Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad) 1967
Spanish
Estimated copies: 52 million
“Many years later, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon when his father had taken him to discover ice. Macondo was then a village of twenty houses of clay and wild reed built on the bank of a river with diaphanous waters that cascaded over a bed of smooth stones, white and enormous like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and to name them you had to point your finger at them”.
Louise hay
You Can Heal Your Life 1984
English language
Estimated copies: 51 million
“Life is very simple: what we give comes back to us. What we think about ourselves becomes our truth. I believe that everyone, including myself, is XNUMX% responsible for their own existence, whether for better or for worse. Every thought we think shapes our future. Each of us creates the experiences we find ourselves living with the thoughts and feelings we feed within ourselves”.
Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita 1955
English language
Estimated copies: 50 million
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-li-ta: the tip of the tongue takes three steps on the palate to hit, on the third, against the teeth. The. There. Ta. She was Lo, just Lo in the morning, standing five feet five in one sock. It was Lola in pants. It was Dolly at school. It was Dolores on the dotted line of the documents. But Lolita was always in my arms."
Johanna Spyri
Heidi (Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre) 1880
German language
Estimated copies: 50 million
“At the foot of a row of mountains with jagged peaks that look menacingly down towards the Upper Rhine valley, there is a village like there are many in Switzerland: with the church with a pointed bell tower and the school, the mill , the blacksmith and the shoemaker. When the train stops at the small station, the conductor shouts: «Mayenfeld!»”.
Benjamin Spock
The child. How to cure and how to raise (The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care) 1946
English language
Estimated copies: 50 million
“Trust yourself. You know a lot more than you think you know. Don't take everything your neighbors say too seriously. Don't put too much weight on expert opinions. Don't be afraid to trust your common sense."
Lucy Maud Montgomery
Anne of Green Gables, 1908
English language
Estimated copies: 50 million
“Mrs. Rachel sat at the window in her usual position and kept an eye on anything that moved around. Her house stood on the high street of Avonlea and from there she could command the road that climbed from the valley to the red hills. It was in a privileged position, so that no one arriving or leaving from Avonlea - a town located in the center of a triangular peninsula jutting out into the Gulf of San Lorenzo and bordered by the sea on both sides - could escape its sight".
Anne Sewell
Black Beauty: autobiography of a horse (Black Beauty) 1877
English language
Estimated copies: 50 million
“The first place I have a clear memory of is a large, pleasant meadow with a pool of clear water in the middle. Trees with shady fronds bent over the pond, and where the water was deeper, reeds and water lilies grew. On one side of the meadow, beyond the fence, we saw a plowed field; on the other, behind a gate, our master's house. At the top of the meadow there was a fir wood, while at the opposite end flowed a steep torrent whose bank, at that point, fell overhanging”.
Jack Higgins
The Eagle Has Landed, 1975
English language
Estimated copies: 50 million
“Someone was digging a grave in the corner of the cemetery as I went through the gate. I remember it quite clearly because it seemed to set the stage for everything that was to come next."
richard adams
Rabbit Hill (Watership Down) 1972
English language
Estimated copies: 50 million
“There weren't any primroses left. On the side of the wood - where it ended, open country sloped down to an old fence, beyond which was a bramble-lined ditch - a few patches of faded yellow could still be seen between the euphorbia and the roots of the oaks".
Lew wallace
Ben-Hur (Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ) 1880
English language
Estimated copies: 50 million
“The Gebel es Zubleh is a range of mountains measuring fifty miles and more in length, and is so narrow that its outline on the map resembles a centipede creeping from noon to the north. Standing on its red and white cliffs and looking towards the rising sun, one would only see the desert of Arabia, where the east winds, so hateful to the vinedressers of Jericho, have been blowing since the beginning of the world. Its slopes are all covered by the sands pushed there by the Euphrates and destined to remain there forever, because the mountains form a bulwark for the pastures of Moab and Ammon, to the west: lands that otherwise would also be a desert”.
Shere Hite
The Hite Report, 1976
English language
Estimated copies: 48 million
“Women have come a long way in the last half of the twentieth century, from when the existence of the female orgasm was questioned and from when women were effectively property in marriage to major victories such as the United Nations Declaration of 1995 on women's rights, signed by 140 countries, which proclaims the autonomy of a woman to decide about her own body. However, despite the fact that today women have all their rights and sexuality is everywhere, there is still a long way to go — as clearly emerges from the women who keep writing to me”.
EB White
Charlotte's Web (Charlotte's Web) 1952
English language
Estimated copies: 45 million
“—Where is papa going with that axe? Fern asked her mother as they set the table for breakfast. 'At the pigsty,' replied Mrs. Arable, 'the piglets were born tonight.'
JP Donleavy
The Ginger Man 1955
English language
Estimated copies: 45 million
“Today a rare spring sun. Carts rattling towards the quays along Tara Street, amid the cries of pale, barefoot children. O'Keefe enters and climbs onto a stool. He adjusts the backpack that he carries over his shoulder and looks at Sebastian Dangerfield ”.
Helen Beatrix Potter
The Tale of Peter Rabbit, 1902
English language
Estimated copies: 45 million
“Once upon a time there were Four Bunnies, whose names were Spinning Top, Hop, Cottontail and Peter. The bunnies lived with their mother in a sandy den dug among the roots of a huge pine tree.
Richard Bach
Jonathan Livingston Seagull (Jonathan Livingston Seagull) 1970
English language
Estimated copies: 44 million
“Today a rare spring sun. Carts rattling towards the quays along Tara Street, amid the cries of pale, barefoot children. O'Keefe enters and climbs onto a stool. He adjusts the backpack he carries over his shoulder and looks at Sebastian Dangerfield. “Those tubs over there are huge. I hadn't had a bath in two months. Every day that passes I feel more Irish. It's like the New York subway, you have to go through the turnstiles."
Eric Carle
The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969).
English language
Estimated copies: 43 million
“In the moonlight a small egg sits on a leaf. One Sunday morning a beautiful warm sun comes out and — pop — a small and voracious caterpillar comes out of the egg”.
VC Andrews
Sunless Flowers (Flowers in the Attic) 1979
English language
Estimated copies: 42 million
“It is so fitting to color hope yellow, like that sun we rarely saw. And as I begin to copy from old journals that I've kept for so long, the title comes to me as if by inspiration: Open the window and stay in the sun. Still, I hesitated to name our story. Because I think of us above all as flowers in the attic. Paper flowers. So intensely colored, fading away in those long, sad, gloomy, oppressive days when we were prisoners of hope and held in check by greed. We would never have been able to color even one of our paper flowers yellow”.
Jostein Gaarder
Sofia's World (Sofies verden (Sophie's World) 1991
Norwegian language
Estimated copies: 41 million
“Sofia Amundsen was returning from school. She had walked the first stretch of road with Jorunn and they had talked about robots. According to Jorunn, the human brain was comparable to a very sophisticated computer: Sofia, however, did not agree very much. A man had to be more than just a machine."
Elbert Hubbard
A Message to Garcia (1899).
English language
Estimated copies: 40 million
“If you are hired by a man, in heaven's name, work for him. If the salary he pays you is enough to buy bread and butter, work for him, speak well of him, think well of him, stand by him and by the institution he represents. I believe that if I were hired by a man, I would work for him."
