The mass-market edition of Kathy Reichs’ 12th Temperance Brennan thriller, 206 Bones(Arrow), was the bestselling book in the UK last week, and débuts at the summit of this week’s Official UK Top 50 with a 29,004 sale. It is the US novelist’s fifth number one in as many years, and her first in exactly two years as Reichs’ previous thriller, Devil Bones, was kept off top spot in May last year by Victoria Hislop’s The Return (Headline Review). Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest (Quercus) holds second position week-on-week while last week’s number one, Jane Green’s Girl Friday (Penguin) falls to third position overall.
The Official UK Top 50 welcomes 11 new entries this week, including the mass-market edition of Michael Connelly’s The Scarecrow (Orion), which benefited from a spot in Waterstone’s link-save promotion, and David Mitchell’s new novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Sceptre). The latter tops an Original Fiction chart fresh with new entries and a top five exclusively Hachette UK.
It is Mitchell’s first-ever number one, and he was helped to top spot by some incredibly deep discounting on the high street and online. The £18.99 publication sold at just £10.13 on average according to BookScan data—equating to an average discount of 46.7%. The novel was also boosted by a word-of-mouth campaign led by Hachette UK chief executive Tim Hely Hutchinson, who gave every member of staff a copy prior to publication, and began tweeting about it during London Book Fair from @HodderBooks.
Other new entries into the Original Fiction chart include Karen Rose’s Silent Scream (Headline) and the late Boyzone singer Stephen Gately’s The Tree of Seasons (Hodder).
In non-fiction, Jamie Oliver’s Jamie Does… (Michael Joseph) continues to dominate, while there are new entries in the hardback list for a couple of football titles: Match! World Cup 2010 (Boxtree) and Rangers striker Nacho Novo’s memoir, I Said No Thanks (Black & White). Meanwhile, with a sale of 1,677 copies, Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret (Simon & Schuster) will be spending its 100th week in the forthcoming Sunday Times non-fiction Top 10 bestseller list (compiled by The Bookseller). It is a feat achieved by just one other title since records began—Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (Corgi).
in the children’s chart there’s are new entries for Julia Donaldson and Evie Parker whose 100% Justin Bieber (Bantam) joins in 19th place with a 1,977 sale.
According to BookScan Total Consumer Market data, £25.4m was spent on books during the seven days to 15th Mar, down 0.3% week on week and down 3.4% on the same week last year.
