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Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train (Black Swan) has chugged its way back into the Official UK Top 50 number one spot, as it surpasses the half a million copies sold mark in mass market paperback. Last week, the psychological thriller shifted 32,690 copies for £171,580, according to Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market.
The Girl on the Train’s week-on-week volume jumped 11% in, fittingly, its 11th week on sale to secure its fifth week as overall number one and ninth in the Mass Market Fiction top spot. Across all print editions, Hawkins’ crime début is now approaching £10m earned since January 2015.
Jojo Moyes’ After You (Penguin) dropped to second, suffering a 21% decline in volume on the week before. However, with the combined sales of predecessor Me Before You (Michael Joseph), Moyes still shifted over 50,000 units over all editions of her million-copy-selling love-and-Dignitas duology.
Peter Robinson’s When the Music’s Over (Hodder & Stoughton), the 23rd title in his DCI Banks series, fell out of the Top 50 but toppled Carrie Hope Fletcher’s On the Other Side (Sphere) from the Original Fiction number one. It shifted 345 copies more than the YouTuber’s fiction début, after Fletcher beat Robinson into second place by over 2,500 units a week ago. This is Robinson’s fourth week in the Original Fiction top spot, and also the fourth week a crime author called Peter took the category’s top spot in 2016 so far - after Peter James’ Love You Dead (Macmillan) spent three weeks at number one in May.
With the release of the Steven Spielberg adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG in UK cinemas last week, two editions rocketed into the Top 50. The centenary edition (Puffin), released in February, took 29th place, with 5,541 copies sold, and the film tie-in edition (Puffin), featuring star Ruby Barnhill and Mark Rylance’s feet on the cover, hit 27th place, shifting just 127 copies more.
This is the second film adaptation-boosted duo of titles to hit the Top 50 this year, with Me Before You and its film tie-in a constant presence in the chart since April. With its talent for resurgence, The Girl on the Train, whose film adaptation is released in October, could pull off the same trick.
Zoe “Zoella” Sugg’s Girl Online: On Tour (Puffin), out in paperback, climbed 45 places in its second week on sale, shifting 4,456 copies. The hardback, the sequel to Sugg’s Girl Online, has sold 318,604 copies since October. Additionally, the W H Smith-backed Zoella Book Club titles received a boost, with Jennifer Niven’s All the Bright Things (Penguin) returning to the Top 50 and Nicola Yoon’s Everything, Everything (Corgi Children’s) charting just outside, in 58th place.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Bloomsbury) was another returnee to the Top 50, ahead of the biggest launch of 2016, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (Little, Brown), on Sunday. Despite all this activity in the Children’s chart, David Walliams’ The World’s Worst Children (HarperCollins Children’s) held on to the number one spot for a ninth consecutive week— the longest of any Children’s title since Minecraft: The Official Construction Handbook (Egmont) racked up 11 weeks in April 2014.