Nearly 10 months after publication, Butter (Fourth Estate) has made its way to the top of the Official UK Top 50 according to data from Nielsen Bookscan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM).
In a week that straddles both sides of Christmas, Asako Yuzuki’s food-based crime novel translated into English by Polly Barton sold 26,873 copies – down 22.3% based on the last full week before Christmas, but performing ahead of the total top 50 which has dropped 46.2%.
The expected decline in sales makes week-on-week comparisons hard to make, as even the most successful of books have seen a decline, while year-on-year comparisons are complicated by the phasing of Christmas which has provided two extra festive trading days in this week compared to the same week last year.
Gillian Anderson’s Want (Bloomsbury) has had the best week-on-week performance with sales dropping just 6.6% – though this is likely due to a pent-up demand for the book with a reprint becoming available just before the big day itself – helping it return to the overall top 50 at 25. At the other end of the scale, 2023’s Christmas Number one Murdle by GT Karber suffers the worst performance, with sales dropping by more than two thirds.
This year’s Christmas Number one, the 2025 editions of Guinness World Records sees a fall to fifth place, though it retains the number one position in the Non-Fiction Hardback chart (NFHB) – 6,000 copies ahead of this week’s biggest new release The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (Hay House). The self-help guide from the podcast host and motivational speaker has sold 11,095 copies in its first week, comfortably beating Robbins’ previous record when The High 5 Habit 1,594 in publication week back in 2021.
In a sign of things to come in January, Pinch of Nom: All in One by Kay and Kate Allinson (Bluebird) and Bored of Lunch Six Ingredients Slow Cooker by Nathan Anthony (Ebury Press) are both starting to rise up the NFHB chart while Tim Spector’s Food for Life Cookbook (Jonathan Cape) both return to the top 20.
The biggest news in the Original Fiction Top 20 – apart from Butter taking the top spot – is Callie Hart’s Quicksilver (Hodderscape) heating up and rising to sixth place. With sales of 4,403 it sits just outside the overall UK Top 50, but with sales pretty much flat week-on-week, it is another one to keep an eye on as we move into January.
Richard Osman’s We Solve Murders (Viking) is the bestselling book of the year, but it has to settle for third place in the overall top 50 as Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Vintage) shoots past it to take second place, keeping hold of its first place position at the top of the Mass Market Fiction chart.
Like the other charts, the MMF chart is mostly just a shuffling of positions ahead of the first tranche of new releases at the beginning of 2025, but both Fourth Wing (Piatkus) and sequel Iron Flame see big positional changes week on week, returning to the top 10 ahead of Onyx Storm – the third book in Rebecca Yarros’ Empyrean series – being released in January.
Quiz book The 1% Club (Bantam) spends another week at the top of the Non-Fiction paperback chart having now sold over 100,000 copies since publication in mid-November, while Dav Pilkey and Jeff Kinney continue their dominance of the Children’s Top 20 with Big Jim Begins (Scholastic) and Hot Mess (Puffin) respectively keeping hold of the top two positions.
In total this week, volume sales have dropped 45.3% to 4.8 million, delivering sales of £48.1m, a decline of 46%. Reflecting the later phasing of Christmas, though, volume sales are up 37% year-on-year, with value sales climbing 42.3%.
