Jamie Oliver's Together whips up another number one

Jamie Oliver's Together (Michael Joseph) has debuted in the UK Official Top 50 number one, becoming his 19th cookbook to hit the top spot since records began.

Together sold 16,830 copies to swipe the chef's 69th week in the number one spot in total.

However, it was also Oliver's lowest volume to date for a number one bestseller in the BookScan era, and is in fact the fourth week on the trot that the weekly print market number one has sold fewer than 20,000 copies—despite the market as a whole looking incredibly healthy for the time of year.

That good health continued last week, with the market selling 3.8 million books for £32.5m—up 10.8% in volume and 8.4% in value on the same week the year before.

Linwood Barclay's Find You First (HQ) was the second highest new entry in the Top 50, searching out fourth place overall—and third in Mass-Market Fiction, which saw Richard Osman's The Thursday Murder Club (Penguin) and Matt Haig's The Midnight Library (Canongate) swipe the top two.

Paula Hawkins' A Slow Fire Burning (Doubleday) blazed into the Original Fiction number one, selling 9,060 copies to make an all-new top seven in the category chart. Ann Cleeves' The Heron's Cry (Macmillan), Ian Rankin and William McIlvanney's The Dark Remains (Canongate) and Elizabeth Day's Magpie (Fourth Estate) also flocked into Original Fiction.

A new hardback 10th anniversary edition of Madeline Miller's 2012-published TikTok-boosted A Song of Achilles (Bloomsbury) put a spear in 46th place in the Top 50, while its 2017 paperback hit 37th place. 

Together beat Kay Featherstone, Kate Allinson and Laura Davis' Pinch of Nom Food Planner: Quick & Easy (Bluebird) to the Hardback Non-Fiction number one spot, as Instagram personal trainer James Smith's Not a Life Coach (HarperCollins) debuted atop the Paperback Non-Fiction chart.

A Jamie Oliver number one is usually the starting gun on the Christmas gift-buying season, even if it is currently 29 degrees Celsius, and Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler doubled down. The Gruffalo and Friends Advent Calendar Book Collection (Macmillan Children's) jingled all the way to the Children's number one, ending the reign of David Walliams and Tony Ross' Megamonster (HarperCollins) by just 186 copies.

In the Amazon Charts, Victoria Hislop's One August Night (Headline) climbed 15 places to hit the Amazon Charts' Most-Sold: Fiction number one.