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You might be out of luck if you check your local bookstore for works by the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, Herta Muller. Anchor Marco Werman tells us what happened when one of The World’s staffers called around to some of the major US bookstores.

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MARCO WERMAN: By the way if you’re tempted to go out and buy one of Herta Muller’s books in a bookstore – good luck. We called a few stores to ask if they had The Land of Green Plums in stock. The results were not good. Now we admit our survey was highly unscientific but still. A famous old bookshop in one of New England’s top college towns had lots of copies when the book was first published. That was in the late 1990s. Another iconic bookshop – this one in the Pacific Northwest – said it usually has it but not today. Calls to other brick and mortar stores proved similarly disappointing. Your best bet for a copy of Herta Muller’s best known novel may be to go online. Plenty of copies there it seems of The Land of Green Plums.

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