Eight years since the last Robert Langdon thriller landed in UK bookshops, Dan Brown has once again returned to the top of the Official UK Top 50 with The Secret of Secrets (Bantam), according to the latest data from NielsenIQ BookData’s Total Consumer Market (TCM).

With a total of 77,721 copies it is the third-biggest single week figure of the year behind Rebecca Yarros’ Onyx Storm (Piatkus) and Suzanne Collins’ Sunrise on the Reaping (Scholastic) – both of which sold more than 100,000 copies in their first weeks – and just beats fellow new release Jamie Oliver’s Eat Yourself Healthy (Michael Joseph) to the top spot, which itself becomes the fourth-biggest new release of the year with 69,501 copies sold at the first time of asking.

Brown’s total gives him his 83rd number one – his first since 2018 – but sales are down 22.4% on the 100,095 copies that Origin, the previous book in the Robert Langdon series, managed in its first week in October 2017, and it is a far cry from the 550,946 units that The Lost Symbol managed in September 2009.

Meanwhile, Oliver’s latest cookbook goes straight to the top of the Hardback Non-Fiction Top 20 (HBNF) – giving the naked chef his 184th appearance in the top position and notching up his biggest single-week performance since 2017’s 5 Ingredients took the Christmas number one in that same year with 81,596 copies.

Third place in this week’s TCM Top 50 goes to Laurie Gilmore as The Gingerbread Bakery (HarperCollins) – the fifth book in the Dream Harbor series – notches up an impressive 31,515 in its first few days on sale, making it the second- biggest paperback launch of the year, beaten only by Richard Osman’s We Solve Murders (Viking) which sold 33,611 copies in its first week back in May.

Fellow spicy-romance author Elsie Silver has to settle for second place in the Mass-Market Fiction chart, and fourth place in the TCM, with Wild Card (Piatkus) racking up sales of 26,960 – up 56% on the first week of May’s Wild Side – a figure that would have taken it straight to the top of the paperback chart in most other weeks.

Dropping from first to fifth place is former number one Robert Galbraith’s The Hallmarked Man (Sphere) which this week has interested 15,532 readers – a drop of 70.8%,compared with its freshman week. While that is a significant fall, it continues to outperform the previous title in the Cormoran Strike series, up 6.6% compared to the second week of The Running Grave.

Sixth place in the Top 10 sees a re-entry for Davinia Taylor’s Futureproof (Orion Spring) – the former Hollyoaks actress’ guide to better physical health had until this point only sold 15,670 copies since its publication at the end of May, but this week has managed to add an extra 13,600 copies to that total. That is up considerably on the 88 copies from the previous week – and gives Taylor her third Paperback Non-Fiction number one, thanks to an appearance at the Health Optimisation Summit in London and an average selling price of just £5.

The biggest Children’s title of the week is the only title inside the TCM Top 10 not to sell more than 10,000 copies – however, with 9,281 copies of The Poisoned King (Bloomsbury) sold in the last seven days, Katherine Rundell has grown sales by 7.5% compared with Impossible Creatures first published in the same week in September 2023.

The flurry of new releases at the top of the charts have led to volume sales of 3.7 million books – up 8.8% compared with the previous week and a rise of 1.7% on the same week in 2024. Value sales have grown 6.8% to £35m, making this the biggest week of 2025 so far, although it is down 0.8% year-on-year.