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Unforgettable: Charlie Mackesy ends the year on a high
At this time of year, it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly what day it is, they all seem to merge into one homogeneous mass of crisp winter walks and meals made entirely out of picky bits. So, it is worth noting that Christmas Day fell on a Thursday in 2025, one day later than in 2024, creating this week a chart of two halves.
The start of the week saw bookshops selling even more of the books they shifted in the previous week creating a static top five at the top of the Official UK Top 50, according to the latest data from NielsenIQ BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM). The last few days of the week have seen a sudden shift in consumer patterns, leading to some big changes further down the chart – as well as 13-re-entries into the Top 50.
The extra pre-Christmas trading day has had a positive boost to the year-on-year picture, too. While volume across the TCM has unsurprisingly fallen by 34.3% from the previous week to 5.4 million copies and value has dropped to by 34.1% to £56.1m the numbers are looking healthier when compared to the same week in 2024 – volume is up 12% and value has increased by 16.5%.
All that means a final position for the whole of 2025 that sees volume down 2.5% while value has performed slightly better, slipping just 0.5% – leading to an average selling price of £9.52, some 19p higher than 2024.
Back to this week and Charlie Mackesy has retained his number one with Always Remember (Ebury Press) for the third consecutive week, and fifth overall, after selling 26,273 copies – a drop of 40.1% compared with Christmas week. Every title in the Top 20 has seen a contraction in contrast to the previous seven days, but Mackesy’s dip – coming from the greatest height – is unsurprisingly one of the steepest, with only Mary Berry’s Mary 90 (BBC Books) in 20th place seeing a bigger percentage decline of 49.5%.
The title in the Top 20 that has seen the smallest drop this week is The Housemaid by Freida McFadden (Little, Brown). Unit sales were down 8.5% to 13,744 copies, enough interested readers to push it up to seventh place in the TCM Top 20 and to the top of the Mass Market Fiction chart, swapping spots with Harlan Coben’s Nobody’s Fool (Cornerstone).
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The film adaptation of The Housemaid was released on Boxing Day, no doubt helping arrest the title’s decline. In fact, the film tie-in edition has seen its sales jump 22.8% to 6,190 copies, giving McFadden’s debut thriller a combined total that is just 135 copies fewer than its previous week’s performance.
McFadden is the only new arrival at the top of any of The Bookseller’s main charts, with the others, like the Top 50, seeing very little change in their composition, especially in the higher positions.
Richard Osman has kept the Original Fiction number one with 21,270 copies sold for The Impossible Fortune (Viking) – enough to give the crime writer an end-of-year figure of 478,270 units, making it not just the bestselling book of the year, despite only being published at the end of September, but the only book this year to move more than 400,000 copies.
The duo of quiz books that tie in with ITV’s The 1% Club (Bantam) have kept hold of the peak positions in the Paperback Non-Fiction chart, selling a combined 33,043 copies – considerably more than 2023’s Christmas number one Murdle by GT Karber (Souvenir) which sits in third place with 7,924 copies.
Jeff Kinney’s Partypooper is spoiling the party for all the other children’s books this week, taking pole position for the ninth week out of the last 10, following sales of 14,197 copies, down compared with the previous week by 29.7%.
The biggest new entries into the TCM’s top titles – coming in at lowly positions of 113 and 129 – give a sneak preview of 2026. Despite having 1st January publication dates, colouring titles from Townhouse, Sunday Reset and Pamper Day, have strayed outside of the lines and sold more than 3,000 copies each this week.
