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Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (Little, Brown) has Wingardium Leviosa’d straight into the UK Official Top 50 number one spot. The paperback of the first playscript to hit the top spot sold 20,123 copies for £87,229.
This is J K Rowling’s 79th overall number one, and her seventh with playwright/director team Jack Thorne and John Tiffany, after the six-week run of the hardback in summer 2016. She puts more space between herself and former recordholder Dan Brown, whose 74 weeks at number one are starting to disappear in Rowling’s rearview mirror—until the October release of Origin, of course.
Including number ones achieved under her pseudonym Robert Galbraith, Rowling has achieved a number one every year for the past six years, since 2012’s The Casual Vacancy (Sphere) hit the top spot after a rare Rowling dry spell of four years. Between 1999 and 2008, she spent at least one week atop the overall charts every year, including years no new Harry Potters were published. With 63 number ones over those nine years, she had a number one on average every seven weeks.
Aside from the success of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child paperback, the chart remained roughly consistent. The four main adult categories held the same number ones as the week before: Santa Montefiore’s The Last Secret of the Deverills (Simon & Schuster) spent a third week in the Original Fiction top spot and John Grisham’s The Whistler (Hodder) called in another Mass Market Fiction number one—his 45th. Nadiya Hussain whipped up another week for Nadiya’s British Food Adventure (Michael Joseph) atop the Hardback Non-Fiction top 20 and Joshua Levine’s Dunkirk (William Collins) sailed into a second week as the Paperback Non-Fiction number one.
While Disney Beauty and the Beast: Book of the Film (Parragon) lost its Children’s number one to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the Pre-School number one, Fiona Watt and Rachel Wells’ That’s Not My Unicorn (Usborne), carried on over from the week before.
While two of the Booker longlistees, announced last Thursday (27th July), appeared in the Top 50, both have already charted regularly in the upper echleons for the last month. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (Fleet) jumped 7% in volume in its fifth week in the chart, climbing back into the top 10, and Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (Hamish Hamilton) improved 10% week on week. Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Hamish Hamilton), out in hardback, climbed nearly 70 places to 132nd and leapt 37% in volume, to 2,169 copies sold.
The market has been enjoying a solid few weeks: at £27.8m, value hit its highest for the year to date last week. Meanwhile volume, at nearly 3.6 million books sold, was second only to World Book Day week—but comfortably beat both Mother's and Father's Day.