Houris (Gallimard) from Goncourt Kamel Daoud in majesty (1st on the list with nearly 300,000 copies as of December 15) and Sandrine Collette (Madelaine before dawnLattès) in comeback (she takes 3rd place and approaches 100,000) after her double Goncourt of high school students and Goncourt of prisoners – Sandrine Collette who we find in the 13 at the table! (Pocket), collection of short stories whose proceeds are donated to Restos du coeur. For this 2024 edition, the bar is high since the publishing house hopes to offer 1 million meals, or a sale of 200,000 copies – as of December 15, therefore, sales of this pocket at 6 euros amounted to ‘already more than 100,000 copies. Fourteen writers and an illustrator (Catherine Meurisse, for the cover) took up the theme of the year, “All in the same boat”, to let their imaginations float. At the helm, in addition to Sandrine Collette, Lorraine Fouchet, Christian Jacq, Marie-Hélène Lafon, Marc Levy, Étienne de Montety, François Morel, Romain Puértolas, etc.
Among the big winners at the end of the year, we will also mention Gaël Faye (JacarandaGrasset, Renaudot prize), 2nd in the Top 20 with some 275,000 copies sold, Miguel Bonnefoy (The Jaguar’s DreamRivages, double grand prize for the novel of the French Academy and Femina prize), Valérie Perrin (TataAlbin Michel), Marc Lévy (The Bookstore of Banned BooksRobert Laffont/Versio), Maxime Chattam (Prime TimeAlbin Michel), Philippe Collin (The Ritz BartenderAlbin Michel), Olivier Norek (The Winter Warriors, Michel Lafon), Olivier Tournut (Post MortemFayard), Harlan Coben (Beware, Belfond), Guillaume Musso, (someone elseCalmann-Lévy), Michel Bussi (The Assassins of the DawnPresses de la Cité), all in battle order for the last and most important stretch of the year – the month of December representing nearly 15% of the annual turnover of bookstores. They alone represent hundreds of thousands of copies sold.
© / The Express
But the most surprising thing in our mid-December rankings is, in testing, the superb first place of Resist (Payot) by Salomé Saqué, which therefore does even better than resist since, for the first time, this work analyzing the rise of the extreme right in society and calling for a reaction, defeats Philippe de Villiers and Jordan Bardella. Indeed, the two men of the hard right, authors respectively of Memoricide and of What I’m looking for, both published by Fayard, are thus “relegated” to 2nd and 3rd ranks with some 140,000 copies and 150,000 copies since their publication. Finally, we will highlight the only entry this week from December 9 to 15, that, in 15th place, of Henri d’Anselme with On the way to the cathedrals (Fayard), published December 4. This 26-year-old host of the Instagram account “Le Chant des Cathédrales”, baptized the “backpack hero” (for notably opposing a knife murderer on the banks of Lake Annecy), tells his story here of the 180 cathedrals of France.
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