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Paula Hawkins’ Into the Water (Doubleday) has held the UK Official Top 50 number one spot for a second week running, according to Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market. The author’s follow-up to her million-copy-bestseller The Girl on the Train sold 23,986 copies for £240,554.
With two weeks at the top spot under its belt, Into the Water is now the longest-running hardback fiction title since Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman (William Heinemann) in July 2015. It is also the first hardback of any category to hold the top spot for more than one week this year, after both Tom Kerridge’s Dopamine Diet (Absolute) and Mary Berry Everyday (BBC) dropped off after a single week.
The top three remained the same as the week before, gifting Transworld a second hat-trick in a row: Shari Lapena’s The Couple Next Door (Corgi) increased its volume 6% to hold the Mass Market Fiction number one for a second week, while Lee Child’s Night School (Bantam) gripped third place. Leasley Pearce’s Dead to Me (Penguin) rose to fourth place, shifting just 95 copies fewer than the Jack Reacher prequel, and Milly Johnson’s The Queen of Wishful Thinking (Simon & Schuster) also jumped up the top 10, to sixth.
Into the Water topped the Original Fiction chart twice—the trade paperback rocketed to second place, selling a further 3,448 copies and appearing in the Top 50. This follows in the footsteps (or train tracks) of The Girl on the Train, which sold over 150,000 copies across two trade paperbacks in 2015 before the mass market paperback was published. Erin Kelly’s He Said/She Said (Hodder & Stoughton) also zipped up the chart, falling just 20 copies below Into the Water’s trade paperback, after featuring on Simon Mayo’s Radio 2 show.
Liz Pichon’s latest Tom Gates titles Family, Friends and Furry Creatures (Scholastic) stole away with the Children’s number one—the author’s third book in a row to hit the category top spot. Waterstones Children’s Book of the Month Emma Carroll’s Letters from the Lighthouse (Faber & Faber) climbed to 12th place in the Children’s and YA Fiction top 20, selling 2,422 copies.
Both non-fiction number ones held on from the week before—Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (Vintage) scoring a fifth non-consecutive week atop the Paperback Non-Fiction chart, and Elena Favilli & Francesca Cavallo’s Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls (Particular) hitting the Hardback Non-Fiction number one for a third week running.
Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (Headline) replaced Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why (Puffin) as the online streaming service adaptation boosted title of the week, after it launched on Amazon Prime in the UK, with Michael Haag’s The Durrells of Corfu (Profile) a place below, assisted by the quainter medium of an ITV adaptation. The title is Waterstones Non-Fiction Book of the Month and acts as a companion to Gerald Durrell’s Corfu Trilogy.
The print market declined 4% in value week on week to £23.8m, but its year on year figures remained strong, leaping 6.5%. Children's continued to be particularly healthy, with a 10% jump in value on the same week in 2016.