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Kay Featherstone and Kate Allinson’s Pinch of Nom (Bluebird) has topped every single regional territory chart, except for London, through Nielsen BookScan’s TCM. The record-smashing cookbook, which shifted 210,506 copies in its first week on sale, surpasses 100,000 copies sold for the year to date in four of the UK’s 11 regions, with Scotland just 1,090 copies below, at 98,910 units sold.
Pinch of Nom was by far the most popular in the Midlands, where it sold 162,553 copies, 16% of its UK-wide total and a hefty 93,620 copies more than the runner-up, David Walliams and Tony Ross’ Fing (HarperCollins Children’s). It also performed strongly in Lancashire, selling 128,755 copies. The BookScan region of Lancashire would include the authors’ home of the Wirral, though of course the huge popularity of their slimming food blog results in an even spread of sales across the UK. In total through the TCM since its publication in March, Pinch of Nom has sold 987,798 copies—and could easily surpass one million copies sold by the time its sequel is released in mid-December.
Despite the original cookbook’s across-the-board success, the June-published follow-up the Pinch of Nom Food Planner charted in only Yorkshire and the North East’s top 20s. In total, it’s hardly rested, selling 129,301 copies to become the eighth bestselling Paperback Non-Fiction title of the year to date.
London bucked the trend in more ways than one. Not only did it crown Heather Morris’ The Tattooist of Auschwitz (Zaffre) as its number one, on 118,553 copies sold, but also featured several titles that appeared on no other region’s chart—Michelle Obama’s Becoming (Viking), Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love (Penguin), Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (Vintage) and Philippa Perry’s The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (Penguin) were all London-only bestsellers. The Secret Barrister (Picador) scored 12th in London, but only featured in one other region’s chart—Lancashire, in 20th place.
Margaret Atwood’s Booker winner The Testaments (Chatto & Windus) also did better in London than any other region, hitting eighth place with 67,415 copies sold—33% of its UK-wide volume so far. It featured in four other regions’ top 20 charts, but without cracking higher than 18th place.
London also stood out for the ranking of Instagram influencer Mrs Hinch’s Hinch Yourself Happy (Michael Joseph), which, like Pinch of Nom, has been a huge social media-boosted hit. In every region except for London, Hinch Yourself Happy scored a top-five placement, charting second place to Pinch of Nom in Lancashire, the North East and Northern Ireland. In London, the cleaning tips guide charted in 13th place, with 53,560 copies sold. While there may be a comment to be made about Generation Rent and the difficulty in getting on the London property ladder and therefore actually having a whole house to clean, this volume still over-indexed for the capital’s population as a proportion of the UK. Mrs Hinch is the current UK-wide number one through BookScan, with her Mrs Hinch: The Activity Journal selling 81,651 copies in its first week on sale.
Every region backed its own—Ian Rankin’s In a House of Lies (Orion) swiped fourth place in Scotland, with Craig Smith and Katz Cowley’s The Wonky Donkey (Scholastic) hitting 11th. The author-illustrator duo may be from New Zealand, but the picture book originally rocketed in sales after a YouTube video of a Scottish granny reading it aloud went viral last year.
Northern Ireland was the only region to feature its homegrown Booker winner, Anna Burns’ Milkman (Faber), with the 2018 winner selling 4,981 copies this year to chart 13th. Milkman has delivered all across the UK, with its total sales just under a quarter of a million units in print—making it the Prize’s biggest-selling winner since Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies (Fourth Estate) in 2012.
Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path (Penguin) rocketed into second place in the South West. The non-fiction breakout bestseller is set on the 630-mile South West Coast Path, which spans from Somerset to Dorset. Eden Project: The Guide also hit third place in the region, the only chart in which it featured.