Britain’s Simon Beckett topped Germany’s fiction bestseller list in late July with the mystery The Lost. More than 10 million copies of Beckett’s books have been sold, according to his literary agency, Curtis Brown, and he’s especially popular in Germany, where the translation of The Lost was published two months before the U.K. edition. German comedian Hape Kerkeling topped the nonfiction list with Paws Off the Table, about “the infinite happiness of living with cats.” His 2009 memoir, I’m Off Then, was published by Simon & Schuster in the U.S.
Esther Verhoef’s new thriller, The Night Shift, about a traumatized veterinarian who is forced to operate on a human, was #1 on the combined bestseller list in the Netherlands at the end of July. Her books are published in English by Quercus. In the second spot is I’m Going to Live, an autobiographical debut novel by 23-year-old Dutch Turkish author Lale Gül, about a young woman’s upbringing as a strict Muslim in Amsterdam.
In Spain, María Dueñas’s Sira, the long-awaited sequel to 2009’s The Time in Between (a million copy bestseller in English, according to its publisher Atria), topped the fiction list in late July. In the second spot is the latest mystery in María Oruña’s Hidden Haven series, set on the Cantabrian coast of Spain. The nonfiction list is led by The Humor of My Life, a memoir by Paz Padilla about the death of her mother and her husband.
