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Super Thursday helped the book market enjoy an 11% surge in sales week-on-week, as spending hit a 2009 high.
According to Nielsen BookScan data, £37.8m was spent at UK book retailers last week, up 10.7% on the previous week, and down just 0.8% on the same week last year, when Jamie Oliver's Jamie's Ministry of Food (Michael Joseph) hit the shelves and Guinness World Records (Guinness) topped the charts.
Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol (Bantam Press) hangs on to its place at the top of the charts thanks to a 79,008 seven-day sale. Life sales of the The Da Vinci Code follow-up now total 805,098 in the UK. The late Stieg Larsson takes second overall with a phenomenal 34,152 part-week sale for the third and final part of his Millennium crime trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest. Terry Pratchett's football-in-Discworld novel, The Unseen Academicals (Doubleday) takes third position—one place ahead of the latest edition of Guinness World Records.
James Patterson's 14th Alex Cross thriller, Cross Country (Arrow) débuts in fifth while Peter Kay's Saturday Night Peter (Century), the follow-up to his huge 2006 hit, The Sound of Laughter, joins the Official UK Top 50 in seventh. Kay's book was sold at just £5 by both Amazon.co.uk and Tesco last week, while W H Smith's sold it for £5.99 as part of its "spend £15 on books and stationery" offer. As a consequence, its average selling price last week was just £7.42, 62.9% off its £20 r.r.p., according to BookScan Total Consumer Market data.
Bernard Cornwell's fifth Saxon Chronicle, The Burning Land (HarperCollins); Cecelia Ahern's seventh novel, The Book of Tomorrow (HarperCollins); Jeremy Clarkson's Driven to Distraction (Michael Joseph); Darren Shan's final Demonata instalment, Hell's Heroes (HarperCollins); Michael Connelly's Nine Dragons (Orion) and Jacqueline Wilson's Victorian times adventure Hetty Feather (Doubleday) are all hardback publications that also join the Official UK Top 50 this week.
According to BookScan data, 81 titles with official publication dates of October 1st 2009 or sooner sold more than 1,000 copies at UK book retailers last week.