Brown bags it: Origin takes two in a row

Dan Brown’s Origin (Bantam) has once again claimed the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, selling 60,602 copies for £631,480. Though this is a steep drop of 40% in volume week on week, it is still the second-biggest week for a hardback fiction title in over two years.

This, Brown’s 76th number one since records began, sets him back on the road to reclaiming the record of most weeks spent in the top spot. After the release of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (Little, Brown) in 2016, J K Rowling inched past Brown to 80 weeks under her belt. But four more weeks in the top spot may be asking too much of Origin—the previous Robert Langdon title Inferno racked up four in total, sold more than double in its first fortnight and came out in May, a much quieter time in the publishing calendar. Origin will have to defeat challenges from Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage, David Walliams’ Bad Dad and E L James’ Darker to hold the top spot.

But one record that Origin might be able to claim back for Brown is his Original Fiction number one record. Transworld stablemate Paula Hawkins surpassed him in 2015 with hardback bestseller The Girl on the Train chugging into the number one spot 29 times, one more than Brown’s total—and her 2017 number one Into the Water only widened the gap. But Origin’s two weeks at the top of the chart puts him back at 30, with just six to go to defeat her. Last week’s volume saw Origin outsell Into the Water—after two weeks on sale—to become the bestselling hardback fiction title of the year.

John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down (Penguin) was the highest new entry, shifting 12,299 copies and yanking the Children’s number one away from the illustrated edition of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. This is Green’s biggest-selling opening week yet, and 129% up on The Fault in our Stars’ first week on sale, in January 2013. The title went on to spend eight weeks in the overall number one spot the following year alongside the release of the film adaptation, becoming the bestselling book of 2014.

For similar reasons, Jo Nesbo’s The Snowman (Vintage) bounced upwards to fifth place, as the Michael Fassbender film hit cinemas.

Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (Vintage) just can’t be stopped—it returned to the Paperback Non-Fiction number one for a non-consecutive 13th week, defeating Rupi Kaur’s The Sun and Her Flowers (Simon & Schuster). With James Patterson’s Cross the Line (Arrow) holding on to its Mass Market Fiction number one, that made an all-male clean sweep for the category top spots.

If the Man Booker Prize was decided by sales, Ali Smith's Autumn (Penguin) would walk away with it—it is still the only title from the shortlist to hit the Top 50, and rocketed upwards 13 places last week. Fiona Mozley's Elmet (J M Originals) and Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1 (Faber & Faber) also performed well, finishing side-by-side in the Original Fiction top 20 (possibly elbowing each other in the ribs). In comparison, the bookies' favourite, George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury), sold just 273 copies across all editions last week, charting 3,024th. But by next week, everything could look very different...