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British brainbox Stephen Fry's second memoir, The Fry Chronicles (Michael Joseph), which charts the actor, director, presenter (etc)'s rise to superstardom, has débuted straight in at number one in the bestseller lists—following a week when a second wave of books destined for the Christmas charts hit the shelves.
Fry's follow-up to 1997's Moab is My Washpot (Hutchinson), sold 37,325 copies at UK booksellers last week, some 8,739 copies more than the next most popular purchase—Lee Child's 61 Hours (Bantam). Fry's sale, clocked up in just five days, is one of the strongest opening week sales from a celebrity memoir since records began — and is almost twice the figure the bestselling celebrity memoir of all time (Peter Kay's The Sound of Laughter) sold in its first week in UK bookshops.
Tony Blair's A Journey (Hutchinson) falls two places to third position week-on-week with a seven-day sale of 25,869 copies. Total UK sales of the former Prime Minister's autobiography currently stand at 184,000 copies across all editions having taken £2.45m through the tills.
Jilly Cooper's return to the saddle, Jump! (Bantam Press), débuts at number one in this week's Original Fiction chart with a sale of 15,955 copies. The novelist's previous book, Wicked! (Bantam Press) has sold 470,000 copies to date, and spent seven weeks at the summit of The Bookseller's bestseller lists. Also new in the Original Fiction chart are John le Carré's first book for Penguin following his 38 years at Hodder, Our Kind of Traitor (Viking), and Chris Ryan's latest thriller, The Kill Zone (Hodder).
This week's Hardback Non-fiction Top 20 welcomes nine new entries, led by Fry in pole position. Paul O'Grady's follow-up to his massively popular first memoir, At My Mother's Knee (which has sold 915,000 copies to date), The Devil Rides Out (Bantam Press), débuts in third position, behind Blair.
The latest edition of stat compendium Guinness World Records (Guinnes) joins in fifth place and should sell more than 500,000 copies by the end of the year (as it has done in each of the past past three years), while racing driver Ben Collins, sensationally outed as "Top Gear"'s The Stig, motors into seventh position in the list with his memoir, The Man in the White Suit (HarperCollins). Other new entries include Nigel Slater's Tender: Vol 2 (Fourth Estate), footballer Kenny Dalglish's My Liverpool Home (Hodder) and Justine Picardie's biography of Coco Chanel (HarperCollins).
Despite the fact that numerous new books hit the shelves last week (around 180 hardback books hit the bookshops on Thursday last week, two and a half times the daily average), boosting spending by 2.1% week-on-week (to £32.2m), spending last week was down 7.8% on the same week last year when Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol (Bantam) hit the shelves in hardback.