Alison Flood in the
Independent reports on the top twenty bestselling novels worldwide in 2008. Khaled Hosseini and Stieg Larsson dominated the bestseller lists around the world, but the success of Barbery's
Elegance of the Hedgehog is nothing to sneeze at: according to the Independent's sources, it was the
5th top-selling work of fiction in 2008.
This is remarkable for two reasons. First, because as Flood notes in her piece, "the lists make depressing reading for fans of literature in translation...Less than 10% of authors make the transition to another country." Muriel Barbery is one of the exceptions, one of the lucky 10, having appeared on bestseller lists in half a dozen European countries and now also in the US. Secondly, the Hedgehog's success in most of these countries has largely been thanks to word-of-mouth and not expensive marketing campaigns, movie tie-ins, or hyper-exposure of the author (since the very first inklings of success Muriel Barbery has been in semi-reclusion in northern Japan, only very rarely giving interviews).
All up, an extraordinary success story featuring a disarmingly cute hero
