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J K Rowling and Jack Thorne’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (Little, Brown) has held on to the number one spot for a sixth week—by the tips of its fingers. It sold 26,547 copies— just 1,404 more than second-placed The Girl on the Train (Black Swan), according to Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market.
Still, Cursed Child has now racked up the third-longest run at the top spot for a Harry Potter book, with only Goblet of Fire (with 10 straight weeks) and Order of the Phoenix (with seven) spending longer at number one. In six weeks on sale, Cursed Child has already surpassed 1.2 million copies sold.
The Girl on the Train also continues to chug along—it has now sold over 700,000 copies in mass market, spent 16 weeks as the Mass Market Fiction number one and is yet to sell fewer than 25,000 copies per week. It was joined in the Top 50 last week by its own film tie-in edition, which sold 8,202 copies to chart 14th.
The top four remained identical to the week before—with Jojo Moyes’ After You (Penguin) leapfrogging Jeffrey Archer’s Cometh the Hour (Pan) to claim fifth. But there was a lot of movement in the lower echelons of the Top 50; Jilly Cooper’s Mount! (Bantam) bounded into the top 10, shifting 12,579 copies and wrestling the Original Fiction number one from Ian McEwan’s Nutshell (Jonathan Cape). This was Cooper’s seventh Original Fiction top spot—putting her on equal footing with McEwan.
Richard and Judy picks Gregg Hurwitz’s Orphan X (Penguin), Susie Steiner’s Missing, Presumed (The Borough Press) and Fiona Barton’s The Widow (Corgi) climbed en masse up the chart, while there were new paperback entries in the form of Linwood Barclay’s Far from True (Orion), in 10th, L S Hilton’s Maestra (Zaffre), in 17th, and Stephen King’s Bazaar of Bad Dreams (Hodder), in 41st.
Though Great British Bake Off: Perfect Cakes & Bakes to Make at Home (Hodder & Stoughton) lost its Hardback Non-Fiction number one to Damon Hill’s Watching the Wheels (Macmillan), which sold 5,715 copies in its first week on sale, "GBBO" presenter Sue Perkins’ autobiography Spectacles (Penguin) rocketed 114 places into 12th, despite being released over a month ago. Its 8,967-unit volume last week represented a 397% boost in volume week on week.
The Children’s Pre-School and Picture Book chart is usually fairly consistent, its readership being pretty much immune to trends, but after the rediscovered Beatrix Potter book The Tale of Kitty in Boots (Warne) parachuted into the top spot a week ago, it saw more upheaval this week as the new Julia Donaldson & Axel Scheffler title, Zog and the Flying Doctors (Scholastic), went straight into second, shifting just 1,193 fewer copies than The Tale of Kitty in Boots. It also hit 43rd overall.
There was definitely a back-to-school effect in last week’s chart—with GCSE text J B Priestley’s An Inspector Calls (Heinemann) hitting 38th place, and Collins English Dictionary and Collins English Thesaurus both climbing, while summer holiday craze tie-in Pokemon Go: The Unofficial Field Guide (Welden Owen) dropped out of the Top 50.
However, the countdown to Christmas has officially begun—Guinness World Records 2017 (GWR) went straight to 46th place in its first week on sale, shifting 4,213 copies.
Last week's value rocketed 10.8% week on week to £29.5m, the second-most valuable week of the year so far, after the week Cursed Child was released. Average selling price hit a high for the year to date, at £8.39.