Word: novels
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Since its publication in France in May, Douglas Kennedy's The Woman in the Fifth has sold more than 200,000 copies and dominated best-seller lists. The novel will enjoy similar success when it appears in a dozen other countries over the next few months. That's an easy prediction to make because a) like the American author's six previous novels, this one is brisk, brainy and enjoyable, and b) each of those titles has sold at least half a million copies worldwide...
...start a cooperative theater group and ended up running the respected Abbey Theatre's second stage. He also wrote a few plays and a column for the Irish Times. In 1988, Kennedy and his wife moved to London, where he cranked out four travel books and a novel, The Dead Heart, about a burned-out U.S. journalist who flees to Australia. Sold to Hollywood, it became the 1997 turkey Welcome to Woop Woop...
...Pursuit of Happiness, a sweeping love story set in postwar New York City. It was more a romance than a thriller, and no U.S. publisher would touch it. "Then two things happened," says Kennedy. "First, I began to have success in Europe. Second, doors closed in New York." The novel thrived overseas, selling 350,000 copies in the U.K. alone. But to American publishers Kennedy was a loser...
...Arts et des Lettres. One day he was shocked to see Paris police randomly stopping nonwhites. Then, while searching for an obscure cinema ("I'm a big movie buff, five or six a week"), he discovered the 10th arrondissement's rich stew of African and Asian ethnicity. His novel tries "to look at Paris in a different way," he says, "through the eyes of immigrants who live there but seldom come in contact with white French natives...
Kennedy's next novel returns him - in his imagination, at least - to his homeland. "This one is set in Boston. It's called Leaving the World. It's got a woman narrator, and it's about what happens when tragedy enters your life. Hey, I shouldn't be telling you all this!" Not that premature disclosure could do much to diminish his sales. Not even the obstinacy of American publishers can do that...