American whistleblower Edward Snowden’s memoir, Permanent Record, hit a number of bestseller lists in Europe in September. In Germany, Permanent Record topped the nonfiction list in late September, beating out Peter Wohlleben’s The Secret Bond Between Humankind and Nature, the follow-up to The Secret Life of Trees, which was a bestseller in North America for Canadian publisher Greystone Books.
Permanent Record was #2 on France’s nonfiction bestseller list late last month, trailing only Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty, whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century was a surprise bestseller in the U.S., where it was published by Belknap Press.
Sweden was a third country where Snowden made the top 10 on the nonfiction list, landing in the fifth spot at the end of last month. Permanent Record was released by Holt’s Metropolitan Books imprint in the U.S. in mid-September.
In fiction, Amelie Nothomb’s Thirst, a novel that imagines what went through the mind of Jesus in the last hours of his life, topped the charts in France. The top-selling fiction title in Germany was Allmen and the Koi, the sixth volume in Martin Suter’s Allmen series; Suter is published in the U.S. by New Vessel Press.
