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In a stunning move, Tom Kerridge’s Lose Weight for Good (Absolute) has held on to the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, despite a robust challenge from the book that rocked the White House, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury (Little, Brown). While the exposé of Trump's administration shifted 59,468 copies last week, Kerridge’s healthy recipe book jumped 114% in volume week on week, to a whopping 70,302 copies sold. This is, by some way, the biggest-selling January hardback number one since records began.
However, Fire and Fury’s sky-high average selling price of £17.30 brings its value to £1.028m earned in just seven days, nearly £400,000 more than Lose Weight for Good. It is near-level with the amount Jamie Oliver’s 5 Ingredients made in the week running up to Christmas 2017, and it is the highest ever seven-day value for any title in the month of January. Though Kerridge has pipped it to the post, both titles’ sales are staggering for so early on in the year—by comparison, 2017 kicked off with seven straight weeks without a single title cresting 20,000 copies sold.
Tim Whiting, Fire and Fury’s UK editor, said the publisher was “really pleased” with the first week of sales, which he said was an “incredible result from a standing start”, especially taking in sales of other formats and editions.
“The UK trade is now well stocked and it’s great to see so many retailers getting behind this extraordinary book,” he added. “A big thank you to all of them for their support throughout - they have all been amazing, and are continuing to hand-sell the book.”
Kerridge’s 2017 number one Tom Kerridge’s Dopamine Diet re-entered the Top 50, while last year’s main beneficiary of the dystopia Trump bump, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (Penguin), climbed 145 places to re-enter the Heatseekers Fiction top 20.
Elsewhere, a barrage of new paperback fiction peppered the chart, with Lee Child’s short story collection No Middle Name (Bantam) yanking the Mass Market Fiction number one from Jo Nesbo’s The Thirst (Vintage) and scoring third place overall, with John Grisham’s Camino Island (Hodder) just below, in fourth place. Dilly Court’s The River Maid (Harper), Jane Fallon’s Faking Friends (Penguin) and Jenny Colgan’s The Endless Beach (Sphere) rushed into the Mass Market Fiction top 10.
After 19 straight weeks of male authors in the Original Fiction number one, Kimberley Chambers’ Life of Crime (HarperCollins) has broken the streak, selling 4,844 copies for the author’s first ever pole in the category chart. However, that run pales in comparison to the Paperback Non-Fiction chart, which has seen a single female-authored number one (Rupi Kaur’s The Sun and Her Flowers) in the 67 weeks since October 2016.
David Walliams’ Bad Dad (HarperCollins) re-claimed the Children’s number one from Jeff Kinney's The Getaway (Puffin), for his first of the year, while Liz Braswell’s Disney Twisted Tales series inched up the Children’s & YA Fiction top 20 en masse, with Once Upon a Dream (Parragon) the biggest seller.
The top two hardbacks' sales did wonders for the overall market, which posted a jump in value of 5.7% week on week—while against the same week on 2017, volume rose 4% and value 7.8%. Average selling price, buffeted by Fire and Fury, swelled to £8.76, its highest since mid-October 2017.