Five alive: Jamie Oliver spends third week at number one

Jamie Oliver’s 5 Ingredients: Quick & Easy Food (Michael Joseph) has rustled up another week in the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, selling 56,966 copies for £675,321 according to Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market.

This is Oliver’s single biggest week of sales outside of the last 12 weeks of the year ever, and 5 Ingredients has outsold his previous fastest-selling title (Jamie's Ministry of Food in 2008) by a whopping 9%. The cookbook’s 146,184 copies sold place it inside the top 20 bestselling books of 2017 to date.

John le Carre’s A Legacy of Spies (Viking) parachuted into second place, knocking Phillippa Gregory’s The Last Tudor (Simon & Schuster) out of the Original Fiction number one spot after four straight weeks. A Legacy of Spies sold 20,238 copies—le Carre’s largest seven-day haul for a hardback since records began—and becomes the author’s first book since 2013 to take the category top spot.

There was a flurry of new hardback fiction into the chart—David Lagercrantz’s The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye (Maclehose Press), Wilbur Smith & Tom Harper’s The Tiger’s Prey (HarperCollins) and Marian Keyes’ The Break (Michael Joseph) took the Original Fiction second, third and fourth place below A Legacy of Spies.

Sarah Pinborough’s Behind Her Eyes (Harper) was the biggest-selling new entry in the Mass Market Fiction chart, hitting third place and shifting 9,976 copies. Ali Smith’s Man Booker Prize-longlisted Autumn (Penguin) jumped into 28th place overall, as an appropriately seasonal September Book of the Month at Waterstones. The retailer's August pick, Helen Dunmore’s Birdcage Walk (Windmill), was just 199 copies and two places behind it.

Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens (Vintage) claimed its 10th Paperback Non-Fiction number one—it has hit the category top spot at least one week in every month since March.

For the first time in 16 weeks, neither David Walliams nor J K Rowling swiped the Children’s number one. Sarah J Maas’ Tower of Dawn (Bloomsbury) loomed over the rest of the children’s chart, shifting 6,615 copies, for the US author’s second kids’ number one of the year—A Court of Wings and Ruin took the top spot in May.

Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler scored a double at the top of the Children’s Pre-School top 20, with Zog and the Flying Doctors (Alison Green) inching out The Ugly Five (Scholastic) to claim first place. Kes Gray and Jim Field’s Oi Cat! (Hodder Children's) was the highest non-Donaldson/Scheffler new entry, in fifth place.

There was no escaping the back-to-school effect in the first full week of September—GCSE text An Inspector Calls (Heinemann) had its best single week of sales ever, selling 5,298 copies to claim 24th place overall and the Children’s Non-Fiction number one. Revision guides and exam texts—as well as Joy May’s Nosh for Students (inTrade) —swooped up the category top 20, as Pokemon and Minecraft titles tumbled.

After fairly consistent high sales over summer, the market more than cleaned up its act for autumn: volume leapt 10% and value soared 16% week on week. Value, at £30m, hit by far its highest peak for the year to date, and the biggest haul for the first week of September since 2010.