You must remember this: Charlie Mackesy storms back to number one

Super Thursday may not have been as big as previous years in terms of the number of titles published, but it has lived up to its reputation by delivering eight new entries into the Top 10, led by Charlie Mackesy’s Always Remember (Ebury).

The long-awaited follow-up to 2019’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse has sold 64,036 copies in its first week on sale which bags Mackesy, perhaps surprisingly, only his fifth week at the top of the Official UK Top 50, according to NielsenIQ BookData’s Total Consumer Market (TCM).

Published at the latter end of 2019, Mackesy’s previous book is the number two topseller of the past six years – beaten only by a certain Richard Osman.

At its peak in the week prior to Christmas Day of that year, it shifted 82,545 copies but was pipped to the top spot then by David Walliams and illustrator Tony Ross’ The Beast of Buckingham Palace (HarperCollins), which sold 5,445 copies more.

Mackesy’s sequel (we are excluding the 2022 picture book based on the animated short film adpatation) has beaten the first week of its predecessor by 270.6% – a rate that is unlikely to sustain, but it could still be on track to match or even surpass the 392,642 copies the first book sold in Christmas period of 2019.

While Mackesy may have only topped the Top 50 a handful of times, this latest week sees his 29th appearance at the summit of the Hardback Non-Fiction Top 20 – beating second-placed When Gavin Met Stacey and Everything in Between by Ruth Jones and James Corden (Bantam) by slightly more than 30,000 copies.

The behind-the-scenes look at the hit BBC sitcom has sold 33,343 copies, just missing out on third place in the TCM as Richard Osman’s The Impossible Fortune (Viking) has shifted 148 more copies to take second place and retain the Original Fiction number one slot for the third consecutive week.

With sales of 33,491 copies in his third week – 13.6% less than The Last Devil to Die managed in its equivalent week in 2023 – Osman beats off Original Fiction competition from Stephanie Garber’s The Alchemy of Secrets (Gollancz) and Bob Mortimer’s The Long Shoe (Gallery). Though Garber is a long-established author, she owes at least some of her success this time around to a slot in FairyLoot’s Adult subscription box; Garber’s previous hardback, Spectacular, a novella in the Caraval series, sold 6,987 copies in its first week in October 2024.

Mortimer meanwhile manages to put in a performance that is more or less flat compared to The Hotel Avocado which sold 24,596 copies in its first week on sale in the August of 2023 – just 157 more units than its performance this year.

In seventh place in the TCM – just behind Bob Mortimer – and at the top of the Children’s Top 20 is the latest instalment of Jamie Smart’s Bunny vs Monkey graphic novel series. Intergalactic Monkey Business (DFB Phoenix) has sold 19,266 copies since its release on Super Thursday and easily takes the Children’s number one. Not only does that figure beat the first week of 2024’s The Great Big Glitch by 15.7%, it gives Smart his biggest single-week figure to date.

Super Thursday is about more than just hardbacks, though. Freida McFadden’s The Intruder (Poisoned Pen Press) takes fourth place in the TCM Top 50, easily topping the Mass-Market Fiction chart, with 32,275 copies sold – like Smart, that is an all-time best for McFadden, beating the first week of The Tenant by 31%.

The Paperback Non-Fiction chart sees Morgan Housel take the top two positions with new release The Art of Spending Money (Harriman House) in first place – just 70 copies ahead of his 2020 release, The Psychology of Money.

With the Top 50 enjoying a 57.2% boost in volume sales this week, it is no surprise to see the full TCM volume rising 14.3% to 3.9 million books sold – bringing in a total of £39.2m, a rise of 14.3% compared with the previous seven days. The year-on-year figures show that the market is continuing to fall behind last year, though – volume is down 3.7%, while value has dropped slightly less at 1.7%.