Walliams’ World’s Worst Children 3 marks hat-trick to series

David Walliams has completed a hat-trick with the third volume of his short story collections, The World’s Worst Children 3 (HarperCollins Children's), scoring the UK Official Top 50 number one. At 77,974 copies sold, this is by far the best week of sales for any title in the series, and 33% up on the first week of The World’s Worst Children 2 in May 2017. It is also the biggest single-week volume for any title across 2018, beating Tom Kerridge's Lose Weight for Good (Absolute) in the second week of January by nearly 8,000 copies.

This is the comedian-turned-author’s 37th overall number one, and his 115th week in the Children’s top spot. The first two World’s Worst Children titles have already shifted nearly 1.2 million copies between them.

Marian Keyes’ The Break (Penguin) elbowed Paula Hawkins’ Into the Water (Black Swan) from the Mass Market Fiction number one, cracking second place overall with 23,867 copies sold in its first week. This is Keyes’ 15th week in the category top spot overall—her first being Sushi for Beginners 17 years ago—with The Break a stunning 26% up on the first-week sales of 2015’s The Woman Who Stole My Life.

Anthony Horowitz swiped his first ever Original Fiction number one, with Forever and a Day (Jonathan Cape), his latest James Bond title, selling 6,791 copies to oust Stephen King’s The Outsider (Hodder) from the category top spot. The Original Fiction chart saw a whopping 10 new entries, including Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (Virago) and Frank Gardner’s Ultimatum (Bantam), as well as new offerings by brand authors Clive Cussler and Danielle Steel.

Special Boat Services sniper Ant Middleton’s memoir First Man In (HarperCollins) bulleted straight into the Hardback Non-Fiction number one, selling 15,178 copies in its first week. In the past year, the only non-cookbook to sell more in a single week has been Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury (Little, Brown).

Aside from The World’s Worst Children 3, Tom and Giovanna Fletcher’s Eve of Man (Michael Joseph) was the highest-charting new entry in Children’s, with the Young Adult title selling 15,205 copies. Derek Landy’s new Skulduggery Pleasant title Midnight also entered the kids’ overall chart in fifth—just below Walliams’ The Midnight Gang.

Julia Donaldson and Lydia Monks’ What the Ladybird Heard on Holiday (Macmillan Children's) benefitted from a half-term boost and re-claimed the Pre School number one from Where’s the Unicorn (Michael O'Mara). And inevitably, Walliams’ backlist returned en masse to the Children’s and YA Fiction top 20, with the author claiming 10 places in total, including all three of the World’s Worst Children series.

Thankfully for the print market, the arrival of June means the summery weather is over—the market jumped 11.3% in volume week on week during last week's drizzle, with a 10.9% bump in value.