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The top of the UK top 50 remained unchanged this week as Minecraft: The Official Construction Handbook and The Official Combat Handbook (Egmont) claimed the numbers one and two respectively for a third week in a row.
Sales of both titles were down week on week, hardly surprising following the Easter holidays, but with sales of 21,726 copies for Construction and 19,305 copes for Combat, sales were well ahead of the nearest chart rival and the highest new entry in the chart, Martina Cole, who debuts at three with the mass market paperback of her latest thriller Revenge (Headline) at 13,102 copies. The hardback has sold 139,319 copies to date and Cole's last paperback, The Life (Headline) has sold 128,380 copies in less than a year and also debuted at three last May (W/E 11th) with 16,086 copies.
There were six new entries inside the Top 20. Cole was joined inside the Top 10 by Swedish writer Jonas Jonasson who enters at eight with The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden (Fourth Estate), selling 9, 541 copies. The book is the follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (Hesperus), which sold 1,741 copies this week and has sold 433,000 since it arrived in paperback in July 2012.
Another week, another James Patterson, with the author this time teaming up with Michael Ledwidge for the sixth installment of the thriller series featuring Detective Michael Bennett. Gone (Arrow) sold 8,909 copies and is one of 14 titles associated with the author and published this year to feature in the TCM 5,000 - including Unlucky 13 (Century) at 10 in the Original Fiction chart selling 951 copes this week and Mistress at 13 in the Mass Market Paperback chart selling 6,420 copies. There were also new entries from Santa Montefiore (Secrets of the Lighthouse, Simon & Schuster, 8,017 copies) and Patricia Cornwell's latest Kay Scarpetta paperback thriller Dust (Sphere) which sold 7,696 taking 15th position.
There were new number ones in both Fiction charts. Martina Cole took the paperback top spot while number one in Original Fiction was taken by Maeve Binchy's posthumously released Chestnut Street (Orion, 3,090 copies), a collection of short tales concerning the lives of some of the characters from the author's previous novels. The author, who died in 2012, wrote many of the stories over decades and 36 of them appear in the volume.
There were also new entries at number two for David Baldacci with The Target (Macmillan) selling 2,935 copies and Mo Hayder's seventh Jack Caffery thriller, Wolf (Bantam Press) shifting 2,891 copies took third place. There were eight new entries in total for Original Fiction including entries for Fern Britton, Charles Cumming, Sophie Hannah, Giles Kristian and Danny Wallace with his second novel, Who is Tom Ditto? (Ebury) at 16 and selling 753 copies. Wallace's debut novel, Charlotte Street (Ebury) has sold 39,873, including 17,749 to date for the original trade paperback.
Mary Berry remains at the top of the Non-fiction chart with sales settling down and dipping below 10,000 for Mary Berry Cooks (BBC, 9,193 copies), while Thomas Piketty's 640 page Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Belknap Press) debuts at four. Examining how social, political and economic patterns define political economies today, the £29.95 hardback had an average selling price of £29.78 and contributed £67,000 to the TCM alone.
With Prom season upon us, the guide to this year's music celebrations took the top spot away from James Bowen and street cat Bob, which slips to number two after six weeks at the top. The BBC Proms 2014 (BBC) sold 8,800 copies while The World According to Bob (Hodder) sold 4,681 copies.
There was no change at the top of Children's and Young Adult Fiction with Veronica Roth's Divergent series (HarperCollins) claiming the top three spots but the LEGO Movie Ultimate Sticker Collection (DK) climbed one place to one in the Pre-School chart with 2,932 copies. The collection has now sold just under 61,000 copies since release back in January.
Overall, 2.5m book sales registered through BookScan last week for a combined value of £18.9m.