Two days after Cinquante nuances de Grey, the French translation of Fifty Shades Of Grey, was released, the erotic novel has become the fastest selling book in the country's publishing history. The astonishing sales figures - of
around 75,000 every day - come after the book was panned by French critics as crass pseudo-porn that reads like a Mills and Boon novel. One high-brow reviewer wrote: It's as close to literature as Whiskas cat food is to gastronomy. A
spokesman for FNAC, which accounts for around a fifth of all book sales in France, said: It is amazingly popular. We have never stocked a book that has sold so fast. We sold 15,000 copies on the
day it was released. In some shops there were just none left.
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