Almost every other year in the 2010s, an author has come out of left field and claimed the annual bestsellers’ top spot at the expense of the perennial contenders. It is either a first-time novelist going straight to No 1 (Gail Honeyman with Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine last year, EL James with all her Fifty Shades trilogy in 2012), or a former mega-seller returning with a new take on their old saga (James’s reverse-angle Grey in 2015, JK Rowling and her co-writers’ script of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in 2016).
This happened again in 2019, but with a double twist: a non-fiction title with two debut authors. Pinch of Nom by Kay Featherstone and Kate Allinson, a pair of weight-watching food bloggers from the Wirral, was always a favourite for supremacy after it broke records in March for first-week sales. The spin-off Food Planner also makes the top 50, and the pair are bound to get a third title well up the chart by the end of the year as their follow-up, Pinch of Nom: Everyday Light, came out on 12 December.
Their success reflects a reconfiguration of the domestic sector, with a falling away of celebrity chefs’ recipe books (Jamie Oliver’s Veg is the sole survivor at No 9) and the rise of offerings centred on weight loss or fitness, including Michael Mosley’s The Fast 800 (23) and titles just outside the chart by Joe Wicks and Tom Kerridge. Books about housework or home organisation are on the rise too, as shown by the remarkable sales for two books (5, 17) by Mrs Hinch – Sophie Hinchcliffe – promising to “shine your sink and soothe your soul”. Published a fortnight apart in the spring, Pinch of Nom and Hinch Yourself Happy both owe much to their authors’ social media presence – Mrs Hinch has an eye-popping 2.9 million followers on Instagram.
Also mingling in the chart’s elite with the usual suspects – Oliver, David Walliams, Lee Child, Jeff Kinney – are representatives of another trend, the insider memoirs of people in stressful jobs: Adam Kay (6, 15) and Christie Watson (47) on hospital medicine, the Secret Barrister (25) on the law, Ant Middleton (19) on the army, and Peter Crouch (on the chart’s subs’ bench at 62) on football. Tellingly, the most popular examples of “job lit” outsold the top new celebrity memoirs – Elton John’s Me (38), Billy Connolly’s Tall Tales (43) – in a defeat of the famous by the non-famous that mirrors Pinch of Nom’s triumph in cookbooks.
The heftier, more scholarly end of the factual spectrum, by contrast, continued to flounder commercially. If Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (50) – one of only two translated works in the list – were not still hanging on five years after publication, Bill Bryson’s The Body (39) would be the lone standard bearer for the kind of non-fiction that wins prizes.
In fiction, meanwhile, a peculiar division is discernible in the top 50, whereby all the chart’s crime novels are by men – an indication of the waning of the largely female-driven psychological thriller – and, perhaps more surprisingly, children’s fiction (from Philip Pullman to Walliams’s five titles to picture books) is a male preserve too. Conversely, no books classified as “general and literary fiction” are written by men, and the range of work by women is striking: Heather Morris’s hugely popular historical novel (2), more BDSM sex from James (31), smart commercial fiction by Liane Moriarty, Jojo Moyes and Sophie Kinsella (7, 10, 40), Eleanor Oliphant still doing more than fine in paperback (14), and the award-winning literary novelists Sally Rooney, Kate Atkinson and Madeline Miller (13, 41, 49).
Plus, of course, the joint 2019 Booker winner Margaret Atwood, who scored with both the TV tie-in edition of The Handmaid’s Tale (37) and its victorious sequel. The Testaments (12) is the highest placed (adult) novel published this year and has quite possibly racked up the biggest sales ever by a winner in hardback, with 272,251 copies sold so far.
Among other reasons to be cheerful are the performances of writers who, like the chart-topping double act, were little known a year ago. These include self-styled “grubby artist” Charlie Mackesy, whose sleeper hit The Boy, The Mole, the Fox and the Horse (20) took the Waterstones prize, memoirist Raynor Winn (35) and Greta Thunberg (32). Six years after Malala Yousafzai’s I Am Malala, the Swedish teenager matched her in producing a bestseller as well as in addressing the UN.
