Not So Foreign Family Problems Fill the Lists The bright blue and red cover of YOU’RE JOKING, MONSIEUR TANNER (l’Olivier), French author Jean-Paul Dubois‘ most recent bestseller, shows a man on hands and knees who’s painted himself into a corner. This is Paul Tanner, a wildlife documentary filmmaker who suddenly inherits the grand family manse,…Continue Reading
When Bridget Jones stumbled into the global spotlight in 1998, readers immediately identified with the bumbling thirty-something who recorded a year of her life in sentence fragments, cigarettes, and calories, making Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary not only a mega international success, but also a genre-spawning sensation. While European readers have been devouring Cecelia Ahern…Continue Reading
In a semiological send-up worthy of a Roland Barthes essay, Christine Orban falls head over heels into the gap between le geste and la parole as her latest novel The Silence of Men takes aim at the bestseller list in France (it’s currently at #12). Described as a marvel of “intense, concise writing” full of…Continue Reading
It’s a Wonderful Double Life Hot-Buttered in Finland, Dreyfus Redux in Israel, and Watusi on the Brain in Spain Nouveau-riche restaurateur Brede Ziegler is murdered not once, but twice in No Echo, the sixth in a series of shrewdly executed detective novels from megastar Norwegian author Anne Holt. After Ziegler turns up hot-buttered and trussed,…Continue Reading
Duck and Cover Fowl Play in Argentina, Penelope Unbound in Spain, And Birdsell’s Back in Canada Argentina’s “official historians” are quacking away over the latest provocation from historical novelist María Esther de Miguel, titled The Palace of the Ducks. The book carries forward the author’s “generally transgressive” history of Buenos Aires and adapts a detective…Continue Reading
Trading Places Guillou Turns Publisher, Potter Imposter in Spain, and Bridget Jones Down Under The prolific writer-turned-publisher Jan Guillou has commandeered the top three slots in Sweden this month, all of them part of his journey through the Middle Ages. At the top of the heap is the third in his trilogy based on the…Continue Reading
