Charlie Mackesy has scored the literary world’s Christmas No 1 with Always Remember, the follow-up to his bestselling 2019 title The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse.

Always Remember sold 43,825 copies in the seven days to 20 December, equating to a sale roughly every 14 seconds, according to NielsenIQ BookData. The illustrated fable – subtitled The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Storm – follows the four unlikely friends as they navigate meteorological and metaphorical dark clouds.

This marks the British illustrator’s first No 1, “having come so close in 2019, when The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse was pipped to the post by David Walliams and his The Beast of Buckingham Palace,” said Philip Stone, analyst at NielsenIQ. Last week, Walliams was dropped by his publisher HarperCollins, following allegations of inappropriate behaviour which he denies.

Mackesy’s book has sold 365,000 copies since publication day in October – “roughly one copy sold every 17 seconds,” said Stone.

Coming in behind Mackesy is Richard Osman’s The Impossible Fortune – the fifth title in his much-loved Thursday Murder Club series, which also clinched the overall bestseller spot for the year, making 457,000 sales, and 35,271 just last week.

The middle section of the Top 10 chart is dominated by gift books: the Guinness World Records 2026 (30,229 copies), The 1% Club Official Quiz Book 1 and 2 (28,656 and 24,226 copies respectively), and the Private Eye Annual 2025 (20,875 copies).

In seventh place is Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Partypooper (20,193 copies), followed by Lee and Andrew Child’s Exit Strategy (17,924 copies), Dan Brown’s The Secret of Secrets (16,985 copies), and The Long Shoe by comedian Bob Mortimer (16,106 copies).

Consumers spent £85.1m on printed books in the UK last week. This represents an 18.1% increase on the previous week but is down 4.4% compared to the same week last year.

Always Remember is also the top-selling book in Ireland this week, with Guinness World Records 2026 in second. In third place is Eimear Ní Bhraonáin’s The Dodger, about the curler DJ Carey’s fall from grace.