Second helping for Anthony, Spector surges while Olivie Blake hits a personal best

Nathan Anthony has made it two for two in 2024 with his Bored of Lunch Healthy Slow Cooker: Even Easier (Ebury Press) cruising to its second straight Official UK Top 50 number one, shifting twice as many units through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market as the second bestselling book.

However, the just over 23,000 units Anthony’s latest Bored of Lunch shifted through the TCM was 70% off its steller launch in the previous week, and is 25% off the pace of what its predecessor, Bored of Lunch Healthy Slow Cooker, sold in the second week of January 2023. Though this comes in the context of a not atypical slow BookScan week two (TCM full market value sales were £28.8m, 10.2% down on the previous seven-day period) and Anthony’s is just one of two titles to sell more than 10,000 units. 

That other title was Tim Spector’s Food for Life (Vintage) which rose eight places week on week to second overall on just over 12,000 copies to give the King’s College London epidemiologist his first Paperback Non-Fiction number one. Healthy eating was the order of the day, or at the very least in the Top 50, as 15 titles broadly in that sector appeared in the chart with Kay and Kate Allinson’s Pinch of Nom Express (Bluebird) and Ella Mills Woodward’s Deliciously Ella Healthy Made Simple (Yellow Kite) joining Anthony and Spector in the top 10.

Olivie Blake’s finale in her Atlas dark academia trilogy, The Atlas Complex (Tor), was the week’s highest new entry, debuting at 12th to bag the American her second Original Fiction pole position. The circa 8,500 units she sold were a personal best, 1,500 better than the launch week of the previous series title, The Atlas Paradox (Tor).

The late Peter Robinson’s final Inspector Banks novel, Standing in the Shawdows (Hodder), meanwhile, moved up four spots week on week to claim the Mass Market Fiction crown from Harlan Coben’s I Will Find You (Cornerstone), which drops to second. Robinson, who died in October 2022, has earned £20.2m all-time through the TCM and last week marked his fifith top spot in Mass Market Fiction, and first since June 2019.

In the Children’s Top 20, Jamie Smart’s Bunny Bonanaza! (David Fickling, 6,784 copies) held onto the number one for the second straight week while the latest from the Bluey empire, I Love my Family! (Ladybird, 2,359), jumped 100 spots to enter the kids’ chart and also notch up the Children’s: Pre-school top spot.