What the world is reading.(fiction bestsellers in May 1995; Review of Books and Multimedia)(Brief Article)

Economist (US), The, May, 1996

Going into the summer of 1996, American readers of hardcover fiction are more than usually reluctant to wander and wonder abroad. They are sticking mostly to novels written by their fellow Americans. Translators are almost as under- worked in Britain, where "Slowness" is a rare bestseller by a novelist whose mother tongue is not English. But the British list is not as low-brow as the American one. Books by such serious writers as Roddy Doyle, Melvyn Bragg, Milan Kundera and Doris Lessing jostle against steamy page-turners from Jilly Cooper and Catherine Cookson. Italian novelists dominate the Italian list, where aspects of love are a recurring theme. The German list is much more cosmopolitan than the rest. Indeed, Germans seem keener on reading novels written by...

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