Colleen Hoover It ends with us has remained at the top of the official UK Top 50 for the second week in a row, with the film-boosted novel selling 20,780 copies via Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market. The sequel to the title, It starts with usalso held on to second place week after week. However, there was not only good news for “CoHo”; the film tie-in edition of It ends with us fell from third to ninth place.
With last week’s advance It ends with us has now surpassed the 1.5 million mark on TCM across all editions. Hoover’s number one also marks publisher Simon & Schuster’s 20th number one spot since accurate records began, including 12 times in the last three years.
The biggest new title was Kate Atkinson’s return to Jackson Brodie after five years with Death in the Sign of the Tower (Doubleday), which sold 10,126 copies, placing ninth overall and first in the Original Fiction (OF) category. Somewhat surprisingly, it is only Atkinson’s second OF entry after the previous title by Jackson Brodie, Big Sky (Doubleday), did it in June 2019. And her latest work is the author’s best first-week hardcover—and the only time she’s sold more than 10,000 copies at launch—and was up 15% from her last hardcover book, 2022’s Shrines of Gaiety (Bantam).
Atkinson effortlessly outperformed the other major hardcover fiction release, Pat Barker’s third retelling of the Iliad, The journey home (Hamish Hamilton), which sold 3,819 copies and landed at number two on the OF charts. Meanwhile, BookTok seems to have finally discovered Naomi Novik, with two backlist hardcovers in the fantasy author’s Scholomance series, 2022 The Golden Enclaves and 2020 A deadly training (both Del Rey) and made it into the OF charts for the first time.
There was little movement in the mass fiction (MMF) area, as Hoover remained at number one for the third week in a row. Susan Lewis’ A Sicilian affair (HarperCollins) jumped 17 places in the overall rankings and appeared in the MMF top 20 for the first time, while LJ Ross’ The port (Dark Skies) also premiered in its opening week.
After being ousted by musician Yungblud last week, Politics on the sidelines (Vintage) returned to first place in the paperback non-fiction category for the tenth time. And it was the ninth non-consecutive top spot for Kay and Kate Allinson’s Prise Nom Air Fryer (Bluebird) at the Hardback Non-Fiction Summit. The Nommers prevailed against strong competition in Luis Elizondo’s Imminent (John Blake), a former US Army counterintelligence agent’s claim that the Pentagon is keeping information about UFOs under wraps. This claim received a lot of press coverage the week it was published.
The Swifties dominated children’s literature for another week when Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara and illustrator Borghild Fallberg Taylor Swift (Frances Lincoln) landed at number one for the sixth time. And a hint that it was a holiday weekend was found in the children’s pre-school charts with Bluey: Road Trip (Labybird) takes the top spot.
This bank holiday was a good year for British booksellers: last week, £30.4 million passed the tills, unchanged from the previous week but 6.2% more than at the same time in 2023.
