Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees has had tremendous international success, with rights being licensed to 22 publishers around the world, and it has been translated into 18 languages — from Chinese and Hebrew to Czech and Swedish. Over one million copies have sold in the United States alone. Canadian sales (English language only) are now well over 365,000 copies. The next-biggest market to date is the Dutch language; they are now in their 15th printing and sales in excess of 150,000 copies.

When Knopf Canada first published Fall on Your Knees in 1996, there were some major hurdles to overcome in selling foreign rights. The author was a first-time novelist with absolutely no international writing credentials. Putting these issues aside, the biggest concern for many foreign publishers was that the book was over 550 pages, which means it is very expensive to translate. For those publishers that took a chance on this “unknown” writer, the risk has paid off.

Featured here are only a few foreign covers of Fall on Your Knees. These covers illustrate the various ways in which publishers around the world have perceived the book, and have determined the right look for their respective markets.