Five goes fourth: Jamie Oliver serves up 60th number one

Jamie Oliver’s 5 Ingredients (Michael Joseph) has once again claimed the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, selling 54,605 copies for £648,673, according to Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market. The title, which is selling faster than the hot orange polenta cakes in Chapter 15, has now surpassed 200,000 copies sold in a month, making it the bestselling non-fiction title of 2017 to date.

Declining in volume just 4% week on week, 5 Ingredients also secured Oliver’s 60th week as overall number one, and his 143rd in the Hardback Non-Fiction top spot.

Sarah Pinborough’s Behind Her Eyes (Harper) set its sights on the Mass Market Fiction number one, ending the five-week run of Victoria Hislop’s Cartes Postales from Greece (Headline). Behind Her Eyes’ volume rocketed 57% to 15,631 copies, climbing to third overall.

Stephen King’s It (Hodder) also crept up the chart, jumping into the top five and ballooning by 78% in volume week on week, as the film adaptation hit UK cinemas.

Ali Smith’s Autumn (Penguin), announced as part of the Man Booker Prize 2017 shortlist last week, bumped upwards into the overall top 20, shifting an extra 25% more copies than the week before. However, the only other shortlisted title to join Smith in the top 600 was York bookseller Fiona Mozley’s Elmet (J M Originals), which sold 2,134 copies—a 604% boost week on week. It hit eighth place in the Original Fiction top 20. It seems bookbuyers love a Booker underdog—2016 shortlisted bookseller-turned-author Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project (Saraband) has sold 138,161 copies to date.

Despite Elmet’s meteoric rise from 1,444th place, John Le Carre’s A Legacy of Spies held the Original Fiction number one, and second place overall, for a second week running.

Last week’s new entries were a decidedly heavyweight bunch—queen of picture books Julia Donaldson scored her first overall Children’s number one in five and half years, with her and Axel Scheffler’s The Ugly Five (Scholastic) selling 6,961 copies—five really is a magic number—while Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run (Simon & Schuster) thundered into the Paperback Non-Fiction number one, selling 6,824 copies. Hillary Clinton’s What Happened (Simon & Schuster) came in just a whisker below (appropriately, given the end to the campaign it describes), hitting third place in the Hardback Non-Fiction chart. If a new Jamie book wasn’t enough indication that Christmas is on the horizon, Guinness World Records 2018 rose to second place in the category top 20.

Unusually, the normally fiction-dominated Children’s top 20 was topped by two picture books (with Donaldson and Scheffler’s Zog and the Flying Doctors joining The Ugly Five) and J B Priestley’s An Inspector Calls (Heinemann) securing third. Though it was not a vintage week for David Walliams, with “just” the three books in the Children’s Fiction top 10, another comedian-turned-author published by HarperCollins, David Baddiel, picked up the slack, with Birthday Boy (HCCB) rising from eighth to second, just below Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (Sphere).

After the print market hit its 2017 peak a week ago, last week saw it inch upwards (by 0.7%) to a new peak of £30.25m. It was up 6% in value on the same week in 2016, with average selling price a whopping 38p higher.