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John Green notched up his fourth consecutive week as the Official UK Top 50 number one whilst Hilary Clinton's UK media blitz has seen her claim hardback fiction's top spot.
Green is only the second author in 2014 to achieve a solid month or more at the top of the Nielsen BookScan charts after Dan Brown accomplished the feat in five straight weeks in May and June. Green has also held on to the first and third spots in the chart for the third week in a row, with the original and film tie-in edition of The Fault in Our Stars (Penguin). The two editions combined for sales of just over 52,000 physical units and £268,000 last week, and all physical formats of the book has sold just under 455,000 copies for £2.4m thus far in 2014. Additionally, Green has two other titles in the overall Top 50: Looking for Alaska (HarperCollins, 24th place) and Paper Towns (Bloomsbury, 29th).
Green has also, for the third straight week, denied a top spot for Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (Vintage, 23,177 copies), which has been ensconsed in second place since it was published on the 19th of June. John Grisham’s Sycamore Row (Hodder), the sequel to his 1989 début, A Time to Kill, is also blocked from number one, but is the week’s highest new entry at fourth place (17,587 copies).
Clinton’s whirlwind UK book tour last week—including a number of high-profile media appearances and a signing at Waterstones Piccadilly—has paid dividends. Three weeks after publication Hard Choices (Simon & Schuster) had its best week yet, shifting 6,058 units for just under £71,000, ending the four-week run of Guy Martin’s My Autobiography (Virgin) at the top of Hardback Non-Fiction.
Rising crime star James Oswald recorded his highest first-week sale (10,289 units) for his fourth Detective Inspector McLean book, Dead Man's Bodies (Penguin), which is the second highest new entry to the chart in eighth place.
Other new entries into the top 50 include 15th-placed Catherine Alliott's My Husband Next Door (Penguin, 7,766 units), 30th-ranked Veronica Henry's The Beach Hut Next Door (Orion, 5,067 copies); and Caitlin Moran's much-hyped How to Build a Girl (Ebury), which sold 4,167 copies hardback copies, and hit 43rd place overall, and second in the Original Fiction chart.
All told, £22.6m were spent through the tills last week, up 6% on the previous week, and marginally down (-0.8%) on the same week in 2013.