Into orbit: Samantha Harvey’s Orbital becomes first Booker champ to hit number one in week of its win

The announcement of Orbital (Vintage) by Samantha Harvey as the Booker Prize winner for 2024 has rocketed it to the top of the charts, breaking Jeff Kinney’s Wimpy Kid’s three-week run in first place. The Wiltshire-based author sold 17,183 copies of her triumphant volume last week according to data from Nielsen Bookscan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM).

It’s the first time the Booker Prize winner has made it to the summit of the charts since records began – although Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments (Vintage) took the top spot when first published (on sales of a whopping 103,177) two months before it shared the 2019 prize with Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (Penguin).

The Orbital paperback has increased its sales 818% against the previous seven-day period – not as big a percentage increase as 2023 winner Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song (Oneworld) achieved last year, but a nearly 10,000-copy jump through the tills. We can’t see where the sales have come from, but it’s likely to be a great result for indie bookshops where Orbital has consistently been a bestseller this year.

Sales of the hardback edition of Orbital – first published more than a year ago – have also been boosted, climbing from just 98 copies in the week before the announcement to 2,857, placing it at position 14 in the Original Fiction chart, and just outside the overall top 100.

It’s been a good week for paperbacks in general with the format taking four places in the top 10 at a time of year when hardbacks usually dominate – Orbital leading, of course, but followed by Think Twice by Harlan Coben (Cornerstone); They Thought I Was Dead by Peter James (Pan); and The Templar Secret by Scott Mariani (HarperNorth), which all rise into the top 10 in their first full week of sales.

They can’t get past the wall of hardback big hitters that occupy positions two to five in the overall top 20, though. Jeff Kinney’s Hot Mess (Puffin) slips to second place with a volume reduction of 5.6%, though hangs on to its Children’s number one, while In Too Deep by Lee and Andrew Child (Bantam) sheds 10% of its sales, dropping it to fifth place overall.

It’s better news for the Guinness World Records 2025 and Richard Osman’s We Solve Murders (Viking), which retain their third and fourth places but manage to grow their sales against the previous seven days. The annual collation of world records climbed 21.5% to 15,237 copies to retain its Hardback Non-Fiction number one for the second week on the trot. We Solve Murders, meanwhile, jumped 11% to 13,695 units to reclaim the Original Fiction number one from the Child brothers; the title has scored lifetime sales of 288,671 copies – some 22% down compared with 2023’s The Last Devil to Die.

Rounding off the top 10 is David Walliams’ Super Sleuth (HarperCollins) – illustrated by Adam Stower – and Mary Berry’s Foolproof Dinners (BBC Books). Walliams sales slipped slightly, but in a week where the top has seen some bigger fluctuations, it’s enough to see the television personality rise two places to eight. Meanwhile, Mary Berry’s sales have contracted 23.1% week-on-week, dropping the national treasure into 10th place.

In the Non-Fiction paperback chart The 1% Club: Official Quiz Book (Bantam) increases its sales 22% to keep hold of the top spot for the second week in a row.

The top 10 has seen volume sales rise 3.3% week-on-week but is still nearly a fifth down on the same week in 2023. The rest of the TCM has performed slightly better though – volume sales are down 3.6% compared with last year while value sales are down 4.1%. Week-on-week sales volume has grown by 4.5% to 4.1m and value has moved 3.8% to £39.4m.