Why this has been The Year of the Whale: (Der Wal und das Ende der Welt and The Whale at the End of the World) (23rd February 2021)

 An odd thing has happened. ‘Not Forgetting the Whale’ has sold amazingly well in Germany. I should love to take all the credit, but in truth I owe much of the success to a remarkable German publisher, and most of the rest to the pandemic. The publisher is S.Fischer Verlag, a small but very dedicated imprint in Frankfurt. They are lovely. They are smart. They renamed the novel, ‘Der Wal und das Ende der Welt’ – or ‘The Whale and the End of the World,’ and they gave it a startlingly clever cover – an arresting orange ground with a fin whale swimming into view from the back cover. They promoted the book really well. Big displays in bookshops. Lots of press. This was in 2019. And well, we all know what happened next. Covid came along. The paperback was due to launch in August 2020, but someone at Fischer had a hunch that the central story of ‘Whale’ (a global flu pandemic) might be topical enough to justify an earlier launch. They brought it forward to March 25^th. Smart move. It went straight into the Spiegel paperback chart at No 6 – just behind Camus’ ‘Plague.’ By 20^th May it had crept up to No 3, and by 20^th August it was at Number 2. Christmas came and it was Number 1. Today, as I write this, it is still up there at Number 5. It has been in the top 10 for 49 weeks. On social media, in Germany, it has been

a phenomenon. More than 560 people have posted photographs of their copy on Instagram. I have lost count of the Twitter messages. The image above is just a snapshot of some of the hundreds of Facebook posts.

I could pretend to be wholly nonplussed. Perhaps I should. But the truth is, of course, I’m over the moon! It’s amazing! (I don't think you'd ever find a novelist who wouldn’t like to see ‘The International Bestseller’ on the cover of their book.) So a huge thank you to S Fischer Verlag, and to Susanne Halblieb, Elisa Diallo, Siv Bublitz, Petra Wittrock, and Janina Bradac, and of course to Maria Poets for her fantastic translation, and to Kirsty and Stan and Fede and  Ellie Freedman and the brilliant team at Orion Books, and to Krystyna who sold the German rights. And now, guess what, it has been relaunched here in England as, ‘The Whale at the End of the World,’ (which is curiously unsettling because now I don't know what to call it.) But it is doing ok. And it is doing well in the Netherlands too as ‘De Dag Dat De Walvis Kwam’ (The Day the Whale Came.) And it will launch soon in Italy. Altogether it has been translated into twelve languages! It is to be made into a German TV series. And it has been turned into a stage show (with music by Sting). Gosh. I'm truly stunned..