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Tom Fletcher and Shane Devries’ Brain Freeze (Puffin) has scored a hat trick, topping the UK Official Top 50 for a third week running. The World Book Day (WBD) title sold 26,215 copies for pop star-turned-author Fletcher’s longest run in the top spot. It’s rare for a WBD title to hang on for a third week—in fact, Fletcher joins David Walliams (with Blob, in 2017) and Ian Whybrow (with Little Wolf’s Postbag, in 2001) as the only three authors to claim the number one spot with a WBD tome more than two weeks in a row. Coupled with Fletcher’s previous WBD number one The Dinosaur That Pooped a Lot!’s two-week run in 2015, the McFly frontman is now the longest-running number one WBD author since records began.
The rest of the 2018 WBD tranche is still holding up strongly, with nine titles in the top 10—the only non-WBD title being Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (Harper), in fourth place—with Nadiya Hussain & Clair Rossiter’s Bake Me a Story (Hachette Children's) in 15th place. The unseasonal blizzard the week of World Book Day seems to have resulted in a longer shelf life for this year’s pack.
Clare Mackintosh’s Let Me Lie (Sphere) knocked Jojo Moyes’ Still Me (Michael Joseph) from the Original Fiction number one, shifting 4,476 copies. This is the crime author’s second Original Fiction pole, after I See You hit the top spot in August 2016. Curiously, despite her paperbacks selling well over half a million copies between them, she has never hit the Mass Market Fiction top spot—maybe Let Me Lie will become her first title to take both fiction number ones.
The Hardback Non-Fiction, Paperback Non-Fiction and Mass-Market Fiction top 20s have been topped by the same three titles since the last week of January—Eleanor Oliphant…, Tom Kerridge’s Lose Weight for Good (Absolute) and Joe Wicks’ The Fat-Loss Plan (Bluebird). While Honeyman and Kerridge notched up an eighth and 10th week in their category top spots respectively, Wicks became the first casualty of the three—The Fat-Loss Plan’s 11-week run in the Paperback Non-Fiction number one came to an end, as it was leapfrogged by Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (Vintage). The popular science title, which has charted in the Top 50 every week for over a year, scored its 18th paperback pole. Its total sales are now closing in on 600,000 copies sold.
Professor Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (Bantam) rocketed upwards after the announcement of the scientist’s death last week, jumping 765% to 3,195 copies and charting sixth place in the Paperback Non-Fiction top 20. This is the 2011 edition’s highest ever weekly volume, despite cresting 2,000 copies in early 2015, around the time the Oscar-winning biopic "The Theory of Everything" was released.
WBD titles still dominate the Children’s chart, though a few Easter-themed Pre-School titles have poked their heads up—Fiona Watt and Rachel Wells’ That’s Not My Chick (Usborne) and We’re Going on an Egg Hunt (Bloomsbury Children's) entered the Top 50. Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone (Macmillan Children's), a Waterstones pick for March, charted 18th in the Children’s & Young Adult Fiction top 20.