Non-Fiction: Pinch duo edged out by slow cooker title
The first week of the year begins with a bang for work-from-homers and energy-efficient kitchen appliance fans, as Nathan Anthony’s Bored of Lunch: The Healthy Slow Cooker Book (Ebury) burned into the Official UK Top 50 number one spot, selling 36,055 copies. This marks a turning point for the “New Year, new you” period, which since January 2020 has been dominated by Kay and Kate Allinson’s Pinch of Nom (Bluebird). With the latest cookbook, Enjoy, becoming the first in the series not to surpass 100,000 copies sold on launch in mid-December, it has now failed to bounce back into the top spot at the start of the New Year, as all of its predecessors have done.
Of course, this year’s “New Year, new you” era is fated to be a short-lived one, with Prince Harry’s memoir Spare hovering on the horizon. This is the first January since 2018 that an “event” non-fiction title, concerning a polarising, distinctively-coiffed famous figure and leaked profusely ahead of publication, has threatened to overshadow diet books and self-help guides for the top spot. Yet of course, despite Michael Wolff’s White House exposé Fire and Fury (Little, Brown) flying off the shelves in early 2018, British book-buyers were marginally more concerned about their post-Christmas waistline than the state of American democracy, with Tom Kerridge’s Lose Weight for Good (Absolute) beating it to the number one in its first week. Kerridge’s healthy cookbook also notched up the biggest sales for a January-published hardback that week, on 70,302 copies—a record that the fifth-in-line to the throne is likely to obliterate in next week’s charts.
The “New Year, new you” offerings had a strong first week ahead of “Harrygeddon”, with Dr Clare Bailey and Kathryn Bruton’s The Fast 800 Keto Recipe Book (Short) reigning once again in the Paperback Non-fiction pole, alongside Bored of Lunch in the Hardback Non-fiction pole. James Clear’s Atomic Habits (Random House) followed its usual January routine of soaring back up the Top 50, hitting seventh place, while Tim Spector’s Food for Life (Jonathan Cape), Roxie Nafousi’s Manifest: Dive Deeper (Michael Joseph) and Suzanne Mulholland’s The Batch Lady: Cooking on a Budget (HQ) all made their débuts in the Top 50. The cost-of-living crisis seemed at the forefront of book-buyers’ minds, with two air-fryer cookbooks—authored by Todd English and Jenny Tschiesche—joining Bored of Lunch in the non-fiction charts.
Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus (Bloomsbury), the Waterstones Non-Fiction Book of the Month for January, and Paul McKenna’s Freedom from Anxiety (Welbeck) also hit the Paperback Non-fiction top 20.
