The best known books set in each country: Romania

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Romania.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
I Must Betray You	Ruta Sepetys	93,117	1,164
Wildwood Dancing	Juliet Marillier	32,070	2,032
The Hunger Angel	Herta Müller	6,850	1,052
The Land of Green Plums	Herta Müller	6,222	1,150
On the Heights of Despair	Emil M. Cioran	9,052	706
The Girl They Left Behind	Roxanne Veletzos	17,970	348
Between the Woods and the Water	Patrick Leigh Fermor	3,606	1,613
The Balkan Trilogy	Olivia Manning	2,875	1,207

We’re back in Europe for the first time since I looked at Ukraine six months ago. When I did this exercise back in 2015, I rather cheekily gave the award to Dracula, by Bram Stoker, but in fact only the opening and closing chapters are set in Transylvania, and most of the book is set in England. At that point, this week’s winner, I Must Betray You, had not yet been published; it has clearly been a big hit on Goodreads, though it is only fifth on LibraryThing. It was published as recently as 2023. It’s a story of being a teenager under Communist-era repression, by a Lithuanian-American author.

The top book on LibraryThing set in Romania, Wildwood Dancing, also features on my 2015 list, as did The Land of Green Plums. I was not completely sure about Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Between the Woods and the Water, but I checked and he crosses the Romanian border from Hungary on page 83 of the 242 pages of the book.

I am not completely sure about Emil Cioran’s philosophical treatise On the Heights of Despair, but I ruled out his similarly philosophical The Trouble With Being Born. The former was written in Bucharest and the latter in Paris.

Books by Romanians who are not Herta Müller do remarkably well on Goodreads and remarkably badly on LibraryThing. There were several others with more than 10,000 raters on GR and less than 200, in some cases less than 100, on LT. The relevant authors are George Călinescu, Liviu Rebreanu, Camil Petrescu, Mihail Sadoveanu, Ioan Slavici, Marin Preda and Mircea Eliade.

I disqualified eight books, including Dracula and The Trouble With Being Born as noted above. Three are set in numerous countries including Romania: Night by Elie Wiesel, The Historian by Elisabeth Kostova and Balkan Ghosts by Robert Kaplan. I thought at first that Richard Wurmbrand’s Tortured for Christ would easily qualify, but in fact it covers all of Eastern Europe with a particularly strong focus on Russia. Eugène Ionesco’s play Rhinocéros is set in Paris. Finally, Bengal Nights by Mircea Eliade is set entirely in India.

Coming next: Guatemala, the Netherlands, Ecuador and Cambodia.

From the Heart of Europe

Books, politics, languages and life

The best known books set in each country: Romania

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