Last year JK Rowling reclaimed the No 1 spot in the bestseller charts by returning from mundane reality to the Potterverse (with the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child playscript); and before that EL James topped the 2015 charts by revisiting the Fifty Shades world from Christian’s perspective. In 2017 it was Jamie Oliver’s turn to play the comeback champion, after managing a best position of only 40th a year ago and being described in (ahem) the 2016 bestsellers analysis piece as “apparently fading”.
Mysteriously revitalised (surely there’s more to it than Channel 4 restoring him to peak-time after marooning him in the afternoon?), Oliver leads a markedly blokey top 10 dominated by recurring figures, with two David Walliams titles joined by books from Dan Brown, Lee Child, Jeff Kinney and Guinness World Records.
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.
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. 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. YouTube idols venturing into print have disappeared too, as have Minecraft manuals. 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.
Other trends also showed signs of being past their best, yet appeared relatively robust. 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. 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.
Once-mighty genres meanwhile continued to dwindle, with Oliver’s supremacy belying an otherwise feeble showing by cookbooks. 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. 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.
Overall, the list includes 39 children’s books (with Walliams alone scoring 11) and 23 novels categorised as crime or thrillers, meaning kids’n’ crime together contributed 62% of the total. While the top 10 is male-dominated, the chart as a whole is anything but, with 50 female author credits compared with 40 for men. If you strip out multiple titles (so everyone including Walliams is just counted once) to show the number of individual authors, the picture is even more striking: 41 women and 22 men.
When the pre-Christmas selling season had barely begun in early November, Waterstones boss James Daunt was already ruefully writing 2017 off as a chastening come-down after “the printed book is back!” headiness of last autumn: “It’s been a funny old year. There hasn’t been nearly the number of big, walloping bestsellers coming through.” One regret was a lack of literary grandees: “There wasn’t an Ian McEwan or a Julian Barnes or a Sebastian Faulks, or those sorts of heavyweight.”
In fact, in their absence literary fiction – though recently declared in danger of extinction by the Arts Council – didn’t do too badly. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (12) charged up the charts 32 years after its original publication; Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (74), Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (86) and Emma Cline’s The Girls (89) rubbed shoulders in the list with commercial novels without, unlike Atwood, the boost of a screen adaptation; while literary-genre hybrids such as Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent (27), Jessie Burton’s The Miniaturist (37) and Naomi Alderman’s Baileys winner The Power (47) proved even more appealing. (However, while he sounded tweedy and time-warped, Daunt was on to something in singling out missing chaps: Whitehead’s book is the top 100’s only “literary and general fiction” work - ie not crime or kid fic - by a man).
Non-fiction similarly offered occasional reasons to be cheerful amid a generally gloomy scene. The crowd-funded phenomenon of Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls (19), ever-present in the weekly charts since publication in March, headed the biography genre chart – but did so with precious little competition from orthodox biogs or memoirs. The equally innovative, map-based Prisoners of Geography (38) was No 1 in politics, but this triumph underlined the weak sales – despite Brexit, Trump, Mayhem, #MeToo, et cetera – of more mainstream fare.
It says much about the waning appeal of history that its genre chart topper (Ben Macintyre’s SAS chronicle Rogue Heroes) didn’t get into the top 100; but here too there are what slumping football managers call “positives”, since Yuval Noah Harari’s stunningly successful Sapiens (8) and Homo Deus (23) are clearly history – the word appears in both subtitles – but have been daftly misclassified officially as “popular science”.
In his musings, Daunt said philosophically “every seven years you get a slight lull” and hoped for a corrective “year of plenty” in 2018 (he mentioned the possibility of Hilary Mantel completing her Cromwell trilogy; others will be keener on another Rowling bonanza - a second Fantastic Beasts film is due - and perhaps George RR Martin overcoming his writer’s block). Less stoical figures in the book trade will be concerned that, rather than a cyclical blip, this year there was a resumption of an inexorable decline – a pattern disguised by the extraordinary, mostly unexpected pieces of luck that inspired 2016’s outbreak of optimism. In contrast, 2017 was, to paraphrase Radiohead, a year of no surprises and any number of alarms.
