A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, his nostalgic memoir of life in Paris in the 1920s, has been a surprise bestseller in the French capital in the 10 days after the Paris attacks, Bloomberg reported.
"Orders surged after a BFM television interview on Monday with a 77-year-old woman called Danielle, who urged people to read the memoir as she laid flowers for the dead," Bloomberg wrote. "The video was shared hundreds of times on social media."
Publisher Folio told the news service that orders rose 50-fold after the TV spot and that copies of A Moveable Feast, which has the French title Paris est une fête, "have been laid among the flowers and tributes at the sites of the massacres, and people are reading the book in bars and cafes."
According to the Guardian, last week Folio received orders for 8,500 copies of the book, which usually sells 6,000-8,000 copies a year. The house is printing another 20,000 copies and plans for another reprinting.
In a similar phenomenon, after the Charlie Hebdo killings in January, sales of Treatise on Tolerance by Voltaire jumped, and Folio has sold 100,000 copies of the book this year.