María Dolores Redondo’s novel Offering to the Storm debuted at #1 on Spain’s fiction bestseller list in December. In the book—the third in the author’s Baztan crime series, set in the Basque Pyrenees of Navarre, in Spain—police inspector Amaia investigates an infant’s death.
Ken Follett’s Edge of Eternity, the third book in his Century trilogy (published by Dutton in the U.S.), rose from #5 to #2 on Spain’s fiction chart. Patrick Rothfuss’s The Slow Regard of Silent Things dropped one spot to #3. The book, a novella in the author’s Kingkiller series, was released in the U.S. by Penguin imprint DAW in October.
Sebastian Fitzek’s Passenger 23 held on to its position as Germany’s top-selling novel. Follett’s book also hit Germany’s fiction list, at #3, coming in behind Nele Neuhaus’s The Living and the Dead, which rose one spot from the previous month.
David Foenkinos maintained his perch at the top of France’s fiction list in late December with Charlotte. The book is, according to the publisher, a portrait of Charlotte Salomon, a German painter who died at Auschwitz at age 26.
Patrick Modiano, the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature, came in at #2 on the fiction list in his home country, with So That You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood (to be released by HMH in the U.S. in late 2015).
I Went to EGB 2, by Javier Ikaz and Jorge Díaz, an illustrated book based on the successful blog of the same name, hit #1 on Spain’s nonfiction list in early January. And, once again, Hape Kerkeling and Éric Zemmour topped the nonfiction charts in Germany and France, respectively, with The Boy Needs Some Fresh Air, and The French Suicide.