Despite a 59.1% decline in sales against its first week on sale, The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman (Viking) has clung onto the number one position, according to the latest data from NielsenIQ BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM).

The newest in the Thursday Murder Club series has shifted 59,504 copies in its first full week on sale, meaning that across the first 10 days on sale, the murder mystery has chalked 205,204 copies, making it already the sixth-bestselling book of the year, just ahead of Sarah J Maas’ A Court of Thorns and Roses (Bloomsbury) which this week also eclipses the 200,000-unit mark.

Just a mere 42,000 copies behind Osman, Dan Brown’s The Secret of Secrets (Bantam) climbs three places back to second place in the Top 50, despite a 30.2% reduction in sales to 16,742 units. It gives the latest Robert Langdon thriller total sales of 155,365 copies across its first four weeks, just slightly behind Jamie Oliver’s 158,760 copies in the same period. 

Oliver’s Eat Yourself Healthy (Michael Joseph) keeps hold of its position at the top of the Hardback Non-Fiction chart with 14,173 copies sold this week, though that has more than halved compared with the previous seven days. Oliver manages to stay ahead of Kay and Kate Allinson’s Pinch of Nom Slow Cooker (Bluebird) which sticks in fourth place in the TCM Top 50 with 11,617 copies this week, a drop of 56.8% in its second week.

SenLinYu’s Alchemised (Michael Joseph) rounds off the Top 5, slipping from second place as sales dropped 76.4% against the previous seven-day period. Despite this, it has been a good start for the first-time author who, according to Penguin Random House, has become the fastest selling debut adult writer since records began, not just in the UK, but globally.

While the titles that make up the Top 5 have not changed this week, sales across all of them have dropped significantly, losing 160,892 copies across the quintet – accounting for the majority of the 181,160 the total Top 50 has shed compared with the previous seven days.

Still, they are the only five titles to sell more than 10,000 units this week, with only Freida McFadden’s The Housemaid (Little, Brown) coming close.

The Housemaid is McFadden’s biggest title to date – lifetime sales now stand at 711,550 units, making it the 12th biggest book of the 2020s, just a handful of copies behind Prince Harry’s Spare (Transworld) – moving 9,412 copies this week, slightly down from the 9,902 books it sold in the preceding seven days.

The Dinosaur that Pooped a Master by Dougie Poynter and Tom Fletcher, featuring illustrations from Garry Parsons (Puffin), takes a second consecutive week at the top of the Children’s Top 20 this week, even with a sales dip 1.5% to 7,387 copies.

With three weeks to go until Halloween there are 12 scarily-themed titles in the kids’ Top 20 – up from the previous week’s 11 – with total sales across them jumping a spooktacular 21.7%, compared with the previous week.

Not all titles at the top of the charts have seen sales drop this week – The Courage to be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga (Allen & Unwin) has seen sales jump 16%, helping it into first place on the Paperback Non-Fiction chart and pushing Gillian Anderson’s Want (Bloomsbury) into third place, despite her sales only slipping by 70 copies week-on-week.

A total of 3.4 million books went through the TCM this week down 3.6% compared with the previous week – a decline more than covered by the reduction in sales of the Top 5 – and down 3% on the same week in 2024. A total of £34.3m was spent on books, down 4.5% week-on week, but up 0.2% on last year.