Chaos reigns supreme: Jamie Smart tops chart for second week
What is the only thing that can stop the World Book Day (WBD) books claiming a clean sweep of the official UK Top 10? If you answered Freida McFadden, you are wrong: Dear Debbie (Poisoned Pen Press) has dropped 13 places to 16th position and the thriller writer has a mere five titles in this week’s Top 50.
Instead, it is the other dominating force in NielsenIQ BookData’s Total Consumer Market (TCM) that interrupts the £1 books: subscription boxes. FairyLoot’s latest Young Adult sub-box selection, Rachel Griffin’s The Sun and the Starmaker (Sourcebooks Fire), is this week’s highest new entry taking 10th place with 14,416 copies.
With positions one to nine filled with this year’s WBD titles it does mean at least that the UK Top 10 matches entirely the Children’s and Young Adult Top 10 – a common occurrence at this time of the year, but an otherwise rare achievement.
Jamie Smart’s Bunny vs Monkey: Total Chaos! (DFB Phoenix) again proves to the most popular choice for the UK’s schoolchildren with 32,811 copies picked up, an increase of 34% to give the comics creator his second consecutive Top 50 Official number one. But Peppa Pig: One Big Family (Ladybird) has closed the gap by jumping 119% to 29,616 copies. Overall 231,462 copies of this year’s list have been exchanged for WBD vouchers in the first full week of the 2026 campaign – that is an increase compared with the previous week of 80.2% and 28.2% more than at the same point in 2025, or a jump of more than 50,000 copies.
Up and coming author Emily Brontë achieves her highest chart position – or at least since records began – with the Penguin Classics edition of Wuthering Heights as the film adaptation continues to top the UK box office. The Penguin Classics version takes 19th place with 7,076 units, a 139.4% climb compared to the previous week. In total, 19 different editions of the Gothic novel appear in NielsenIQ’s Top 5,000 titles this week, totalling sales of 21,570 copies which would be enough to give it fourth place in the overall chart.
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Paperback editions of Wuthering Heights account for 16,966 copies of those sales – more than enough to give it the Mass-Market Fiction (MMF) number one for combined editions. Unfortunately for the classic novel – which turns 179 years old in 2026 – the charts are not structured that way and it is Clare Douglas’ 2016 offering Local Girl Missing (Penguin), a mere 10 years old, that climbs to the top of the MMF Top 20 with 10,937 copies, up 35.5% on the previous seven days.
Douglas takes 13th position overall, dropping down one place – but, while it takes the crown as the most popular fiction title of the week, it is beaten as the biggest adult title. Nancy Birtwhistle takes 12th place – and claims the Hardback Non-Fiction number one – with Clean Magic (One Boat) with 13,253 copies shifted in its first few days on sale. This means it is not just the fastest-selling debut for any of Birtwhistle’s titles, but also the biggest single week of sales for the former Great British Bake Off contestant.
Kate Golden’s Half City (Arcadia Books) – the first in the Harker Academy series – grabs 14th place on 10,288 copies, the last of this week’s titles to break five digits. The is enough for the Original Fiction (OF) number one, something it achieved thanks again to FairyLoot, with the title its latest Romantasy box selection.
Finally, to the Paperback Non-Fiction Top 20 – Ian Leslie’s John & Paul (Faber) has dipped slightly this week with sales down 3.8% to 4,048 copies – but it is still enough to give it a third turn at the summit in a week that sees no new releases able to make a dent in the ranking.
Despite a low number of new releases, the WBD titles in conjunction with half term have provided a welcome boost to the overall numbers – volume has risen by 4.6% to 3.5 million delivering £31.5m – up 2.4% compared with the previous week. Year on year, volume is up 3.3% with value up 6.4%.
