Expanded International Bestseller Lists

-- Publishers Weekly, 4/15/2007 3:01:00 AM

Once again, we’re adding a few more countries—Italy, Sweden and the Czech Republic—to our print coverage of international bestsellers (France, Spain and Germany are featured in this week’s print issue). A handful of familiar titles join many new ones.

Topping Italy’s fiction list is Sorry, But I Call You Love, a novel about a troubled romance between a 37-year-old man and a 17-year-old girl. Farther down the list are two titles that will be more familiar to U.S. readers: Philip Roth’s Everyman and Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris, which is also at number two on Sweden’s fiction list. Not surprisingly, a book about a Pope and his secretary—A Life with Karol—tops the nonfiction list in the home of the Vatican.

Alexander McCall Smith’s In the Company of Cheerful Ladies is at number three on Sweden’s fiction list. PW is planning to check in with Smith, who is currently touring for the newest installment in his No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, soon. Topping Sweden’s nonfiction list is a book called Overheard, which is a companion volume to a popular Swedish Web site on which readers post funny or unusual things they’ve overheard others saying.

Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being (which is set in Czechoslovakia and was banned there until 1989) is still high up on the Czech list, as is Tax Law 2007, which was a big seller last month as well.