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A Christmas to Remember: Charlie Mackesy is 2025’s Xmas number one
As Kylie Minogue claims her first festive number one in the singles chart with XMAS, the even more hotly anticipated book charts witness another artist also finally taking the top spot in Christmas week.
According to data from NielsenIQ BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM), Always Remember (Ebury Press) has pipped contenders Guinness and Richard Osman to claim the coveted top spot with 43,825 copies – giving Mackesy his first Christmas number one.
Despite being the second-bestselling book of the decade – Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club (Viking) is number one – Mackesy’s 2019 debut, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse could not quite claim the Yuletide top spot that year. As it happens, Mackesy lost out by just 5,445 copies to the author who has been most in the news this week, David Walliams, whose The Best of Buckingham Palace (illustrated by Tony Ross) (HarperCollins) shifted almost 88,000 units that week.
It is a different tale six years later as Mackesy sits just 8,554 copies ahead of second place The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman – yet also fails to take the Independent Bookshop number one, which instead goes to the Private Eye Annual 2025.
Always Remember has seen its sales grow 26.2%, compared with the previous seven days as booksellers across the country have fought their way through the biggest week of the year. Total sales in the last full week before Christmas rose 18.1% to £85.1m, with 8.2 million books sold, a boost of 15.5%. Compared with the same week in 2024, volume was down 6.8%, with value performing slightly better, down 4.4%
Just missing out on the overall number one, Richard Osman can console himself somewhat as The Impossible Fortune (Viking) takes the top slot in the Original Fiction (OF) chart for the sixth Christmas in a row for the crime-writer. Osman’s sales in the TCM’s busiest week have risen by 16.4% – meaning that with still a fortnight to go the biggest book of 2025 has now sold 457,000 copies, just 1,133 copies fewer than We Solve Murders managed in the whole of 2024.
Apart from the numbers rising, there is little change at the peak of the OF Top 20, with Lee and Andrew Child’s Exit Strategy (Bantam), Dan Brown’s The Secret of Secrets (Bantam) and Bob Mortimer’s The Long Shoe (Gallery) keeping hold of slots two to four. Meanwhile Flesh, the winner of the 2025 Booker Prize from David Szalay (Jonathan Cape) moves up to fifth place following a 27.1% rise to 11,166 units, providing its best weekly performance to date.
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There is no change at the top of the Mass-Market Fiction chart with Harlan Coben’s Nobody’s Fool (Cornerstone) taking the lead for the third consecutive week – though it bucks the trend for most other books this week with volume contracting 4.2% to 15,712 copies, just 684 sales ahead of Freida McFadden’s The Housemaid (Little, Brown), which experienced a 30% jump ahead of the release of the film adaption this Boxing Day.
If sales of the film tie-in edition of McFadden’s most notable title were added in, The Housemaid would be sitting comfortably at the top of the MMF chart, and in eighth place in the overall ranking with 20,069 copies.
Fourth place in the TCM this week, and notching up the Paperback Non-Fiction number one, is The 1% Club Official Quiz Book Volume 1 (Bantam) – this replicates the same position it held in 2024, though with a 26.7% reduction – while fifth place goes to the second volume from the ITV’s hit game show fronted by Lee Mack.
Combined, the two titles have sold 52,882 copies this week, so many readers can expect to find their stockings filled with head-scratching brainteasers.
Jeff Kinney’s Partypooper sits atop the Children’s Top 20, taking a fifth consecutive week as the kids’ number one – and its eighth week overall. The Diary of a Wimpy Kid author thus earns his first Children’s Christmas number one since 2013 when Hard Luck scored first place with 39,779 copies. In total Partypooper has now sold 207,843 units, already surpassing its immediate predecessor’s total performance for 2024 by 7.1%.
We should “always remember” at this point that the phasing of Christmas Day can have a big impact on the sales figures as customer behaviour changes each year. In this week in 2024, the Top 50 sold a total of 748,753 copies – 8.3% more than this year, but with an extra day still to go before the big day this year, expect to see some big year-on-year rises in the data next week.
