Almost 60,000 print copies of Michael Wolff’s Donald Trump exposé Fire and Fury were sold in the UK last week, but the British public’s New Year’s resolutions meant the explosive political title was pipped to the No 1 spot – by Tom Kerridge’s Lose Weight for Good.

In the US, Wolff’s account of the early months in Donald Trump’s White House is in its 11th printing, according to US publisher Henry Holt, which has 1.4m hardback books on order and has shipped more than 700,000 copies to date. It made No 1 on the New York Times bestseller list based on two days of sales, but in the UK, Wolff’s book missed the top spot by more than 10,000 copies, with Kerridge’s title selling 70,302 against Wolff’s 59,468, according to newly released figures from Nielsen BookScan. UK publisher Little, Brown told the Bookseller it had also sold “tens of thousands” of Fire and Fury ebooks and audiobooks, with 330,000 copies shipped.

'It's all explosive': Michael Wolff on Donald Trump Read more

British booksellers hailed the performance of the book, which was published on 5 January. Waterstones, the country’s largest book chain, said that Fire and Fury was its bestselling title “by a margin of thousands of copies”.

The retail chain’s non-fiction buyer Clement Knox said: “After a fantastic weekend, sales of Fire and Fury have remained strong and look set to brave another news cycle. This is clearly a story that is not going to go away and Wolff’s book will remain the definitive text on the tumultuous first phase of the Trump presidency for the foreseeable future.”

At independent chain Foyles, head of buying Jasper Sutcliffe said there had been a very strong first week of sales both in-store and online. “Fire and Fury mania has come to Foyles in a big way; the book has created a huge amount of public interest and has had customers coming in to all our shops to get copies,” he said. “As with any book that takes off like this one has, availability has been challenging but the publishers Little, Brown and the wholesalers have been doing a sterling effort in getting stock to us to make sure we make the most of the formidable publicity this book has received.”

Although Fire and Fury was officially released on 5 January, there was little stock available to booksellers until the following week, as publishers rushed to meet demand. In the US, where publisher Henry Holt pulled forward the book’s publication by four days after the Guardian published an early extract and Trump’s lawyer threatened legal action, Macmillan president Don Weisberg called “the magnitude of demand” for the book unprecedented. “We felt the only thing to do was break from our planned publication date – which Macmillan has never done in our memory – and make this book available as soon as possible,” said Weisberg.