Despite the transnational turn in book history (Shep, 2008) it is impossible to disentangle the nation from the text. It has been argued that the invention of the printing press was crucial to the creation of the modern nation-state (Anderson, 1983; Eisenstein, 1979; McLuhan, 1962), and that books play a key part in nationalist movements (Armstrong, 1982; Hutchinson, 1987; Smith, 2009). Books shape and maintain national identities (Noorda, 2016), cementing how these identities are constructed, represented, spatialized, and performed (Edensor, 2002). Our research examines the twofold relationship between the globalized book trade and national identity: firstly, the role of the nation in configuring books’ production and reception, in particular the events in the life of a book which springboard it from a national to an international context; and secondly, the interventions made by the globalized book trade in contemporary conceptualisations of national identity, culture, and cultural hybridity (Bhabha, 1996).

This collaborative paper discusses the international reception and circulation of three bestselling titles in the area of contemporary family-centered fiction: Big Little Lies (2014, Australia), Crazy Rich Asians (2013, US), and NW (2012, UK). It explores the use of methods such as close reading, thematic coding, and discourse analysis of the texts and their reviews to trace these texts’ cross-cultural encounters, and offers preliminary analysis that contributes to discussions about textual migration and exchange.

Melanie Ramdarshan Bold is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Information Studies at University College, London. Rachel Noorda is the Director of Book Publishing and Assistant Professor in English at Portland State University.