The Bookseller – Bestsellers – The Devil’s hat-trick: Richard Osman’s Last Devil to Die in pole position

New releases bolstered a robust week of sales, which increased by 7% on the previous week, to reach a value of £28.8m through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market. Unit sales were up as well with 3.1 million books changing hands and making a change from last week’s steady pace.

Richard Osman has successfully claimed his 40th Official UK Top 50 number one after comfortably securing last week’s lead. The paperback edition of The Last Devil to Die (Penguin) sold more than 31,000 copies in its third week, making it a hat-trick for The Thursday Murder Club. With that, Osman was also trumps in Mass Market Fiction — his 52nd MMF number one. 

The latest from Stephen King shot to second place with 19,123 copies sold. You Like it Darker (Hodder & Stoughton), which is a collection of 12 “delightfully dark” short stories, landed him his 27th number one in Original Fiction. King was trailed in OF by a romantasy début from Megan Scott. The Temptation of Magic (Magpie) is the first book in the Empyrean trilogy and not to be confused with Rebecca Yarros’ Empyreal novels Fourth Wing (Pitakus), which came in 19th last week, and Iron Flame (Pitakus) at 98th. Scott became the latest author to benefit from being a FairyLoot subscription box pick.

All up, new releases won six of the top 10 positions. Children’s number one Astrochimp by David Walliams and illustrated by Adam Stower (HarperCollins) came in seventh with 10,017 copies sold. The paperback edition of David Mitchell’s Unruly (Penguin) and Colm Tóibín’s Long Island (Picador) followed close behind, all roughly 500 copies apart from each other.

However, Mitchell was unable to rule out Chris van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People (Penguin Cornerstone) from the number one spot in Paperback Non-Fiction. The current Waterstones’ Non-Fiction Book of the Month sold another 10,000-odd copies for his fourth consecutive time at the top of that chart and sixth position overall. In Hardback Non-Fiction, a memoir by “Made in Chelsea” star Louise Thompson titled Lucky (Ebury Spotlight) unseated River Cottage legend Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who fell from first to fourth.