The #5 book in Italy in May, Gianluigi Nuzzi’s His Holiness. The Secret Documents of Benedict XVI, has caused international news since its publication. Pope Benedict XVI’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, was arrested late last month on suspicion of releasing dozens of embarrassing letters to Nuzzi disclosing corruption and nepotism at the Holy See.
Also getting a lot of international media coverage is the top nonfiction title in Germany, Europe Doesn’t Need the Euro. Its nonfiction list has two American hits just missing our cutoff: David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow landed at #4 and #5, respectively. Kahneman’s book has seen great success in the U.S., selling more than 200,000 copies in the outlets tracked by Nielsen BookScan since Farrar, Straus and Giroux published it in October 2011.
On the fiction side, Germany’s #2 title is Destined by the mother-daughter team of P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast. The novel has just been released in the German market, but was published in October 2011 by St. Martin’s Griffin. To date, it has sold 174,000 copies in the outlets tracked by BookScan.
In financially troubled Spain, End This Depression Now! by Paul Krugman debuts at the top of the nonfiction list. Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics, takes “an edifying and often humorous journalistic approach” to the current economic crisis, according to the starred review from PW. The book was published in April 2012 by Norton in the U.S.