Books & Bookmen
n GLARINGLY absent from the Sunday Times’s provisional all-year top 10 – and, indeed, from the top 30 – is HarperCollins. Embarrassingly, its bestselling title last year was Asako Yuzuki’s Butter, the heavily marketed breakout hit of 2024, now a painful reminder of better times at no 35 (yet still outperforming 2025’s HarperCollins hardbacks and paperbacks).
Should we connect the sudden resignation of UK supremo Charlie Redmayne in early October – still without official explanation – to an awareness that a dismal Christmas at the tills was inevitable? Or was he somehow doomed by association with David Walliams, whose downfall only came last month following Telegraph exposé of allegations of creepy behaviour – too late, fortuitously for HC, to halt release of Walliams’ autumn children’s books, which HC has now said it will no longer publish?