It’s heartwarming to see two books I’ve just acquired sitting near the top of the Italian bestseller list. José Saramago’s Cain is at number two and Fabio Geda’s Nel mare ci sono croccodrilli (In the sea there are crocodiles) is number three. We won’t publish Cain until 2011 because it’s still being translated, and this year we have Saramago’s previous novel coming out in August, the delightful Elephant’s Journey, a fable based on the true story of an elephant that made the journey from Lisbon to Vienna in 1551. We should be getting proofs of The Elephant’s Journey this week and we’re going to scatter them in public places and see who picks them up and how far they travel.

I can see why a lot of Italians might be buying Cain given the controversy it has already caused when published in Spain and Portugal. It is an audacious retelling of Old Testament stories, in one of which Cain intervenes to stop Abraham from sacrificing his son. What kind of a god, Cain asks, would make a father to do something so dreadful? Priests have accused Saramago of being offensive to Catholics. Rather as Philip Pullman has been criticised by Christians here for his The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. Of course I hope that when we publish it, Saramago might follow Pullman and hit the number two slot in the UK bestseller list, but it is harder in this country for books in translation to become bestsellers. Still, it is interesting that the grass is always greener when it comes to assessing how high-brow a nation is. I had dinner with an Italian literary agent this week who was marvelling at the fact that Diarmaid MacCulloch’s A History of Christianity could sell so many copies in the UK. No one bought serious history in Italy any more he said, and Italy didn’t have the equivalent of the BBC to make excellent documentaries that could help sell serious non-fiction. 

Television is, indeed, all powerful when it comes to selling books. It was a chatshow interview a couple of weeks ago that helped put Fabio Geda’s In the sea there are crocodiles at number three in the Italian bestseller list. Novelist Fabio Geda has done a wonderful thing. He has written the story of Enaiatollah Akbari, an Afghan boy who made an extraordinary five-year-long journey from his Afghan village to claim political asylum in Italy, in Enaiatollah’s own voice. As you can see in the TV interview (http://bit.ly/aMhHXG) they have worked incredibly closely together and the result is a book that combines brilliant storytelling with a great sense of authenticity. Although many of the things that Enaiatollah experienced - people traffickers, child labour, stowing away in lorries, a desperate attempt to cross the sea in an inflatable boat – are familiar to us, he and Geda have managed to bring them alive on the page in a way that makes the reader see them afresh. I’m very excited about publishing this book, which will also come out as a young adult edition from David Fickling Books. I may even meet Geda and Enaiatollah in Turin this week, where I’m going to attend the Turin book fair, ash cloud permitting. So more from Italy next week …