Best-selling books: foreign authors back on our list

It’s a week to mark with a cross. It’s been months since we’ve seen so many foreign novels in our charts. They are eight to appear (even ten if we add the French speakers, the Italian-Swiss Giuliano da Empoli and the Algerian Sarah Rivens), starting with the tenors who are the German Bernhard Schlink (The girl) and Americans Bret Easton Ellis (Splinters) and Cormac McCarthy (The passenger), the last two making their return to bookstores after long years of absence.

To these great classics, we must add the impromptu presence of the English poet and cruciverbist Edward Powys Mathers, alias Torquemada (1892-1939, Cain’s Jaw). Finally, and we will have to get used to it, three authors of new romance and fantasy infiltrate the top 20: the Americans Colleen Hoover (For ever), Alex Aster(Lightlark) and Scarlett S. Clair (Hades and Persephone (t. I). A Touch of Darkness), all three carried by BookTok, the literary platform of TikTok. France, paradise for foreign writers?

19. The Two Beunes

By Pierre Michon

Twenty-six years later The Big Beune, the Creuse writer writes a sequel, The Little Beuneboth of which are published today under the title The Two Beunes. We therefore find the narrator there, a teacher sent to teach in a school in the Dordogne, still flabbergasted by the village tobacconist, Yvonne. And the magic of the style of the author of tiny lives to perpetuate itself.

19. Diary of an Invasion

By Andrei Kurkov

That is, from December 2021 to mid-July 2022, the still fiery pages of the journal of the author of gray beesPrix Médicis Etranger 2022. This document, in which the Ukrainian writer, winner of the Europe Prize from L’Express, takes a wise look at his people and on Russian-Ukrainian relations, is off to a very good start.

UNITED STATES

I Will Find You

By Harlan Coben

Harlan Coben or the man of all records with more than 70 million books sold worldwide (published in France by Belfond), and 31 novels placed No. New York Times. I Will Find You, published on March 14, takes the same path. It is about a father, wrongfully imprisoned for life for the murder of his son.