Competing visions of domestic life square off against each other this Christmas, as Jamie Oliver’s latest cookbook jostles for the No 1 bestseller spot with David Walliams’s Bad Dad.
Both writers have strong pedigree for the contest, with TV chef and campaigner Oliver having taking the prize no fewer than five times in the past, and actor and children’s author Walliams securing the top slot last year.
A market that has been swamped by satirical takes on children’s classics for the last two years is turning away from spoofs, according to the Bookseller, with last week’s non-fiction sales down 16% in volume compared to last year – a decline the magazine attributed to the “wane in popularity” of humour titles. This year’s biggest seller to date from the Ladybird for Grown-Ups series is How it Works: The Baby, which has sold 10,741 copies. Last year, Five on Brexit Island had sold more than 50,000 copies by December.
This year, Walliams has been topping charts with his latest children’s novel, which has sold around 80,000 copies for the past two weeks, according to Nielsen BookScan. Another children’s title, Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Getaway, is second, selling almost 50,000 copies a week, with Oliver’s 5 Ingredients surging from almost 30,000 copies two weeks ago to more than 37,000 copies last week. The Bookseller predicted that it could be a two-horse race for the No 1 spot this Christmas, between Walliams and Oliver.
“I’d be surprised if [it] didn’t end up in the hands of either Jamie Oliver or David Walliams,” agreed Waterstones’ Chris White. “But then Christmas is all about surprises. Maybe Lee Child or Dan Brown will claim the crown for fiction.”
White also cited titles including Blue Planet II, Mary Beard’s “timely” Women and Power, which he said “is providing further proof of the popularity of politically engaged writing in the era of Trump and Brexit”, and Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage. The latter, he said, was “providing a huge boon both to our tills and to the underlying health of the cultural world in which we operate”.
“We’re seeing a range of titles perform very strongly, while lacking a book to compare with the enormous reach of Fantastic Beasts last year (although a new EL James may help to rectify that),” said White. “I’m not sure how much of a dark horse it is, given the success of The GCHQ Puzzle Book last year, but Bletchley Park Brainteasers looks like being the book which will be asking the questions in the most family homes this festive season.”
At Blackwell’s, David Kelly said: “The army of satiric Ladybirds appears to have halted their monopoly of the humour and gift market but, unsurprisingly, anything taking a lighter look at Trump and Brexit is doing well for us – in particular Alice in Brexitland and Trump’s Christmas Carol”.
“I sense a unique Christmas for us ahead, where a vast range of outstanding publishing will bring in our sales rather than a smaller amount of big titles,” said Kelly, “which as a range bookshop, with many expert buyers, suits us perfectly. For our specifically inquisitive customers, titles such as The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus sums us up and is selling really well.” The title promises to provide “the most elegant mathematical solutions to your Christmas conundrums, from how to avoid a secret Santa disaster to how to win the festive family games”.
Kelly added that “usually, there’s at least 20 books at this stage of the season that could be competing for our bestsellers”, but that “this year I see it as being a small field of high quality competing for the bestselling book – between The Lost Words by Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane, Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage and Women and Power by Mary Beard”.
