Pinch of Nom surges to fourth number one

With another strong week, Kay Featherstone and Kate Allinson's Pinch of Nom (Bluebird) notched its second UK Official Number One on the trot and claimed its fourth non-consecutive pole position. The slimming title surged 25% in volume sales over the previous seven-day period to shift 56,337 copies through Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market.

Pinch of Nom has now eclipsed the 600,000-unit mark through the TCM (612,091) and is the 56th bestselling non-fiction print title since accurate records began—on just seven weeks of sales. Its £6.2m in value sales mean that for every £1 spent through BookScan's Health, Dieting and Wholefood Cookery category in 2019, 63% was generated by the book. 

Featherstone's and Allinson's title showed a clean pair of heels to second-placed The Mister (Arrow), more than doubling the 26,939-copy haul of E L James' latest. The Mister has sold 113,584 copies in its three weeks on sale—an excellent result for mere mortals but it does show a slackening off of James' previous blistering pace. At the three-week mark, 2017's Darker had rung up just under 165,000 copies through the tills, while 2015's Grey had sold an eye-popping 865,000 copies. Still, The Mister does hold on to the Mass Market Fiction number one for a third straight week. 

There is another returning champ in Paperback Non-Fiction with Ant Middleton's First Man In (HarperCollins) grabbing its second straight and fifth overall number one, squeaking by Adam Kay's This is Going to Hurt (Picador) by a mere 39 units (8,833 to 8,794). And it is four weeks atop the Children's chart for Jeff Kinney's Diary of an Awesome Friendly Kid (Puffin,12,902 copies), which has shifted a smidgeon under 100,000 units (98,070) in a month on sale. 

A busy publication schedule saw a raft of changes in the Top 50 with 16 books making their first appearances, led by the paperback of Sally Rooney's Normal People (Faber) which shifted 16,178 copies. Normal People has had by far the highest average selling price (£6.65) and slimmest discount (26%) of any title in the Mass Market Fiction Top 20 meaning it earned almost as much as The Mister (£108,000 to £109,000), despite selling 10,000 fewer copies. A Women's Prize for Fiction shortlisting boosted Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls (Penguin) 248 places week-on-week to 36th on the overall chart, the author's second-best ever chart position. 

In Original Fiction, Chris Carter recorded his best-ever weekly hardback total (4,536 units) to claim the top spot with Hunting Evil (Simon & Schuster), unseating Ian McEwan's Machines Like Me after a two-week run. It is the crime writer's second Original Fiction number one, after The Caller claimed the pole position in February 2017.