Pearse topples James to claim top spot

Lesley Pearse has notched up her second Official Top 50 number one, displacing E L James.

The paperback edition of Without a Trace (Penguin) sold 15,960 copies (worth £64,667) last week through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market as Grey (Arrow) dropped to third place. The hardback edition of the title has sold 17,266 units since it was released in May.

Pearse previously topped the chart once before in July 2010, when Stolen (Penguin) sold 38,244 copies before it was knocked off the following week by Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol (Bantam).
 
Stolen went on to sell 323,552 copies for £1.7m. In total, Pearse has sold over three million books through the TCM making over £19.2m for UK booksellers.
 
James Patterson came in a very close second place with 14th Deadly Sin (Arrow), which sold 15,811 copies—just 149 below Without a Trace.

His book 14th Deadly Sin, the latest in the Women’s Murder Club series written with Maxine Paetro, actually sold more copies than Patterson’s most recent number one, Invisible (Arrow), which shifted 15,693 copies to take the top spot in February.
 
The previous week’s number one, Grey, slipped into third place with 13,575 copies sold, a 20.9% drop in volume week on week. E L James’ fourth novel has now officially sold one million paperback copies in the eight weeks since its release in June. This is faster than all three of the titles in the original Fifty Shades trilogy, which each took 11 weeks to reach the one million mark in the summer of 2012. Grey only has to sell 16,000 more copies to overtake Julia Donaldson’s The Gruffalo’s Child (Macmillan Children’s) and enter the top 50 of the highest-selling books since records began, in which the Fifty Shades trilogy occupies first, third and fourth place.
 

Meanwhile, Philippa Gregory's The Taming of the Queen (Simon & Schuster) ended the five-week run of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman (William Heinemann) as the Original Fiction number one. Gregory's latest—which focuses on Catherine Parr and the intrigue in the dying days of Henry VIII's court—shifted 11,496 copies to Go Set a Watchman's 11,020. This continues an impressive run for Gregory: her last seven hardbacks have all claimed the Original Fiction top spot.  

The film tie-in edition and the original version of John Green’s Paper Towns (both Bloomsbury Children’s) took first and second place in the Children’s chart in the week the film adaptation premieres in UK cinemas, closely followed by the paperback of Zoe “Zoella” Sugg’s Girl Online (Penguin) in third place. Paper Towns sold a combined 13,440 across both editions, which would have put it only a whisker behind Grey in the overall chart.
 
The hardback of Zoella’s debut has sold 392,143 copies since its record-breaking launch in November last year. The paperback enters the top 50 in 29th place, selling 5,787 copies.
 
Linda Collister’s Great British Bake Off: Celebrations (Hodder), the previous week’s highest new entry, has taken the number one Hardback Non-Fiction spot from Marcus Butler’s Hello Life! (Headline), despite a 13% week-on-week decline in volume sales to 5,256. Rick Stein’s From Venice to Istanbul (BBC) improved on its launch week numbers to sell 5,140 copies and enter the top 50 in 36th place, taking second place in the Hardback Non-Fiction chart and pushing Butler into third.
 
After the death of Cilla Black at the age of 72 on 1st August, her autobiography What’s It All About? (Ebury) sold 1,390 copies last week to enter the chart in 220th place. Since its release in 2003 it sold 86,268 copies across hardback and paperback.