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Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (Little, Brown) has snatched the Official Top 50 number one for a fourth week, according to Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market. J K Rowling, Jack Thorne and John Tiffany’s playscript sold 52,719 copies for £652,220, making it the longest-running children’s number one since Judith Kerr’s Mog’s Christmas Calamity (HarperCollins Children's) in November 2015.
This is the first time a Little, Brown title has held the number one for more than three weeks on the trot—beating Rowling’s own The Casual Vacancy, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight spin-off The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner and Patricia Cornwell’s Book of the Dead, all of which held the number one for three weeks apiece. It is also Rowling's 75th number one overall, when added to her three top spots writing as Robert Galbraith, making her the author with the most weeks spent at number one.
After three straight weeks of the same top three— Cursed Child, Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train (Black Swan) and Jojo Moyes’ After You (Penguin)—the monopoly was broken up last week by the new entry of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (Faber & Faber) in second place, selling 29,837 copies. Sainsbury's were offering the title as part of a buy one get one free deal with the release of the Disney live action film adaptation on DVD.
Hawkins’ psychological thriller dropped to third, but Jeffrey Archer’s Cometh the Hour (Pan) muscled its way into fourth place, elbowing out Moyes’ After You to fifth. Cometh the Hour topped the Original Fiction chart in hardback for three weeks in February. In its first week in paperback it shifted 19,266 copies.
Philippa Gregory held the Original Fiction top spot with Three Sisters, Three Queens (Simon & Schuster) for a third consecutive week, matching the run of Stephen King’s End of Watch (Hodder) at the beginning of the summer. It is now the longest running female-authored Original Fiction number one since The Girl on the Train totted up 29 weeks atop the chart in hardback. Incidentally, the paperback of ...Train has now racked up 14 weeks as the Mass Market Fiction number one.
The new "Great British Bake Off" tie-in title—Linda Collister’s Great British Bake Off: Perfect Cakes and Bakes to Make at Home (Hodder & Stoughton)—knocked that other national treasure Jamie Oliver off the Hardback Non-Fiction number one, after a four week run for the chef’s Super Food Family Classics (Michael Joseph). Perfect Cakes to Make and Bake at Home sold 4,674 copies in its first week on sale.
The newest Ladybird Books for Grown-Ups title How it Works: The Student (Michael Joseph) entered the Top 50 for the first time, jumping 192 places on its first week in the chart.