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Don’t forget to remember: Charlie Mackesy reclaims first place
Charlie Mackesy has surged forward in a bid to claim the Christmas number one in the penultimate week before the big day, according to the latest data from NielsenIQ BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM).
Always Remember (Ebury Press) has climbed one place as it sees its sales jump 13% to 34,736 copies in the week ending 13th December – a figure that pushes its lifetime sales to 320,826 units, only the sixth book to break the 300,000 mark in volume this year and the first Non-Fiction title to do so.
Mackesy’s sequel to 2019’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse – which is the bestselling Non-Fiction title of the 2020s so far on 1.4 million units – has jumped ahead of the previous week’s number one, Guinness World Records 2026. The latest GWR edition slips to third in the TCM and second in the Hardback Non-Fiction chart as its sales fall 15.8% to 30,140 copies.
Sitting just 160 copies ahead of Guinness in second place – and at the summit of the Original Fiction chart – is Richard Osman’s The Impossible Fortune (Viking). Like Mackesy, the latest Thursday Murder Club title has seen a sales bump this week, though not as great; its 6.2% rise takes it to 30,300 copies in the latest seven-day period.
Yet, that figure is enough to push its lifetime sales over 400,000 units – the only book to cross that mark in 2025 so far – and likely will be only book to do so, though Mackesy might be in with a shot, depending on how the past few weeks of the year pan out for Always Remember.
Elsewhere in the Original Fiction (OF) chart, Lee and Andrew Child’s Exit Strategy, Dan Brown’s The Secret of Secrets (both Bantam) and Bob Mortimer’s The Long Shoe shuffle around a little, though none of them can break 15,000 copies this week, so are not challenging Osman for his OF crown.
Just a few hundred units behind Mortimer is this weeks’ biggest new release, Chloe Gong’s Coldwire (Hodderscape) – though it has an official publication date of 6th November, it has not recorded any sales in the TCM until the 13,213 copies that have appeared this week, likely thanks to its inclusion in FairyLoot’s YA subscription box for December (though it is coded as adult fiction by Hodderscape).
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The Children’s number one of the week sits in fourth place in the Official UK Top 50, though falls short of third place by more than 10,000 copies. Jeff Kinney’s Partypooper, the 20th Diary of a Wimpy Kid title, had a 5.3% contraction in volume compared to the previous seven days, giving it a total of 19,659 copies.
Still, Kinney’s book sits comfortably ahead of its nearest rival – Tom Fletcher and Shane Devries’ The Christmasaurus and the Night before Christmas (Puffin), which has seen 13,432 copies fly through the tills across the UK this week, up 13.8%. Perhaps the one to watch out for here, though is The Unofficial K-Pop Demon Hunters Activity Book (Arcade). Lila Violet’s tie-in to the summer’s hottest animation has jumped from 14th place to third in its second week on sale, as sales climb 53.3%.
The 1% Club Quiz Book: Volume 2 (Bantam) has seemingly been ruled out of the race for Christmas number one – despite its sales rising 36.9% to 16,803 copies and vaulting to seventh place in the TCM. It loses its crown at the top of the Paperback Non-Fiction Top 20 to its own predecessor. Volume one of the tie-in books to ITV’s hit game show has climbed 53.5% to 18,388 copies putting it one place ahead of volume two in both PBNF and the overall TCM.
Harlan Coben’s Nobody’s Fool (Cornerstone) takes a second consecutive week at the top of the Mass-Market Fiction (MMF) Top 20, with its sales rising 45.5%, pushing it inside the overall Top 10. Freida McFadden’s The Housemaid (Little, Brown) sticks in second on 11,563 copies – though ahead of the Boxing Day release of the film adaptation, the tie-in edition has sold an additional 5,143 copies. Combined, the two editions have sold 16,706 books in the latest week, putting it ahead of Coben by just 304 copies.
While the Top 50 has seen sales drop 6.8% – due to the absence of both Orbital (Vintage) and Butter (4th Estate) – the penultimate full week of Christmas sales has seen total volume sales jump by 9.1% to 7.1 million books, leading to value increasing 11.7% to £72.1m. Sales are lagging behind 2024, though – compared with the equivalent week last year, volume is down 7.7% and value has slipped 6.4%
