Sunday Salon: Bestsellers around the world

I recently started following quite a few British book bloggers and noticed that many of the books that they read are different from those in other countries. For the group of bloggers I am following, there are a lot more WWII novels, particularly focused on the life off women on the home front and lots of those escapist, moving to somewhere new and starting again type books..

Thinking about this made me contemplate doing a semi regular post where I would have a look at the bestsellers list for two countries and see if there were any interesting similarities or, indeed, interesting differences. So, for example, I might take a look at the Australian and British bestsellers list and discuss the differences, and next time it might be Australian and American, or perhaps even all three, or another country all together. We'll see. It could be that there really isn't anything all that interesting to comment on!

One of the first challenges in trying to do this is trying to work out what the definitive bestseller list is. Is it the New York Times or USA Today in America? Should it include both fiction and non fiction, kids books or not? Some lists are broken into hardcover and other types of editions. It's actually a bit harder to find like for like than I thought it would be! In the end, I decided to be a little flexible about this and just make it whichever list catches my eye at the time I am writing the post, with no hard and fast rules. I will try, where possible to do a like for like comparison.

Given that this idea sprung from the fact that I was seeing different books on British based blogs than I do on Australian or US blogs, I would start with looking at the British vs Australian lists.

Here is the current list of top 10 Australian fiction bestsellers from Betterreading.com.au from week ending 13 June.

1. Fair Warning by Michael Connelly (Alle & Unwin)
2. Normal People by Sally Rooney (Faber & Faber)
3. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (Hachette)
4. Hideaway by Nora Roberts (Hachette)
5. Daddy’s Girls by Danielle Steel (Macmillan)
6. Wrath of Poseidon by Clive Cussler and Robin Burcell (Michael Joseph)
7. The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams (Affirm Press)
8. Tom Clancy’s Firing Point by Mike Maden (Michael Joseph)
9. Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton (Harper Collins)
10. Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (Penguin)

And the current list of top 10 Australian non-fiction bestsellers from Betterreading.com.au

1. Phosphorescence by Julia Baird (HarperCollins)
2. The Barefoot Investor by Scott Pape (John Wiley & Sons)
3. Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe (Magabala Books)
4. Untamed by Glennon Doyle (Vermilion)
5. Epic Air Fryer Cookbook by Emily Paster (Harvard Common Press)
6. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*** by Mark Manson (Macmillan)
7. The Pie Maker (Bauer)
8. Becoming by Michelle Obama (Viking)
9. A Bigger Picture by Malcolm Turnbull (Hardie Grant)
10. Ottolenghi SIMPLE by Yotam Ottolenghi (Ebury Press)

And here is the Sunday Time hardcover top 10 list from All Top Books. There were no numbers on this list so I assume that they are  in order but I don't know for sure!

• Be Your Own Best Friend : The Glorious Truths of Being Female by Chessie King
• Camino Winds by John Grisham
• Daughters of Cornwall by Fern Britton
• Fair Warning by Michael Connelly
• If It Bleeds by Stephen King
• Lancaster: The Forging of a Very British Legend by John Nicol
• Me and White Supremacy : How to Recognise Your Privilege, Combat Racism and Change the World by Layla Saad
• Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
• The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy
• Women Don't Owe You Pretty by Florence Given

It is interesting to me that the non fiction books on these lists are so different. I do wonder if they use different criteria because while there are three cookbooks on the Australian lists, there are none on the UK list, or maybe they are just further down the list. 

Perhaps it is that non fiction lists are far more representative of what is going on in the individual country. For example, Dark Emu from the Australian list is about the indigenous Australian experience and A Bigger Picture is about a former Australian prime minister so would really only be of interest to Australians.

I do think, though, that my husband would be very interested in reading the book about the Lancaster bombers.

Where I expect we will always see similarities in the fiction lists is in relation to the big name authors, so it is no surprise to see names like Stephen King or Danielle Steel on these lists.

On the UK fiction side there are two books in particular that stand out to me.The first is Daughters of Cornwall by Fern Britton. I lived in the UK in the late 1990s and at that time Fern Britton was the host of the TV cooking show Ready, Steady, Cook. I know that the later series of the show that were hosted by Ainsley Harriott got shown here in Australia but I have no idea if the early ones were, and therefore if anyone here would recognise her name. What I didn't know was that she was now an author. This book is a triple timeline book with events taking place in 1918, 1939 and 2020. And just like that I am keen to read it! It turns out that Fern Britton has previously written 8 other books and my library has some of them so hopefully if I read and enjoy this one, I can work my way through her backlist.

The other book which caught my attention was The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy. This book is actually the reason why I started thinking about doing the post, because as soon as I heard about it I knew I wanted to read it, even if I don't really know what it is about, but I think I have only seen it on one non British blog so far! Or at least that I can recall. This book did come out last year, so maybe I am just late to the party with this book.

Is there anything on these lists that catches your interest?

I am sharing this post with Sunday Salon, which is hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz