Oliver’s Veg puts down roots in the number one spot

Jamie Oliver’s Veg (Michael Joseph) has blossomed in its second week in the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, improving 28% in volume week on week to 30,974 copies sold through Nielsen BookScan’s TCM.

So far, the vegetarian recipe book is selling nearly twice as fast as 2018’s Jamie Cooks Italy, and 70% faster than 2015’s “clean eating” cookbook Everyday Super Food. But it hasn’t quite caught up with Oliver’s two biggest-selling “quick and easy” titles, 30-Minute Meals and 5 Ingredients, both which went on to become million-copy-bestsellers.

Salman Rushdie’s Booker-shortlisted Quichotte (Jonathan Cape) debuted in the Original Fiction chart in sixth place, as Philippa Gregory’s Tidelands (Simon & Schuster) held the number one and David Lagercrantz’s The Girl Who Lived Twice (Maclehose Press) leapfrogging Val McDermid’s How the Dead Speak (Little, Brown) for second place.

Jodi Picoult’s A Spark of Light (Hodder & Stoughton) rose to second overall and number one in the Mass Market Fiction chart, bouncing 86% in volume on its launch week. It claimed the author’s 16th week in the top spot, and her first since January 2014’s The Storyteller.

The Hardback Non-Fiction top three—Veg, Kay Featherstone & Kate Allinson’s Pinch of Nom (Bluebird) and Nadiya Hussain’s Time to Eat (Michael Joseph)—remained solid on the week before, with Lemn Sissay’s memoir My Name is Why (Canongate) the highest new entry in fourth place.

Jeremy Dronfield’s The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz (Penguin) knocked Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt (Picador) from the Paperback Non-Fiction number one, selling 8,230 copies and rising to seventh place overall.

Though this chart covers the week ending 31st August, there was a definite September back-to-school feel in the air: the Oxford English Mini Dictionary (OUP) jumped 39% in volume to chart in the Top 50 in 45th place, while the Oxford Mini Dictionary and Thesaurus entered the Paperback Non-Fiction top 20 in 13th and every GCSE student’s favourite book, An Inspector Calls (Heinemann), returned to the Children’s chart in 14th place.

The combined one-two punch of a bank holiday and a late-summer heatwave hit the market hard—it dropped 1% in value week on week, dropping 3.6% against the same week in 2018. However, average selling price hit its highest level since mid-January, posting a 2.6% year on year rise to £8.62.