Australians were hungry for more in 2024 from RecipeTin Eats founder Nagi Maehashi who topped the country’s bestseller list for the second year as her two cookbooks ruled the charts.
Readers devoured Maehashi’s second cookbook, RecipeTin Eats: Tonight, which sold nearly 300,000 copies in less than three months. It was the highest-selling title of the year, according to figures from Nielsen BookScan.
Nagi Maehashi confirmed she has the recipe for success with her second book Tonight.Credit: James Brickwood
The Sydneysider’s first release, RecipeTin Eats: Dinner, followed with 177,000 sales, after topping the list in 2023. Dinner is now the biggest-selling cookbook in Australia since records began, ahead of Jamie Oliver’s 2012 Jamie’s 15-Minute Meals and Kim McCosker and Rachael Bermingham’s 2010 4 Ingredients.
Maehashi, who left a high-flying career in corporate finance to launch the blog RecipeTin Eats in 2014, has since sold more than 895,000 books in Australia generating $25.5 million.
Pan MacMillan Australia’s publishing director Ingrid Ohlsson said Maehashi (who is a Good Food columnist) was a once-in-a-generation phenomenon.
“There is nothing flash-in-the-pan about Nagi’s success. She is tirelessly and forensically focused on meeting everyday people where they are on their cooking journeys. Her mission is to ‘get us’, not ‘impress us’. This is why we can’t get enough,” Ohlsson said.
Liane Moriarty’s 10th novel Here One Moment was the top fiction title of 2024, and third overall after Maehashi’s cookbooks, selling 158,000 copies, all in the final quarter of the year. The only other Australian novel to crack the top 20 was Trent Dalton’s third novel, 2023’s Lola in the Mirror, with 80,000 copies sold in 2024. Other strong local fiction performers included Dervla McTiernan’s crime novel What Happened to Nina?, Sarah A. Parker’s romantasy When the Moon Hatched and Tim Winton’s dystopian novel Juice.
BookTok continued to shape fiction sales, with older releases and genre novels dominating the top 10. Colleen Hoover’s 2016 novel It Ends With Us ranked as the fourth-highest seller, boosted by the release of a new edition tied to the controversial film adaptation starring Blake Lively. Desire still burns bright for romantasy with Sarah J. Maas’ 2015 A Court of Thorns and Roses and Rebecca Yarros’ 2023 Iron Flame the next highest-selling novels, followed by Freida McFadden’s 2022 thriller The Housemaid. One of the year’s most anticipated literary fiction releases, Sally Rooney’s fourth novel Intermezzo, ranked 19th with 73,000 copies sold, matching the sales of her third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, released in 2021.
