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Kate Garraway's The Power of Hope (Bantam) has debuted in the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, selling 22,394 copies in its first week on sale. The TV presenter’s memoir, about her husband’s year-long struggle with Covid-19 and how she held on to hope through his illness, ended the run of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (Tinder Press) in the top spot and leapfrogged Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse (Ebury) to hit the Hardback Non-Fiction number one spot.
Garraway's book also leapt straight into Amazon's Most-Sold: Non-Fiction top spot.
The print market sold 3.7 million books for £31.3m, a hefty week on week rise of 18.4% in volume and 17.7% in value. With bookshops reopening in Scotland last week, volume rose to a level higher than the first week bookshops reopened in England and Wales in mid-April. For a usually sluggish time of year, the market was bustling, with last week's figures 37% up in both measures on the same week in 2019.
Ian Rankin’s A Song for the Dark Times (Orion) hit the right chord, becoming the second-highest new entry in the chart and charting second in Mass Market Fiction, below Hamnet. New titles thundered into the Mass Market Fiction chart below the latest Rebus, with Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light (Fourth Estate) among the nine new entries in the Mass Market Fiction top 20 last week.
The Power of Hope led the way in Hardback Non-Fiction, as Raymond Blanc’s Simply Raymond (Headline) debuted in second place. The cookbook, at 12,816 copies sold, was far and away the chef’s highest ever single-week volume in the Nielsen BookScan era.
Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club (Viking) notched up its eighth consecutive week as the Original Fiction number one. Since its publication in September, the cosy crime title has scored 28 non-consecutive weeks in the category chart top spot, just a week off the 29-week record set by Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train (Doubleday) in 2015. But could the mid-May publication of The Thursday Murder Club’s paperback scupper its potential record?
Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler's Tales of Acorn Wood title Cat's Cookbook (Macmillan Children's) charted top of the Children's chart. Donaldson achieved the rare feat of claiming the kids' top two with two different illustrators, as What the Ladybird Heard at the Seaside (Macmillan Children's) with Lydia Monks held second place.
Leigh Bardugo's Shadow and Bone series (Orion Children's) thundered into the Children's and YA Fiction chart, as the series adaptation dropped on Netflix. Katie and Kevin Tsang's Dragon Legend (Simon & Schuster Children's) debuted in fifth.