“That scale usually applies to the Grishams and Pattersons of the world,” she said. At Barnes & Noble, sales surged this month - a surprising twist for a literary fiction title that’s been out for eight months, said Sessalee Hensley, the chain’s fiction buyer. “It looks to be essentially ‘The Goldfinch’ of this year,” he said, referring to Donna Tartt’s best-selling novel. He sold out and had to reorder a week later. “People are clamoring for it,” said Mark LaFramboise, the book buyer at Politics & Prose in Washington, who said he had sold out and reordered the novel several times in recent weeks.Įd Conklin, the buyer at Chaucer’s bookstore in Santa Barbara, Calif., said he was worried he had ordered too many copies a few weeks ago, when he bought more than 100. The book was out of stock at Amazon in the run-up to Christmas, and some independent booksellers also ran out in at the height of the holiday rush. “An awful lot of titles drop off the best-seller list after four months, and it’s a miracle if it lasts more than four months.”
“It not only kept going, but the longer it went, the bigger it got, and that’s very unusual,” said Carolyn Reidy, chief executive of Simon & Schuster, Scribner’s parent company. Scribner, which printed 60,000 copies when the book was published in May, has reprinted it 25 times and now has 920,000 copies in print. The story, about a blind French girl who joins the resistance to the German occupation and a sharp young German soldier with a savant-like talent for tracking radio signals, has struck a chord with readers, catching everyone in the book industry, including Mr. Doerr’s book has emerged as the unexpected breakout fiction best seller of 2014. In a year jammed with juicy novels from literary heavyweights like David Mitchell and Marilynne Robinson, Mr. “I think it’s dangerous to keep asking myself why.”
“It never crossed my mind that this was a more commercial book,” Mr. It has dense passages about radio technology and carbon bonds.īut he’s stumped when asked to explain how the book became a smash hit. The prose often feels knotty and baroque. It’s set in Europe during World War II and features a sympathetic young Nazi.
Anthony Doerr can come up with plenty of reasons his novel “All the Light We Cannot See” might have failed to reach a broad audience.
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