Celebrity autobiographies did even worse: the second highest selling celeb memoir ( Jenson Button) tellingly failed to make the cut, leaving David Jason’s Only Fools and Stories (43) as the lone representative.

Only Mary Berry (29) and Nigella Lawson (56) joined him in the chart with traditional recipe collections, although Tom Kerridge (41) outsold Lawson with a diet-based offering. Once-mighty genres meanwhile continued to dwindle, with Oliver’s supremacy belying an otherwise feeble showing by cookbooks. Shari Lapena, the only woman in the top 10.

Paula Hawkins’s second outing, Into the Water, was unable to match The Girl on the Train (itself continuing to flourish at 11 thanks to the film version) but nevertheless managed to grab 33rd place as a hardback this and the strong performances of The Couple Next Door (3) by Canada’s Shari Lapena – the sole woman in the top 10 – and Clare Mackintosh’s I See You (14) suggest it’s too soon to write off the psychological thriller. While the diet/fitness titles of Joe Wicks (who claimed Nos 3 and 7 in 2016) may have peaked, slots at Nos 17, 31 and 40 are not to be sneezed at. Other trends also showed signs of being past their best, yet appeared relatively robust. Several more jokey updated versions of Ladybird or Enid Blyton books (which between them had three top 20 entries in 2016) were released, perhaps for the final year, but the best-selling were just outside the top 100. YouTube idols venturing into print have disappeared too, as have Minecraft manuals. Adult colouring books, for instance, still sell – Keep Calm and Colour Unicorns was among the most popular – but no longer well enough to make this list, let alone the top 10 as in their heyday.

It helps too that the challenges previously posed to this oligopoly by short-lived fads have receded, and were not replaced in 2017 by another vogue with the same commercial impact.

These near-perpetual kings of Christmas have been able to retain or regain their places in the chart’s elite without difficulty because in 2017 only Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage (10) exemplified the kind of windfalls publishers and booksellers have become accustomed to, when big names – such as Bill Bryson, Harper Lee and Alex Ferguson as well as Rowling and James – enter the pre-festive fray and take on the producers of annual instalments or iterations of a series.

Best books to read 2017 fiction