The Ends game: Victoria Hislop’s The Figurine is tops again, but Colleen Hoover is the all-editions champ

Victoria Hislop’s The Figurine (Headline) has retained the UK Official Top 50 number one for a second week on the trot, but the tie-in-boosted combined sales of two versions of Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us (Simon & Schuster) would have easily put the American author in pole position.

The Figurine shifted 17,421 copies last week through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market, an impressive 25% rise on its mass-market paperback launch in the previous seven-day period. This marks Hislop’s 18th overall UK number one, her 23rd time atop the Mass Market Fiction chart.    

Yet as “It Ends with Us” dropped in cinemas⁠ – complete with reams of press owing to star Blake Lively and co-star/director James Baldoni’s red carpet feuding⁠ – the original paperback and tie-in edition of Hoover’s book were in second and third place, together chalking up nearly a nearly 31,000-unit sale through BookScan. An excellent week overall for Hoover, though, as It Starts with Us (Simon & Schuster, 13,875 copies) was in fourth place, while she had an additional three titles in the top 100.

Another week, another win for the subscription box model as the Fairyloot August Young Adult selection, Keshe Chow’s The Girl With No Reflection, was the top new title, shifting just over 10,000 units to hit seventh overall and easily capture the Children’s number one, ending a three-week run for Katie Kirby’s The Majorly Awkward BFF Dramas of Lottie Brooks (Puffin). Chow’s triumph marks the seventh time in the past year that publisher Hodderscape has bagged a Children’s or Original Fiction (OF) number one thanks to a subscription box nod. 

In a light publication week, Chow was one of just three newcomers to the top 50. Helped by an energetic publicity tour, Elif Shafak scored by far her personal best for a hardback launch, with There Are Rivers in the Sky (Viking) shifting 4,971 copies; this represents a 51% rise on the first week for her last book, 2021’s The Island of Missing Trees (Bloomsbury).

After topping the Heatseekers Fiction chart at launch, Miye Lee’s The DallerGut Dream Department Store (Wildfire, translated by Sandy Joosun Lee) barrelled into the top 50 in its second week. A massive bestseller in Lee’s native Korea, DallerGut… leads another strong seven days for the East Asian cosy fantasy trend with Michiko Aoyama’s  What You Are Looking For Is In the Library (Transworld, translated by Alison Watts), Hwang Bo-reum’s Shanna Tan-translated Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop (Bloomsbury) and Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s evergreen Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Picador, Geoffrey Trousselot translation) all moving more than 1,300 units.

Surging fantasy star Sarah A Parker’s When the Moon Hatched (HarperVoyager, 8,481 units) returned to the top of OF for the third time, after being displaced by Barbara Erskine’s The Story Spinner (HarperCollins) the previous week. Five of the top 10 titles in OF are Science Fiction & Fantasy; in a rarity of late, one comes for the “SF” end in the form of James S A Corey’s newest space opera, The Mercy of Gods (Orbit).

Kay and Kate Allinson’s Pinch of Nom Air Fryer returned to the Hardback Non-Fiction top spot for the seventh time in the last two months after it was displaced last week by Jane Dunn’s Jane’s Patisserie Easy Favourites (Ebury Press). In a similar dominant streak, Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge scored a ninth non-consecutive number one in Paperback Non-Fiction.

After a fortnight of contraction, the overall market rebounded somewhat, with a sliver over £30m sold through the TCM, a 2.1% bump on the previous week and 4.3% up on the same period in 2023.