Boris Johnson unleashed on the Top 50 as former Prime Minister tops the charts

Super Thursday has lived up to its name once again by delivering 22 new entries into the UK’s top 50, with Boris Johnson’s Unleashed (William Collins) taking the prime spot with more than 40,000 copies. In total Nielsen Bookscan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM) was worth £39.9m this week – up 16% against last week and up 10% compared to Super Thursday week last year, with volume sales breaking the four million barrier for the first time this year.

If book sales equals popularity, then Johnson comes out on top of our most recent Prime Ministers, selling twice as many as David Cameron’s 2019 For the Record (William Collins) in its first week, and more than Liz Truss’ and Theresa May’s lifetime sales combined of their post-premiership biographies. Johnson can’t quite match up to Tony Blair’s A Journey (Hutchinson), however, which shifted 92,060 in its first week back in 2010.

A HarperCollins spokesperson said: “We’re delighted to see Boris Johnson’s Unleashed as the nation’s overall number one this week. Boris is a writer to the core and Unleashed is a compulsively readable and unputdownable account of these recent turbulent years. A must read for anyone with an interest in the world today.”

In second place, Tim Spector’s The Food for Life Cookbook (Jonathan Cape) bucks the recent trend by bringing in sales of 29,732 up 211% on 2022’s original Food for Life release while Miranda Hart’s I Haven’t Been Entirely Honest With You (Michael Joseph) takes the sixth position with sales of 16,548 – up 256% versus 2016’s Peggy and Me.

Ian Rankin’s Midnight and Blue (Orion) is the bestselling fiction title this week, taking third place in the overall chart. Despite an r.r.p increase to £25, the 25th John Rebus novel manages to improve on the last Rebus novel A Heart full of Headstones by just under 1,000 copies.

New releases from Martina Cole and Kate Mosse both make the overall top 50, but neither of them can do quite enough to leap-frog this autumn’s big hitters Richard Osman and Sally Rooney who are the only two from last week’s top 10 to remain there this week with We Solve Murders (Viking) and Intermezzo (Faber) respectively. 

Reflecting the wide spread of new releases this week, there are also two children’s titles moving into the top 10 with Jamie Smart’s latest Bunny vs Monkey title The Big Glitch (David Fickling) taking fifth place. The increasingly popular Bunny vs Monkey graphic novel series is another one that is enjoying a large increase – The Big Glitch is up 145% against The Impossible Pig which came out in the autumn of 2023.

A F Steadman’s Skandar and the Skeleton Curse (Simon & Schuster) props up the top 10—the fourth Skandar novel is the first one to be published during the October peak, just six months after the third book in the series. It managed to shift 12,585 copies, down 4% against Skandar and the Chaos Trials’ first seven days back in April of this year. 

It’s safe to say that Christmas is well and truly on its way now, with two festive paperbacks rounding off the remainder of the top 10. Romantic mainstay Dilly Court’s latest release is The Snow Angel (HarperCollins) and has sold an impressive 13,093 units, but this is a reduction of 24% when compared to 2023’s A Thimble for Christmas.

It’s rising star Laurie Gilmore, however who takes the top paperback spot – and position seven in the overall UK Top 50 – with The Christmas Tree Farm (One More Chapter) delivering Gilmore’s biggest single week to date with 14,720 copies sold through the TCM. This beats Gilmore’s previous best week – last week, when The Pumpkin Spice Café achieved sales of 12,381 – and brings Gilmore’s lifetime sales to 196,984. Some 16% of that number comes from this week alone with all three of Gilmore’s titles making the overall Top 50.

Christmas isn’t quite here yet, though, with Halloween titles – including Gilmore’s The Pumpkin Spice Café – still continuing to sell well, and achieving combined unit sales of 43,739 inside the top 50 – 1,211 copies more than Boris Johnson’s Unleashed.