Honeyman's debut claims the top spot

Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (HarperCollins) has soared into the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, selling 29,442 copies for £170,329 through Nielsen BookScan’s TCM. Though the Costa First Novel Award winner declined a marginal 1.7% in volume week on week, four-week number one Tom Kerridge’s Lose Weight for Good (Absolute) crashed to 18,025 copies sold, vacating the top spot.

Due to five weeks of number one lockdown by both Kerridge and Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury (Little, Brown), Eleanor Oliphant… is the first paperback, the first fiction title and the first book written by a woman to hit the top spot this year. In fact, aside from a single week when E L James’ Darker (Arrow) ascended to the number one, Honeyman is the first female number one author in 25 weeks. Eleanor Oliphant... is the first debut title to take the top spot since Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run (Simon & Schuster)—a very different kind of debut—in October 2016.

The title’s paperback, after three weeks on sale, is now within 7,000 copies of outselling the blockbuster hardback, which has sold 85,268 copies since its release in May 2017.

Philippa Gregory’s The Last Tudor (Simon & Schuster) was the highest new entry, charting third with 14,405 copies sold. Though remarkably consistent with the first week sales of last year’s paperback Three Sisters, Three Queens—The Last Tudor was 3% up in volume—the historical fiction author missed out on a springtime Mass Market Fiction number one for the first time in four years.

Philip K Dick made his debut in the Top 50, with Blade Runner (Gollancz) zooming into fourth place, as the film sequel “Blade Runner 2049” was released on DVD, and both Katie Fforde and Stuart MacBride’s new offerings A Secret Garden (Arrow) and A Dark So Deadly (HarperCollins) entered the Mass Market Fiction top 10.

Jojo Moyes’ Still Me (Michael Joseph) held the Original Fiction number one for a third week, with Sophie Kinsella’s Surprise Me (Bantam) and Chris Carter’s Gallery of the Dead (S&S) hitting the top five.

David Walliams reclaimed the Children’s number one after briefly losing a week ago to Jeff Kinney, with The Midnight Gang’s release in paperback. Robin Stevens’ A Spoonful of Murder (Puffin) charted in sixth place and became the author’s first title to hit the overall Top 50. Padriag Kenny’s Tin (Chicken House), Waterstones Children’s Book of the Month, hit 16th place in the kids’ book chart.

After last week’s centenary of the 1918 suffrage act, Kate Pankhurst’s Fantastically Great Women Who Made History (Bloomsbury) went straight to the top of the Children’s Non-Fiction top 20, closely followed by Fantastically Great Women Who Changed the World in second. Sally Nicholls’ Things a Bright Girl Can Do (Andersen) stormed up the Small Publishers Children’s top 20, and Jenni Murray’s Votes for Women! (Oneworld) joined her A History of Britain in 21 Women in the Small Publishers Non-Fiction chart.

The print market declined 3.7% in volume and 2.7% in value week on week, but is still holding up well against 2017. For the first six weeks of the year, 2018 is up nearly 4% in value and 2% in volume on the same period a year ago—and is even outstripping 2016's first six weeks in value terms, posting a 1.9% bump.