Jamie back on top as Costa winner shows mutability

The Bookseller - 01.02.11 - Philip Stone

Jamie Oliver's Jamie's 30-minute Meals (Michael Joseph) has returned to the summit of the Official UK Top 50 after a three-week hiatus.

The bestselling hardback non-fiction book since records began sold 37,407 copies in the seven days to 29th January, up 77% week-on-week, bringing its total sales since publication in September last year to 1,284,202 copies.

Emma Donoghue's Room (Picador) falls one place to second position, despite a 10% rise in week-on-week sales, while Tess Gerritsen's The Killing Place (Bantam) holds firm in third.

Andrea Levy's The Long Song (Headline) climbs three places into fourth position having enjoyed a slight boost in sales (by 5%) following its spot under Jo Brand et al's "TV Book Club", while the newest celebrity chef in town, former model Lorraine Pascale, climbs 18 places into fifth position. Her Baking Made Easy (HarperCollins), the official tie-in to her BBC2 series of the same name, sold 12,158 copies last week, up 81% on its previous week total.

New entries into The Official UK Top 50 include Tony Parson's Men from the Boys (Harper), the book in WHSmith's "£2.99 if you buy the Times" link-save promotion last week, and the mass-market edition of Edmund de Waal's Costa Award winning The Hare with Amber Eyes (Vintage).

The latter takes fourth position in this week's Top 20 Paperback Non-fiction chart behind two titles enjoying silver-screen boosts (Mark Logue's The King's Speech and Aron Ralston's 127 Hours) and one penned by someone made famous by the small screen: Denise Welch. The latter is the new number one, the former "Coronation Street" actress' memoir, Pulling Myself Together (Pan), taking top spot with a 7,023 sale.

Also new in the Top 20 Paperback Non-fiction chart is surprise Costa Book of the Year winner Jo Shapcott. Sales of her Of Mutability rocketed 1,066% week-on-week, to 2,496 copies sold across all editions, and outsold the next most popular poetry book, Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife (Picador) by seven copies to one. Of Mutability also sold more than four times as many copies as last year's winner (Christopher Reid's A Scattering) managed, in the week it won the prestigious award, although is just a third of the sale Sebastian Barry's novel, The Secret Scripture (Faber), achieved in the week it won in 2009.

Elsewhere in non-fiction, Simon Sebag Montefiore's incredibly well reviewed Jerusalem: The Biography (Weidenfeld), sold 3,424 copies in its opening week in bookshops, taking third place (behind Pascale) in this week's Top 20 Hardback Non-fiction chart.

In fiction, James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge's Tick Tock (Century) ousts Jo Nesbo's The Leopard (Harvill) from pole position in this week's Top 20 Original Fiction chart which welcomes three new entries into the top 10, all published by Orion. Joe Abercrombie's The Heroes (Gollancz) debuts in third place, while Raymond Khoury's long-awaited follow-up to The Last Templar, The Templar Salvation (Orion), takes ninth, and sometime bookseller, sometime script-writer Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London (Gollancz) debuts in 10th.

Also debuting in the Original Fiction chart are James Henry's First Frost (Bantam Press), a prequel to R D Wingfield's Jack Frost crime series, and Kim Edwards' The Lake of Dreams (Viking), the new novel from the author of the hugely popular The Memory Keeper's Daughter, life sales of which stand at 830,000 copies and counting.