Benevolent Ones' Lands in Spain, Italy

Although Jonathan Littell's French blockbuster The Benevolent Ones won't be published here for at least one more year, it landed at #5 on Spain's fiction list in November and in the same spot on Italy's combined bestsellers list last month. HarperCollins won the auction in 2006 to publish Littell's book in the U.S., and HC's Jonthan Burnham reports The Little Ones (the U.S. title) is currently set for a winter 2009 release.

Winning prizes doesn't often translate into higher book sales in the U.S., but that's not the case this year abroad. The winner and runner-up of the Planeta Prize in Spain debuted in the third and fourth spots on the fiction list there. Journalist Juan Jose Millas's autobiographical novel, The World, is at #3, while Spanish televison personality Boris Izaguirre's Villa Diamond is in the fourth spot. Neither title has been published in English in the U.S., although Planeta is making Spanish-language titles available. In France, Gilles Leroy's Alabama Song, the winner of this year's Prix Goncourt, finished November at #2. The novel explores the relationship between Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald from Zelda's point of view. The Civil War from Rhett Butler's point of view, in Rhett Butler's People, landed at #6 in Germany; it's published in the U.S. by St. Martin's.