There is a particular kind of literary deja vu that strikes sometimes. Seemingly out of nowhere, the same book starts appearing across multiple social media feeds. On the bus, you’ll spot two copies of the same title in one day. A friend says, “Have you read this yet?”, to which you respond, “Someone was just telling me about it the other day.”
These are the sleeper hits that seem to materialise without warning. They are not stacked high on the new release tables. They are books that, for one reason or another, have slipped their original timelines and found a second, often more powerful life.
For a long time, the lifecycle of a book followed a similar ritual: publication-week fanfare, a few reviews and festival appearances, and then a slow fade unless garlanded with awards. But today’s sleeper hits emerge from an alchemical combination of influences: online enthusiasm, translation, design, political mood, bookseller advocacy and sheer serendipity.
Perhaps the standout example from this year is the runaway success of Jacqueline Harpman’s dystopian feminist novella I Who Have Never Known Men. Originally published in French in 1995, it follows a girl imprisoned underground with 39 other women, raised in captivity, then released into a barren, post-apocalyptic landscape she must try to make sense of. It was translated into English in 1997 and was a marked failure in both markets. The English version was left to languish under the (decidedly worse) title The Mistress of Silence, and global sales were at one or two per year.
Fast forward three decades, and the book has sold 275,000 copies worldwide this year, a 143% jump on 2024. It has sold 75,000 copies in the UK alone – more than double last year’s figure. It has appeared on the must-read lists of Service95, a book club and website set up by Dua Lipa, and is one of the buzziest titles on TikTok.
Its renaissance was a mixture of luck and strategy. Its publisher, Vintage Classics, reissued the novel in English in 2019 after a canny executive made the case for it. The new version was repackaged, retranslated and had its original title restored.
Part of its success was timing. As Nick Skidmore, publishing director at Vintage, explains, the reissue came “in the wake of Trump’s inauguration … at that time The Handmaid’s Tale and dystopia more generally were selling”. Harpman’s book tapped into that bewilderment, Skidmore says: “A lot of people don’t know where we are, or how we got to this place, and were looking to fiction to help explain that.”
A large factor was also its retranslation. Ros Schwartz, the book’s translator, was acutely aware that her first translation in the 1990s had missed the narrator’s voice. Much of it was written in esoteric, literary language, which didn’t chime with the experience of the callow protagonist.
“I realised I had translated the words and not the voice,” she says. She stripped out “Latinate words” that had lifted the prose into an overly formal register and restored contractions, which had been missing entirely.
In fact, a striking number of recent word-of-mouth successes have been translated works. Translation can crack open a book’s potential, giving it a new voice and therefore a new audience.
Perfection – Vincenzo Latronico’s slim, wry novel about an aspirational creative-class couple documenting (and slowly warping) their lives through the pursuit of aesthetic “perfection” – is one such example. Published in Italian in 2022, the book didn’t take off at home; it was only once Fitzcarraldo Editions published it in English in February this year (translated by Sophie Hughes) that the phenomenon began. Suddenly, the book was everywhere, appearing in every carefully photographed bedside stack and “April Reads” carousel, becoming the unofficial book of Instagram – and it went on to be shortlisted for the International Booker.
Latronico recalls that in the first weeks after the book came out in English, his publisher sent him an Instagram story from “a famous literary figure recommending my book”. It was an audience Fitzcarraldo “does not usually reach”, his publisher told him. He describes the uncanny experience of being read predominantly in translation. “I honestly think the English translation is better than the Italian version,” he says of Hughes’s rendering. This has produced a “strange position” in which “the majority of my readers are not from the culture I am from”.
He believes that this cultural distance is partly why the book exploded in London and New York. For Italians or those outside big cities in Europe, the lifestyle he portrays is “not that common, it is quite exotic”. For Berliners, it felt too familiar. But for anglophone creative-class readers, it struck the sweet spot of recognition and distance. “It has now sold more copies in specific London bookshops than in the whole of France, for example,” says Latronico.
Not all trending hits are bleak or skewering satires – some are buoyed up by the desire for refuge. Mary Mount, publisher at Picador, believes the global rise of Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold series (translated by Geoffrey Trousselot) is rooted in escapism. The books, set around a small Tokyo cafe where customers can travel back in time for the duration of a single cup of coffee, have built a devoted cult following since publication, selling around the world and spreading steadily through online reader communities.
“Kawaguchi has created a world you want to return to,” Mount says. These are “cosy, comforting” titles – exactly what many readers want. The series has now sold more than 1m copies worldwide, and Before the Coffee Gets Cold has been the bestselling Japanese book in translation for three years in a row. Sales quadrupled in 2022, partially helped by a TikTok trend of people reading the series with a coffee that has helped to boost sales in international markets, according to its publisher.
Design and the physicality of books matter here, too. In a video-first online ecosystem, content creators know that an aesthetically pleasing cover will drive clicks, and arresting covers are also more likely to make it to Instagram feeds. “They are beautiful physical books in both hardback and paperback,” Mount says, “and we invest a lot in how the books look and feel, because readers show their copies and discuss the books on social media.”
The role of Fitzcarraldo’s trademark branding – the minimalist Klein blue cover – was undeniable in the success of Perfection, too. “The book benefited immensely from Fitzcarraldo’s vibe and reputation,” Latronico says. Their titles are often a badge of cultural capital on social feeds and in tote bags, an irony not lost on Latronico. “The book is about things that look good on Instagram, and it has become a thing that looks good on Instagram itself.”
The rebranding of I Who Have Never Known Men shows this process in action. The new cover by Anna Morrison is, Skidmore says, “already somewhat iconic” and helped position the book as “a strange, mesmerising and beautiful novel”.
It’s tempting to imagine sleeper hits as miraculous accidents: a lone reader praising a book, then a chain reaction of friends pressing copies into hands. But the machinery underneath is increasingly deliberate.
Bookshops play a crucial role, says Bea Carvalho, head of books at Waterstones. When a book begins to stir, Waterstones can “ensure that we are part of the conversation”, placing it in more stores. Sometimes, she notes, “this can start with one individual, sometimes with a splashy pre-publication buzz”, but either way, “booksellers are now increasingly good at harnessing it”.
Meanwhile, in recent years, a number of publishing houses and imprints have created dedicated programmes for unearthing forgotten classics. “There’s an art to it,” says Skidmore. “You have to resurface the right book at the right time. My desk is full of lists of books that I know could and should find new readers, but they all need to wait patiently for the right set of circumstances – be that a publicity hook, a design trend, a celebrity or influencer endorsement – to come along, or be engineered successfully.”
If there is one constant across these stories, it’s unpredictability. “There’s no formula for success,” Schwartz says. Latronico is similarly sceptical. “I had zero expectations when I wrote this book,” he admits. “I’m trying to remember that this kind of thing doesn’t happen twice.”
