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Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol (Corgi) has retained its position at the summit of the Official UK Top 50 and by a comfortable margin. The sequel to The Da Vinci Code (Corgi) sold 75,974 copies at UK book retail outlets during the seven days to 7th August. Its sales were down 46% week-on-week but it nonetheless sold some 48,700 copies more than the next bestselling book of the week, Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest (Quercus). Life sales of The Lost Symbol now stand at 1,705,000 copies across all editions.
Sales of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy jumped 8% week-on-week ahead of the second installment in the trilogy, The Girl Who Played with Fire (Quercus), hitting UK cinema screens later this month. Dorothy Koomson's The Ice Cream Girls (Sphere) takes third position in the chart with a 25,425 weekly sale.
In total, £30.9m was spent at UK book retail outlets last week, according to Nielsen BookScan data. The figure is down 2.8% week-on-week but up 4% on the same week last year when Linwood Barclay's Too Close to Home (Orion) topped the charts.
The Official UK Top 50 welcomes 11 new entries this week, including two in the top 10. The mass-market edition of Ian Rankin's standalone thriller, The Complaints (Orion), which sold 85,000 copies in hardback, joins the chart in sixth position while James Patterson's Swimsuit (Arrow), co-authored with Maxine Paetro, joins the chart in seventh place.
Also new in the Official UK Top 50 are the mass-market editions of Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (Penguin), which sold a respectable 53,000 copies in hardback, and George Dawes Green's Ravens (Sphere), the US novelist's first work of fiction in more than 14 years. Sales of the latter were helped by its spot in WHSmith's "£2.99 if you buy the Times" link-save promotion.
Kate Kerrigan's Ellis Island (Pan) also débuts. Sales of the book jumped 14% week-on-week ahead of its appearance under More4/Channel Four's "The TV Book Club" spotlight on Sunday (8th August).
In Original Fiction, two of the biggest names in crime-writing fail to topple Katie Price from the summit of the chart. James Patterson's Don't Blink (Century), co-authored with Howard Roughan, joins the chart in second position, while Peter Robinson's latest Inspector Banks thriller, Bad Boy (Hodder), joins the list in third place. Robinson's previous DCI Banks thriller, All the Colours of Darkness (Hodder), sold 31,000 copies in hardback.
This week's hardback non-fiction chart welcomes three new entries, as Peter Mandelson's The Third Man (HarperPress) holds top spot for a fourth week. Levi Roots' latest cookbook, Food for Friends (Mitchell Beazley) débuts in 11th position; opinionated footballer Robbie Savage's memoir, Savage! (Mainstream), joins the list in 15th place; and Susan Finden's biography of her late bus-travelling cat, Casper the Commuting Cat (Simon & Schuster), débuts in 16th position.
Meanwhile, the impact of the new football season can clearly be seen in this week's Paperback Non-fiction chart which welcomes both the Nationwide Football Annual 2010/2011 (SportsBooks) and the Sky Sports Football Yearbook 2010/2011 (Headline) for the first time. Comedian Stewart Lee's How I Escaped My Certain Fate (Faber) also débuts.
In children's, Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid titles continue to creep up the bestseller lists, ahead of the adaptation of the first book in the series hitting UK cinemas later this month, while Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler's latest storybook, Zog, débuts atop the children's pre-school list.