Top of the shops: 28 titles reached number one in 2024
As Nathan Anthony (pictured) celebrates being the first number one of 2025 with Bored of Lunch: Six Ingredient Slow Cooker, we’re rewinding the clock to this time last year when the same position was occupied by… well, Nathan Anthony with Bored of Lunch: Healthy Slow Cooker: Even Easier. It was the first of 28 different titles to take the top spot in 2024, marking it out as the most varied year since 2015 when 32 different books charted in first place. Anthony clocked up 74,727 copies in the first week of the year, easily setting the benchmark for 2024, with only one title shifting more than that during its time at number one.
Bored of Lunch… Even Easier lasted two weeks at the top of the chart, but Anthony would return to the top spot twice more during 2024 – once in March with The Healthy Air Fryer Book and again in December with Six Ingredient Slow Cooker – claiming the pole position for a total of five weeks.
The only author to take first place more than Anthony was Richard Osman, who charted in first place on nine separate occasions, initially in May for six consecutive weeks with the The Last Devil to Die mass market paperback and then three more times across September and October with the We Solve Murders hardback.
As well as the most number ones of the year, Osman also notched up the biggest number one, with more than 100,000 units sold of We Solve Murders the week of its launch – nearly 10 times more than 2024’s lowest-selling weekly top seller The City of Stardust managed when it went to number one at the end of January.
As well as the most number ones of the year, Richard Osman also notched up the biggest number on, with more than 100,000 units sold of We Solve Murders the week of its launch.
Georgia Summers’ debut fantasy shot to the summit of the charts after being featured in FairyLoot’s subscription box in the first month of the year, bringing in sales of 11,020 copies – this seven-day period accounted for four-fifths of Summers’ total for the year.
It took until the beginning of February for the first paperback of the year to reach pole position when Dilly Court’s The Lucky Penny hit the jackpot for a week before quickly being displaced by World Book Day (WBD) entry Greg the Sausage Roll: Lunchbox Hero by Mark and Roxanne Hoyle plus illustrator Gareth Conway.
The £1 WBD books – given in exchange for vouchers and funded by booksellers – traditionally dominate the charts during March, and 2024 was no exception, with the pastry-based character sticking around for four weeks before Lee and Andrew Child’s latest paperback The Secret reached first place.
The Secret was one of 11 titles to spend two consecutive weeks in first place – a feat that is facilitated by the UK’s fortnightly publishing pattern – a number that includes Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us, which took over the charts during August, thanks to a film adaptation starring Blake Lively. Had the sales of both the standard and film tie-in editions been combined under one ISBN, Hoover would have managed five consecutive weeks at the pinnacle of the charts; instead fellow fiction writers Claire Douglas and Victoria Hislop both managed to snatch some time at the top.
Osman’s We Solve Murders spent a total of three weeks as the UK’s most popular book, but that run was interrupted by Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo. In fact, the only title to spend more than two consecutive weeks at number one in the second half of the year was Jeff Kinney’s Hot Mess – the 19th instalment in the Wimpy Kid series.
Kinney was able to depose Boris Johnson from first place after Unleashed spent two weeks there but was itself overtaken by Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, which rocketed to the top after being announced as the winner of the 2024 Booker Prize. It was the first time a Booker winner has made it to the summit in the week of the award’s announcement, and only the second Booker winner since records began to bag the coveted position – Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments in 2019 was the only other, though its top spot was at launch, a month before Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo shared that year’s prize.
Harvey’s single week at the top was followed by one week for Kay and Kate Allinson’s second number one title of the year – Pinch of Nom: All in One – before December saw the Guinness World Records 2025 take three non-consecutive weeks in first place, including taking the coveted festive top spot – albeit with the unwanted record of lowest-selling Christmas number one since records began.
