their doors for the first time since the very start of 2021. The top three bestselling titles through indies—Hamnet, Shuggie Bain, and Matt Haig's The Midnight Library (Canongate)—were identical to the main TCM chart, as book-buyers rushed to support their local bookshop. The 2020 Nielsen Books & Consumer survey found that the most common reason respondents gave for visiting an indie was to show support, rising from the seventh-most common reason in 2019, and this seems to have carried on into post-lockdown 2021.

Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (Faber) was fourth in the independent bookseller chart, with Rachel Joyce's Miss Benson's Beetle (Black Swan) in fifth. Only one non-fiction title charted in the indie top 10—US Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman's The Hill We Climb (Chatto & Windus), the poem she performed at Joe Biden's presidential inauguration in Washington DC in January, and which charted in the Hardback Non-Fiction top 20 earlier this month. (Poetry is coded as a non-fiction category through Nielsen BookScan.)