The best known books set in each country: Slovakia

Slovakia is in Central Europe. It was part of the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of the first world war, then part of Czechoslovakia until 1992. It borders Austria, Czechia, Poland, Ukraine and Hungary. The main language is Slovak, a Slavic language, though there is also a strong Hungarian-speaking minority. It has been democratic since the fall of Communism, though teetering occasionally towards authoritarianism.

I have been to Slovakia maybe half a dozen times, and have a lot of personal connections there. In particular, I am a member of the board of the European Democracy Youth Network whose seat is in the capital, Bratislava. I took photos of public art there in 2024. I also went to see Giselle there in 2019, the only ballet I have ever been to in my life. A close colleague at work (whose spouse is Irish) and a family connection are both from the Hungarian-speaking minority. So it’s a place I feel comfortable talking about.

See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Slovakia.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
Zoli	Colum McCann	4,312	701	540
Trhlina [The Rift]	Jozef Karika	7,650	14	557
The Piper on the Mountain	Ellis Peters	736	425	51
The Taste of Power	Ladislav Mňačko	2,105	37	202
Katarina	Kathryn Winter	470	528	62
Rivers of Babylon	Peter Pišťanek	826	64	80
Siren of the Waters	Michael Genelin	515	173	44
The Luck of the Weissensteiners	Christoph Fischer	981	83	45

This week’s winner was also the winner when I last did this exercise in 2015. Zoli is about the life of a Roma woman under totalitarianism, both Nazism and Communism. It is the winner only on LibraryThing this week, but that was enough to pull it ahead of the field (second on the other two systems, narrowly so on StoryGraph).

Trhlina has not been translated into English, which perhaps explains its catastrophic LibraryThing rankings; otherwise it is amazingly far ahead on Goodreads and narrowly leading also on StoryGraph. It is a horror novel which has been adapted into a very successful Slovak film, and as far as I can tell has been translated into Czech, Hungarian, Polish and oddly enough Macedonian, but not English, which makes its high rankings on two of the systems even more impressive.

Ellis Peters was a name I did not expect to see here. The Piper on the Mountain is a murder mystery where the victim died mountain-climbing in the Tatras.

The Taste of Power (original Ako chutí moc) is a satirical novel about the Communist system. It doesn’t actually identify the city and country where it is set, but everyone agrees that it’s Bratislava in 1967 Czechoslovakia.

Katarina is a semi-autobiographical novel about a Jewish girl in hiding during the Second World War.

Rivers of Babylon (the title of the original Slovak publication is in English) is a crime novel set in the early 1990s.

Siren of the Waters is the first in a series of novels about detective Jana Matinova by Californian prosecutor Michael Genelin, who died earlier this year aged 90.

The Luck of the Weissensteiners is about a Jewish family in Bratislava in the 1930s. It the first of Fischer’s Three Nations trilogy. (The other two books deal with Austria and Bavaria/Germany.)

Including the StoryGraph numbers did not change the top eight. The top book by a woman writer from Slovakia is This Room is Impossible to Eat / Táto izba sa nedá zjesť, by Nicol Hochholczerová. It very narrowly missed inclusion (thanks again to a poor LibraryThing score),

I did not have many borderline cases. There are a lot of books about survivors or victims of the Holocaust who were from Slovakia, but in general more of the action is set outside the country. I am still not 100% certain about Embers, by Sándor Márai, but the consensus from people who know the region better than I do is that it’s set in Hungary.

Despite my affection for the country, I do not have many books on my own shelves concerning Slovakia. The best known is Patrick Leigh Fermor’s visit to Kövecses (now Štrkovec) at the end of his classic A Time of Gifts. The mid-1990s authoritarian wobble and its resolution are described in a chapter of Reclaiming Democracy: Civil Society and Electoral Change in Central and Eastern Europe, eds. Joerg Forbrig and Pavol Demeš. And Pavol Demeš, who is a friend and was also Slovakia’s foreign minister before independence, kindly gave me a copy of his Slovakia and the United Kingdom: the first 30 years. Here I photographed him sitting behind the page of the book that shows him meeting John Major, when the latter was the British prime minister, more than thirty years before. (Pavol is on the left in the group photo.) It’s the only book I own that satisfies my Slovakia geographic criterion.

Next up will be Ireland, our last European country for a bit, followed by New Zealand, Costa Rica and Kuwait.

From the Heart of Europe

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The best known books set in each country: Slovakia

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