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David Walliams’ Bad Dad (HarperCollins) has soared back into the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, displacing E L James’ Darker (Arrow) after a single week’s reign. Bad Dad sold 67,061 copies for £400,317, notching up a fifth non-consecutive week in the top spot and surpassing the half a million copies sold mark in a scant six weeks.
Jamie Oliver’s 5 Ingredients (Michael Joseph) also leapt upwards, jumping 29% in volume week on week and claiming second place, pushing Darker into third place. But has Jamie done enough to pip Walliams to the Christmas Number One next week? Bad Dad’s weekly volume is currently a healthy 12,427 copies ahead of 5 Ingredients, yet Walliams is in decline—and Oliver holds all the momentum. If 5 Ingredients can jump another 29% in volume, it can beat Bad Dad—as long as the Children’s title doesn’t have a late surge in sales.
Unlike the snow in south-east England, the chart has settled for Christmas—everything simply shuffled round a bit last week, with Dan Brown’s Origin (Bantam) leapfrogging James Honeybourne & Mark Brownlow’s Blue Planet II (BBC), and David Jason’s Only Fools and Stories (Century), Lee Child’s The Midnight Line (Bantam) and Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage (Penguin/David Fickling) doing an awkward three-step at the edges of the top 10.
Stephen Fry’s Mythos (Michael Joseph) rose 30 places, hitting 15th place, while Chris Heath's Robbie Williams biography Reveal (Blink) and Dawn French’s Me. You. A Diary (Michael Joseph) both entered the Top 50 in 21st and 24th place respectively. Surely it’s no coincidence that all three stars have appeared on The Graham Norton Show in the last two weeks. Maybe Norton is eyeing up a place for himself on the Bookseller’s 2018 100 list.
Even the longest-running chart-huggers can’t compete with the onslaught of Christmas-gift-friendly releases—with one glaring exception. Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (Vintage) last week achieved its 40th week running in the Top 50, and held second place in the Paperback Non-Fiction chart. Sinclair McKay's Bletchley Park Brainteasers (Headline) continues to crack the code to the top spot, leaping 70% in volume week on week.
It’s rare for a Mass Market Fiction title to make any sort of impact this close to Christmas—unless of course, it’s part of a series that has already sold 12 million copies—but Lulu Taylor’s Her Frozen Heart (Pan) has done it, ski-jumping into 38th place overall and third in the Mass Market Fiction chart. This year has seen wintery and festive-themed fiction do particularly well, in a similar way to e-book seasonal success. Though the hygge trend of Christmas 2016—which impressively rode the wave through to January’s “new year, new you” period—is all but gone from the non-fiction charts, Clara Christensen’s Hygge and Kisses (Simon & Schuster) hit 17th in the Mass Market Fiction chart.
Over in the Children's charts, the unicorn mini-trend canters on, with the My Little Pony Annual 2018 (Hachette Children's) getting an unprecented boost to fourth in the Children's Non-Fiction charts. In the Children's and YA Fiction top 20, the musical edition of Tom Fletcher and Shane Devries' The Christmasaurus (Puffin) saw a similar (albeit non-unicorn related) bump, rising from 13th place to sixth.
The print market rose in both weekly volume and value for the sixth week running—yet the year-on-year figures were not so rosy, with last week down 5.6% in value and 8.5% in volume on the same week in 2016. The year's total volume for the year to date is just under 170 million books sold, a 2.7% drop on the same point in 2016, but value is now virtually level—2017 has brought in just £39,635 less, a 0.0028% decline.