Pope Benedict XVI's Light of the World, coauthored with German journalist Peter Seewald, was a popular book in December. The work has been translated into 18 languages and landed on bestseller lists in Germany (#6), France (#8), and Italy (#15). Ignatius Press published the book in the U.S. last November after hearing about it at Frankfurt last October. The house had it translated, typeset, printed, and shipped in time for the November 24 international release date and has sold about 50,000 copies so far. It predicts it will do a third printing in the coming weeks.

On Germany's fiction list, Rita Falk's debut, Winter Potato Dumpling, a reinvention of "provincial" crime fiction, nicely fit into Bavaria's rustic charm and jumped into the 10th spot. The first book in Ken Follett's Century series, Fall of Giants, led the list, and Jonathan Franzen's Freedom was back on at #8. In nonfiction, Life by Keith Richards dropped from the second to the third spot.

Umberto Eco's The Cemetery in Prague surged to the second position on Italy's combined fiction and nonfiction list (it also debuted at #2 on Spain's fiction list). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is Eco's U.S. publisher; it will release Cemetery in November. Lower down on Italy's list, Henning Mankell, whose The Troubled Man has been a hit throughout continental Europe, came in at #17; Knopf will release the U.S. edition in March.

In Spain, Follett's Fall of Giants was #3, right behind Eco's Cemetery. The rest of the fiction list included Mario Vargas Llosa's The Dream of the Celt, Paul Auster's Sunset Park, and John Verdon's Think of a Number. On the nonfiction side, an illustrated version of a French diet book, The Dukan Diet, was #10; Crown Archetype is publishing the book in the U.S. in May.

International Bestsellers

Germany

Fiction

Sturz der Titanen
Fall of Giants
(The Century Trilogy, Vol. 1)
Ken Follett
Bastei Lübbe

Kein Wort zu Papa
Don't Tell Dad!
Dora Heldt
dtv premium

Smaragdgrün
Emerald Green
Kerstin Gier

Nonfiction

Arena
Deutschland schafft sich ab
Germany Does Away with Itself
Thilo Sarrazin
DVA

Auf dem roten Teppich
On the Red Carpet
Loki Schmidt
Hoffmann und Campe

Life
Life
Keith Richards
Heyne

Italy

Combined

Se qualcuno mi apre la porta.
Lettera per la visita alle famiglie
If Someone Opens the Door.
Christmas Letter
Dionigi Tettamanzi
Centro Ambrosiano

Il cimitero di Praga
The Cemetery in Prague
Umberto Eco
Bompiani

o e te
I and You
Niccolò Ammaniti
Einaudi

Educare alla vita buona del Vangelo.
Orientamenti pastorali dell'Episcopato italiano per il
decennio 2010–2020
Education for a Good Life with the Gospel. Pastoral Guidelines of the Italian Episcopate for the Decade 2010–2020
Conferenza episcopale italiana (cur.)
Paoline Editoriale Libri

Appunti di un venditore di donne
Notes from a Woman Trafficker
Giorgio Faletti
B.C. Dalai Editore

Il sorriso di Angelica
Angelica's Smile
Andrea Camilleri
Sellerio Editore Palermo

Spain

Fiction

Riña de gatos
Quarrel Among Cats
Eduardo Mendoza
Planeta

El cementerio de Praga
The Cemetery in Prague
Umberto Eco
Lumen

La caída de los gigantes
Fall of Giants (The Century Trilogy, Vol. 1)
Ken Follett
Plaza & Janés

Nonfiction

Los días de gloria
The Glory Days
Mario Conde
Martínez Roca

María la Brava
María, the Brave
Pilar Eyre
La esfera de los libros

El gran diseño
The Grand Design
Stephen Hawking
Editorial Crítica