The Thursday Murder Club boomerangs back into the top spot

Richard Osman's The Thursday Murder Club (Penguin) has bounced back to the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, for an 11th week in total and a sixth week in paperback.

The title sold 15,292 copies last week, the lowest single-week volume for any number one title since Harlan Coben's Run Away (Arrow) in August 2019. Despite this, the print market as a whole was up 6.8% in volume and 2.4% in value against the same week in 2020, indicating the strength lies in the market's depth.

However, Osman's cosy crime title is far and away the bestselling title of the year to date (from mid-March onwards, when Nielsen BookScan began reporting sales figures again post-Lockdown 3.0). With the sequel, The Man Who Died Twice, out in hardback in a month's time, Osman could end up topping both the Mass Market Fiction and Original Fiction charts at the same time—and could even take 2021's top two spots at the end of the year.

Ken Follett's The Evening and the Morning (Pan) and Coben's Win (Arrow) jumped up to second and third place. Colleen Hoover's TikTok-boosted It Ends With Us (S&S), published in 2016, made its debut in the Mass Market Fiction top 20, with T M Logan's Trust Me (Zaffre) joining it a place below, in 12th.

Jane Dunn's Jane's Patisserie (Ebury) held the Hardback Non-Fiction number one for a second week, with its Ebury stablemate The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse galloping back up to second place.

The Official Highway Code (TSO) revved its engine in the Paperback Non-Fiction number one, for a second consecutive week in the top spot—and its sixth week this year. Amir Khan's The Doctor Will See You Now (Ebury) and Ruby Wax's A Mindfulness Guide for Survival (Welbeck) debuted in fourth and fifth respectively.

David Walliams and Tony Ross' Megamonster (HarperCollins) and Tom Fletcher and Greg Abbott's There's a Unicorn in Your Book (Puffin) once again claimed the Children's and YA Fiction and the Pre-School number one respectively. Marcus Rashford and Carl Anka's You Are a Champion (Macmillan Children's) notched up another Children's Non-Fiction number one, though Natural History Museum guide (and school holiday stalwart) Kids Only zipped up 11 places to second.