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J K Rowling's The Casual Vacancy (Sphere) remains the bestselling book in the UK, topping the Official UK Top 50 for a third consecutive week.
The mass-market edition of Rowling's 2012 hardback bestseller sold 23,082 copies in the UK last week—just 343 copies more than Tess Gerritsen's 10th Rizzoli and Isles thriller, Last to Die (Bantam Books), which climbs one place into second position.
David Baldacci's The Forgotten (Pan) takes third place in the Official UK Top 50 with a sale of 20,917 copies, scoring the American novelist his highest ever position in the chart. Fellow Americans John Grisham and Gillian Flynn complete the top five with The Racketeer (Hodder) and Gone Girl (Phoenix) respectively.
New entries into the Official UK Top 50 include: mother and daughter writing duo P J Tracy's Two Evils (Penguin); French novelist Pierre Lemaitre's first work to be translated into English, Alex (MacLehose); and the latest member of the "Great British Bake Off" canon, Everyday (BBC). The fourth series of the popular TV cookery competition begins next week.
J K Rowling's pseudonymous The Cuckoo's Calling (Little, Brown) remains the bestselling hardback novel in the UK. It tops this week's Original Fiction chart for a fourth consecutive week. Across all print editions it has sold 78,000 copies in the UK since Rowling was sensationally outed as the real writer behind the "Robert Galbraith" pseudonym. In its three months on sale before the exposé, it sold fewer than 500 copies.
New entries into the Top 20 Original Fiction chart include: Terry Hayes' début novel, the fast-paced thriller I Am Pilgrim (Bantam Press); David Peace's fictionalised tale of legendary football manager Bill Shankly, Red or Dead (Faber); Roddy Doyle's Commitments sequel, The Guts (Cape); and Alissa Nutting's Tampa (Faber) - the highly controversial erotic tale of a young female teacher's sexual obsession with pre-pubescent boys.
Rick Stein's India (BBC) was once again the bestselling hardback non-fiction book in the UK, scoring sales of 5,386 copies in the seven days to 10th August. It tops the Hardback Non-fiction chart for a fourth consecutive week, and a sixth week in total. Cookbooks have topped the Hardback Non-fiction chart for 44 of the past 52 weeks.
Dr Michael Mosley and Mimi Spencer's The Fast Diet (Short) holds top spot in the Paperback Non-fiction bestseller list, registering a 22nd week at number one in the chart. The last title to achieve as long a lifetime at number one in the list was Dr Robert Atkins' New Diet Revolution (Vermilion), which spent 33 weeks at number one in the list between 2003 and 2004.
In total, £23.6m was spent on printed books at UK booksellers last week—down 3.7% (£0.9m) on the previous week and down a marginally shallower 3.6% on the same week last year, when E L James' three Fifty Shades novels topped the chart with combined sales of 457,000 copies (£1.9m). Removing E L James' distorting influence from the figures reveals underlying printed book sales were up 4.8% year on year last week, or £1.1m in value terms.