Talking to Horizont Channel of the Bulgarian National Radio, Lyudmila Elenkova from the leading chain of bookstores Helikon provides us with some insights about the Bulgarians’ choice of reading stuff this summer:

“Camino Island by John Grisham is leading the Helikon charts and will most probably top sales this summer”, she says. “Camino Island is a not one of Grisham’s typical legal thrillers in which lawyers help justice triumph. It is in fact focused on librarians, booksellers and people of books. Its storyline discusses five missing manuscripts of F. Scott Fitzgerald kept at Princeton University.

John Grisham created a veritable furor on Facebook sharing the Bulgarian title page of this bookwith the following comment: “Bulgaria is bordered by Romania to the north, Greece and Turkey to the south, and Serbia and Macedonia to the west. This is their cover of CAMINO ISLAND. I think the title is at the top, in which case "octpob" means "island." That's the Cyrillic alphabet, invented by two monks, Cyril and his brother, Methodius, in the 9th century. Clearly, Methodius got no credit for his contribution.”

This sparked off a few nationalist comments trying to correct Grisham that St. Cyril in fact authored the Glagolitic Alphabet while the Cyrillic one was created later and was only named after Cyril to honor his role for promoting the Old Bulgarian language as the fourth official language in medieval Europe.

Lyudmila Elenkova discussed other bestselling fiction titles:

“Among bestselling fiction is the new detective novel of Aleksandra Marinina – a Ukrainian with a rank of lieutenant colonel in the police. Siberian Mysteries is a novel about murders of environmentalists. The Little Herbalist Shop In Montmartre by Italian Donatella Rizzati is also on the Helikon bestseller charts this summer. The Bulgarian edition of the book gives off real lavender scent – owing to a special printing technology for mixing lavender with ink. The book recounts a beautiful love story and shares some practical cosmetic advice including a way to make lavender essential oil."

Helikon this summer has also seen keen interest in books dedicated to the Bulgarian Apostle of Freedom Vasil Levski (1837 – 1873). A new novel about the national hero is among bestselling titles – The First After God, the Love and Death of Levski by Neda Antonova. In nonfiction,Vasil Levski, the Deacon, the biography of Levski by Zahari Stoyanov, and Levski’s celebrated Personal Notebook are also very popular this summer.