Adding stories to the storeys
You will notice in the Top 10 list under this column that Andy Griffiths' The 65-Storey Treehouse is in No. 1 spot. That will surprise no one who keeps an eye on these things or sees the queues waiting for him to sign books after he has made an appearance at a festival or in a bookshop. But this new instalment of the Treehouse stories by him and Terry Denton has taken off in an extraordinary way. It has smashed the record for the most copies of an Australian book sold in a week, according to BookScan. Published on August 12, in its first four days, 70,528 of the paperback edition of The 65-Storey Treehouse were sold, along with another 1502 copies of the hardback - a total of just over 72,000, beating the first-week tally of recent bestsellers Go Set a Watchman (40,559) and Grey (66,872). Its success has also had a flow-on effect to his back list. The 13, 26 and 52-Storey Treehouses are all in the top 10, which also contains five colouring-in books, and Watchman.
A tangled web they weave
Lasse Winkler, writing in Britain's The Bookseller, has pointed out a fundamental difference between the way David Lagercrantz's The Girl in the Spider's Web, a continuation of Stieg Larsson's bestselling Millennium trilogy, is being promoted in Sweden and in the Anglophone world. He says Norstedts, the Swedish publisher, is billing it as a new David Lagercrantz book rather than a new Larsson book. In Sweden, there is no mention of the late Larsson on the book's cover, rather it uses the Millennium name. Whereas the edition of The Girl in the Spider's Web that hit our bookshops this week describes the book on the cover as "continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium series". According to Winkler, "the cover of the English edition of the novel, with its clear reference to Stieg Larsson, would not be accepted in Sweden". The Swedish title translates as That Which Does not Kill Us.
This house of joy
There was unanimous delight that Helen Garner won the Ned Kelly Award for non-fiction for This House of Grief, her scrupulous account of Robert Farquharson's crimes and trials that has been shortlisted for many prizes but not won one until now. When she got the Ned, she told the crowd at the Bella Union bar at the Trades Hall that she had never considered herself a crime writer. But, she said, the more crime she wrote, the less interest the literary world took in her. "It takes guts to give the prize to this book."
A festival weekend at MWF
This is the final weekend of the 30th Melbourne Writers Festival. Guests appearing this weekend include Will Self, Naomi Klein, Hannah Kent, Sophie Hannah, Renata Singer, Sarai Walker, John Kinsella, David Malouf, Sarah Waters,Annie Burrows, Malcolm Knox, Antony Beevor, Tariq Ali, Jon Ronson and many more. mwf.com.au
