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C J Sansom’s seventh Matthew Shardlake title Tombland (Mantle) has beheaded the competition, swiping the UK Official Top 50 number one, with 45,633 copies sold. This is by far Sansom’s biggest single-week sale in any print format, beating the pre-Christmas 2006 sales of paperback Winter in Madrid by more than 12,000 copies.
The previous Shardlake hardback, 2014’s Lamentation, sold 155,015 copies in total, so Tombland is already 30% of the way there, after three days on sale. The seventh title’s first-week volume was up 76% on Lamentation’s first three days, and has racked up the biggest weekly volume for any Original Fiction number one since Lee Child’s The Midnight Line (Bantam) in November 2017 (and even then, Sansom missed out by a scant 3,000 copies).
Anna Burns’ Man Booker Prize winner Milkman (Faber & Faber) delivered, selling 9,466 copies in the week of its win, an 882% jump week on week (from 963 copies sold the previous week). Before the announcement, the title had sold a total of 5,606 copies across all editions—so last week’s paperback sales make up 62% of its current total volume. A change in circumstances, indeed.
Last week saw a mini-Super Thursday take place on 18th October, and the new releases rushed into the top of the Top 50. Peter James’ Dead if You Don’t (Pan) hit third place, but missed out on the Mass Market Fiction number one, due to Heather Morris’ The Tattooist of Auschwitz (Zaffre) jumping 27% week on week to 32,615 copies sold.
Noel “The Supervet” Fitzpatrick swiped the Hardback Non-Fiction number one from Gary Barlow’s A Better Me (Blink), with his memoir Listening to the Animals (Trapeze) shifting 16,189 copies. Stephen Hawking’s Brief Answers to the Big Questions (John Murray), his final title, charted just below, in fifth overall and second in Hardback Non-Fiction. Celebrities hot-footed it into the top 20, with Tina Turner’s My Love Story (Century), Roger Daltrey’s Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite (Blink), Michael Caine’s Blowing the Bloody Doors Off (Hodder & Stoughton) and Eric Idle’s Always Look on the Bright Side of Life (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) all entering the chart. Guy Martin’s We Need to Weaken the Mixture (Virgin) joined fellow sportsmen Peter Crouch and How to be a Footballer (Ebury) and Kevin Keegan with My Life in Football (Macmillan).
Liz Pichon’s What Monster (Scholastic) held the Children’s number one for a third week running, holding off a challenge from an insurgent Beano Annual 2019 (D C Thomson) and new entry Matt Haig’s The Truth Pixie (Canongate).
The print market slid by 0.1% week on week in value, but pleasingly posted a 4.2% boost in volume, to 3.55 million books sold—only the second weekly rise in volume in the last six weeks.