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A record weekly sale from James Patterson helped the American author, nicknamed the "publishing juggernaut", top the Official UK Top 50 for a second consecutive week. Sail (Arrow), his third thriller written in collaboration with Howard Roughan, sold 54,419 copies through Nielsen BookScan Total Consumer Market during the seven days to 20th June, smashing his previous weekly record—set by Mary, Mary (Headline) back in September 2006—by more than 9,000 copies.
It proved the bestseller in a week of welcome Father's Day-boosted sales for book retailers. According to BookScan data, £30.3m was spent through the TCM last week, up 11.8% on the previous week and, due to Father's Day falling a week later this year, up 10.8% year on year. Last week's sales were up a slim 0.1% on the week immediately prior to Father's Day in 2008.
Two other authors set new 30,000-plus weekly sales records last week—Michael Connelly, with his second Mickey Haller thriller, The Brass Verdict (Orion), and Bernard Cornwell, thanks to his latest historial epic Azincourt (Harper).
Ahead of the adaptation's silver-screen release on Friday, the film tie-in edition of Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper (Hodder) rocketed into the Top 10, along with Jeremy Clarkson's third World According to Clarkson instalment, For Crying Out Loud (Penguin), and Andy McNab's SAS memoir Seven Troop (Corgi).
Meanwhile, Antony Beevor's D-Day: The Battle for Normandy (Viking) tops both the hardback non-ficiton and independent retailers' chart for a fourth week, while sales of Wilbur Smith's Assegai (Macmillan) more than doubled week-on-week, catapulting him to the top of the Original Fiction chart for the first time in 10 weeks.