Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo hits all the right notes

It’s all change at the top of the Nielsen BookScan’s Official UK Top 50 this week with seven new entries in the Total Consumer Market top 10, led by Sally Rooney’s fourth novel Intermezzo (Faber), which comfortably takes the top spot on sales of over 40,000 copies. The Irish author relegates last week’s number one – Richard Osman’s We Solve Murders (Viking) – into second place.

Like Osman before her, though, Rooney’s highly anticipated novel failed to match up to her previous hardback release, with launch week volume sales down 9.7% versus 2021’s Beautiful World, Where Are You. Interestingly, a higher r.r.p. for Intermezzo means that nearly an identical amount of money has been spent with Rooney’s value sales up by about £1,000 to £619,000. It is Rooney’s second overall number one and her eighth time at the Original Fiction summit.

It’s a similar story for Jamie Oliver whose latest cookbook Simply Jamie (Michael Joseph) takes third position in the charts, some 25 years after the chef’s first release The Naked Chef. Oliver’s total volume (19,654 copies) is down 4.6% on the launch week of his 2023 outing, though this year’s publication date is about a month later than his usual late August release. Having said all that, thanks to a slightly increased r.r.p. Oliver’s value sales are up 1.1% (to just under £300,000), and Oliver easily grabbed the Hardback Non-Fiction top spot, the 179th time he has crowned that chart.

The highest new entry in the Children’s corner of the market is Catherine Doyle’s The Dagger and the Flame (Simon & Schuster) which notches up sales of 12,928 copies thanks to an appearance in Fairyloot’s September subscription box. It just pips Rick Riordan’s latest Percy Jackson title Wrath of the Triple Goddess (Puffin) which settles for fifth place in the overall Official UK Top 50.

With the hardback season now in full swing, there’s just one paperback inside the top 10 – Laurie Gilmore’s The Pumpkin Spice Café (One More Chapter), which despite being more than a year old rises to the top of the Mass Market Fiction chart (MMF). The second book in the Dream Harbor series The Cinnamon Bun Book Store moves up to sixth place.

The Original Fiction chart sees 10 new releases into the top 20, led of course by Intermezzo. This week’s second-highest new entry is Peter James’ twentieth Roy Grace thriller One of Us Is Dead (Macmillan) – who shows no signs of slowing down with a volume increase of 13% against the same period last year.

Jamie Oliver isn’t the only celebrity chef enjoying a good week, with Nigel Slater’s A Thousand Feasts (Fourth Estate) hitting second place in the HBNF. Slater’s “memoir of sorts” follows the pattern of the majority of this week’s other big releases in not quite being able to match previous performance – it’s down 9.8% compared to 2021’s A Cook’s Book.

Last week’s HBNF number one, The Actually Delicious Slow Cooker Cookbook (Bloomsbury) by Poppy O’Toole drops to fifth, with the 2025 edition of the Guinness World Records continuing its ascent up the chart, taking the fourth slot this week. The only other new entry in the HBNF top 10 is Jane McDonald’s Let the Light In (Ebury) which cruises into eighth place.

In the Non-Fiction Paperback chart, Rory Stewart holds onto the top spot, with the other titles in the top 10 shuffling around to make room for Adam Richardson’s How to Build a Body That Lasts (Century) while the paperback edition of Philippa Gregory’s Normal Women (William Collins) positions itself at 10th.

The Children’s Top 20 sees only one other new release aside from Doyle and Rick Riordan’s titles: Bill Wood’s Young Adult novel Let’s Split Up (Scholastic) in sixth. But in kids’, it’s still really all about Halloween with four spooky books inside the top 10.

Overall this week, volume sales through the TCM grew 6.7% versus last week to 3.5 million with value stepping ahead slightly further, up 8.9% to £35.1m. Against 2023, though, the volume dropped 2.3% with the value down 2.6%.