Find your next read in this dataset of international bestsellers.

In most situations when I say “I need the data,” I’m referring to gossip, and it’s less of a “need” than what some would call a “messy curiosity.”

But recently, I came across a Substack post analyzing a set of open-sourced data on international bestsellers, and while its conclusions were interesting, I found that in this case, I wanted to literally see the data. So I strapped on my “took one workshop on statistical analysis” hat and dove in.

Compiled by academics Sean DiLeonardi, Becca Cohen, and Dan Sinykin—the author of the very good Big Fiction—the International Bestsellers Dataset gathers data about international bestselling books from 2013 to 2022. The bestseller lists included come from over 40 different countries, though the most consistent lists are from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United States, so those nations’ tastes are over-represented. In total, the dataset comprises 7,909 entries, with information on a bestseller list’s location and date, as well as book titles, author names, countries of publication, publishers, ranking on the list, and more.

I downloaded the list to poke around in a spreadsheet, mostly to see which names and titles appeared the most across this slice of the bestsellers world. The top authors, listed by frequency of appearance, were about as you might expect:

Elena Ferrante: 120

Stephen King: 87
Joël Dicker: 87
John Grisham: 84
Guillaume Musso: 80
Paula Hawkins: 77

Ken Follett: 74
Jojo Moyes: 74

Andrea Camilleri: 70

Delia Owens: 59

Lucinda Riley: 58
E. L. James: 57
Dan Brown: 57

Valerie Perrin: 50
Isabel Allende: 48
Camilla Läckberg: 47

David Baldacci: 46
Arturo Pérez-Reverte: 46
Nicholas Sparks: 43
Gianrico Carofiglio: 43

Antonio Manzini: 43
Jonas Jonasson: 42
Colleen Hoover: 42
Anthony Doerr: 41

Sebastian Fitzek: 40
Marc Levy: 40
Jo Nesbø: 39
John Green: 38
Maurizio De Giovanni: 36
Haruki Murakami: 36
Harlan Coben: 35
George R. R. Martin: 35

The world doesn’t have terrible taste, it seems. Love to see Isabel Allende so high up, and Elena Ferrante beating out Stephen King feels like a little gift just for me. Of course, there are also plenty of less obvious to an American reader authors on this list, like French writer Guillaume Musso, Swiss writer Joël Dicker, and the Italian Andrea Camilleri—who I only know because my dad’s a fan of the Inspector Montalbano novels.

A name that doesn’t appear in this top 30 is James Patterson, but he should—his frequent collaborations mean that his total number of appearances are scattered. He appears as a sole author, but also has 21 different, unique collaborators. When you add up the times his name pops up both solo and alongside someone else, he’s on these bestseller lists 76 times. Not bad.

Similarly when you sort out the top 30 book titles appearing across these lists by frequency of appearance, you get a lot of hits from Paula Hawkins, Elena Ferrante, Dan Brown, etc. Here are the most popular individual books on the list:

The Girl on the Train: 62
My Brilliant Friend: 61
Where The Crawdads Sing: 60
All the Light We Cannot See: 37
Origin: 36
Fresh Water For Flowers: 34
The Midnight Library: 27
Homeland: 26
The Goldfinch: 25
After You: 24
The Evening and the Morning: 24
The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair: 23
The Fault in Our Stars: 23
Your Second Life Begins When You Understand You Only Have One: 23
It Ends with Us: 22
The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer: 20
Inferno: 19
The Story of a New Name: 19
A Column of Fire: 19
And the Mountains Echoed: 18
The Silent Patient: 17
The Enigma of Room 622: 17
The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared: 17
The Braid: 17
The Song of Achilles: 17
The History of Bees: 17
The Girl in the Spider’s Web: 16
Gone Girl: 16
Fifty Shades of Grey: 15
Nineteen Eighty-Four: 15

The new-to-me book that caught my eye at the top here was The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, a Swiss novel set in New Hampshire that was very popular in Europe but less so in the US, where its depictions of America were read as too cliched and unflattering. Joël Dicker, who is the number three most frequent author name in this data set, also has his novels The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer and The Enigma of Room 622 here at the top.

As someone who isn’t fluent in quantitative analysis, this was mostly fun for me to poke around in to find new books and authors I’d never heard of. Scrolling around for the number “1” and looking for titles I didn’t recognize was a fun way to to see what topped and international chart on a random week. I discovered this Dan Brown-y Bulgarian novel and this work of Finnish literary fiction, two novels I might not have heard about otherwise. It’s not the most scientific use of this data, but even if your eyes swim in spreadsheets, this is still a fun discovery tool, if you want to see what the world is reading—or at least was reading, not too long ago.

So much to say, the International Bestsellers Dataset is worth a look. And if it’s your thing, the Post45 Data Collective has a ton of great open source info relevant to the literary and cultural world. But if you’re like me and and interested in this stuff but don’t want it quite so raw, Sinykin is a great follow on Bluesky.