Dan Brown’s The Secret of Secrets (Bantam) has slipped to second place in the Official UK Top 50, allowing Jamie Oliver to claim his 73rd number one, according to the latest data from NielsenIQ BookData’s Total Consumer Market (TCM).

Sales of Eat Yourself Healthy (Michael Joseph) have slipped 35%, giving the cheeky chef a seven-day sales figure of 45,207 units in its second week on sale, which combined with the previous week adds up to a total of 114,756 copies – to put that into context, Oliver’s previous title, Easy Air Fryer released in February of this year took 33 weeks to achieve the same number.

Admittedly, an air-fryer title will appeal to a more reduced audience than Oliver’s usual fare, but Eat Yourself Healthy is still doing well compared to Simply Jamie – the 2024 release took 12 weeks to shift the same amount. In fact, this is Oliver’s best debut fortnight ever – with his previous best performance belonging to 5 Ingredients which sold 89,170 copies in its first two weeks on sale back in 2017.

Despite the drop of more than a third compared with the previous week, Oliver is able to claim the top spot as Brown’s sales have more than halved, taking the latest Robert Langdon thriller to 36,692 copies in its second week and a lifetime sales figure of 114,621 – just 135 fewer than Eat Yourself Healthy has achieved in the same time.

Robert Galbraith – JK Rowling’s nom de plume for her Cormoran Strike series – retains second place in the Original Fiction chart behind Brown as sales of The Hallmarked Man (Sphere) drop 40.4% to 9,261 copies, keeping off competition from Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know (Jonathan Cape) – this week’s highest new release – which has to settle for third place with 7,237 copies, a figure only slightly lower than 2022’s Lessons which sold 7,448 copies for the author in its first week.

McEwan takes seventh place in the TCM Top 50, with the only other new release in the Top 10 belonging to Lucy Jane Wood as Uncharmed (Macmillan) manages to seduce 6,553 customers, down 8.2% compared to Rewitched – Wood’s debut novel – which sold 7,135 copies the same week last year.

The remaining slots in this week’s Top 10 are taken up by the top five titles in the Mass-Market Fiction (MMF) chart led once again by Laurie Gilmore’s The Gingerbread Bakery – with 16,304 copies sold in its second week, the fifth title in the Dream Harbor series keeps hold of third place in the TCM, although sales have fallen 48.3% compared to the previous week.

Conversely, Freida McFadden’s The Housemaid (Little, Brown) has seen sales jump up 68.4% from the previous seven days to 12,024 copies, taking it to second place in the MMF Top 20 and fourth place in the TCM – all thanks to the release of the first trailer for the film adaptation which is due to be released on Boxing Day. 

Gillian Anderson’s Want (Bloomsbury) has returned to the top of the Paperback Non-Fiction chart even though sales have fallen 12% – the previous number one Futureproof by Davinia Taylor (Orion Spring) has seen its sales fall to just 482, a drop of 96.5%, although it is 447.7% more than the 88 copies it managed in the week preceding its spike in sales.

The biggest title for the Children’s market is Paddington’s Trick or Treat by Michael Bond with illustrations by RW Alley – it is one of five Halloween-themed children’s books to make it into the TCM Top 50 this week which, combined, have sold 21,694 copies.

Following the previous week’s year-high, value sales have dropped in the latest TCM data by 8.8% to £31.9m – volume sales have fallen even further, down 11.5% to 3.3 million books. The year-on-year picture is slightly better – volume sales are down 1.9%, with value down 1.1%.