This week’s top seller is The Fault in Our Stars, the sixth novel by author John Green. The story is narrated by a sixteen-year-old cancer patient named Hazel Grace Lancaster, who is forced by her parents to attend a support group, where she subsequently meets and falls in love with the seventeen-year-old Augustus Waters, an ex-basketball player and amputee. The title is inspired from Act 1, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt remains in top place this week. Coming in at number 2 is Sycamore Row, a novel by the ever-popular legally-fixated American author John Grisham. The book is a direct sequel to his powerful first novel, A Time to Kill, and again features attorney Jake Brigance as the main character. It was released in October 2013. A right ripping yarn!

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt has retaken the top place this week. To avoid repeating the excellent review it has already received in Le News, it is worth commenting instead on the welcome arrival into the top ten of A Delicate Truth, a spy novel by John le Carré. Set in 2011, the book flashes back to a 2008 joint American-British covert anti-jihadist mission on the Rock of Gibraltar and its consequences.
Le Carré has described this as his most autobiographical work in years. The author, a former MI5 and MI6 officer, told The Daily Telegraph that he has based two of the book’s characters on himself.
Le Carré is truly on form with his latest work and his authentic insights into the harsh realities of espionage are thoroughly compelling.

For the second time since June, top of the list is Inferno, a mystery thriller from Dan “de Vinci Code” Brown, and the fourth book in his Robert Langdon series. Set mainly in Florence, the plot is as twisted as any dreamed up by that lovely city’s renaissance politician, Niccolò Machiavelli. The book was number one on the New York Times Best Seller list for the first eleven weeks of its release in 2013.

Top of this week’s list is The Goldfinch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning third novel from Donna Tartt, her first new book in 11 years. The book was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of 2013 by the New York Times Book Review.