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Val McDermid has bounced straight into the UK Official number one spot with Out of Bounds (Sphere), shifting 13,310 copies for £53,483 according to Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market. Not only is this the first non-diet book to go to number one this year, it is also the veteran crime author’s first overall top spot.
McDermid has previously taken the Mass Market Fiction top spot twice, with The Retribution in February 2012 and The Skeleton Road in April 2015.
However, following on from Tom Kerridge’s Dopamine Diet (Absolute) scoring a near-four-year low for a number one title, Out of Bounds is the lowest-selling number one since Jeff Kinney’s Cabin Fever (Puffin) in December 2011. Despite this, the print market’s overall value seems to be holding steady against 2016’s blockbuster January, which saw Joe Wicks’ Lean in 15 (Bluebird) shift nearly 300,000 copies. The “strength in depth” of print shows that even with January 2017’s number ones selling a combined 75% fewer copies than the personal trainer's bestselling cookbook, the overall value for the month was just 2.5% down on the year before—and that's with 2017 taking the hit of the New Year's Day bank holiday.
Ella Mills Woodward’s Deliciously Ella with Friends (Yellow Kite) hit second place, selling 11,423 copies and yanking the Hardback Non-Fiction number one from Kerridge’s dopamine-enhanced grip. Despite the original wellness blogger-turned-bestselling author becoming one of the first of her tribe to deny she ever promoted the clean eating trend, the backlash seems to have affected her sales. Deliciously Ella with Friends’ first week out of the gate is 67% down in volume on last year’s Deliciously Ella Every Day.
But she did beat Mary Berry, who had to settle for 18th overall and third in the Hardback Non-Fiction chart, below Kerridge, with her new cookbook Mary Berry Everyday. The BBC TV chef is playing the long game, though—her titles tend to hit their peak in the week ahead of Mother’s Day, giving Everyday a two-month run-up to the top spot.
Gregg Andrew Hurwitz’s The Nowhere Man (Michael Joseph) swiped the Original Fiction number one from Josephine Cox’s A Family Secret (HarperCollins), with Sarah Pinborough’s Behind Her Eyes (HarperCollins) entering the chart in third place, shifting 1,932 copies. Two other new entries, Jack Sheffield’s Happiest Days (Bantam) and J P Delaney’s The Girl Before (Quercus), hit the top 10.
Out of Bounds stole the Mass Market Fiction number one from Frank Gardner’s Crisis (Bantam), with Louise Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard (Faber & Faber) rising up into second place and third overall with the TV adaptation currently airing on the BBC. Ann Cleeves’ former e-book number one Cold Earth (Pan) hit 14th overall in its first week on sale in paperback.
The Fiction Heatseekers chart—the ranking of fiction titles by authors who have never appeared in the Top 50—was awash with new up-and-comers last week. However, it wasn’t just contenders for the next Girl on the Train who rocketed up the chart: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (Penguin), which raced up Amazon hit lists in America last week, jumped 203% in volume week on week, shifting 2,682 copies to chart third. A newly re-issued edition of Sinclair Lewis’ 1936 novel It Can’t Happen Here from Penguin Classics—in which “a vain, outlandish, anti-immigrant demagogue runs for President of the United States… and wins” also hit the Fiction Heatseekers top 10, selling 1,628 copies. Can’t think why.