The best known books set in each country: Belarus

Posted on 24 May 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Belarus is a landlocked state in Eastern Europe, with Poland to the west, Russia to the east, Ukraine to the south and Lithuania to the north. It was part of the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union before becoming independent in 1991. It was also the home of a large Jewish population before the Second World War, when most of them were murdered and most of the survivors emigrated to Israel. Since 1996 it has been ruled by the authoritarian Aleksandr Lukashenka, though it is generally believed that the real winner of the most recent presidential election was Sviatlana Tsihanouskaya, who I had the pleasure of working with a few years ago.

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 the current boundaries of Belarus.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
The Bielski Brothers	Peter Duffy	3,795	613	258
The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko	Scott Stambach	4,891	297	679
Defiance: The Bielski Partisans	Nechama Tec	2,215	553	173
The Slaughterman’s Daughter	Yaniv Iczkovits	2,637	170	279
Red Crosses	Sasha Filipenko	1,790	64	203
Gingerbread	Robert Dinsdale	972	77	133
King Stakh’s Wild Hunt	Uladzimir Karatkievič	1,289	44	128
Бывший сын	Sasha Filipenko	1,263	29	135

With a somewhat heavy heart I have disqualified several books by the great Svetlana Aleksievich, notably Voices from Chernobyl, which I think is not quite sufficiently in Belarus to qualify, superb book though it is.

This week’s winner – as was the case in 2015 when I first crunched these numbers – is a book about the Jewish leaders of a partisan group waging war against the German occupiers from the woods. So is the third book on the list.

The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko is about two teenagers with special needs in a Belarusian hospital, and has sparked fierce warfare on Goodreads which you do not need to read for yourself.

The Slaughterman’s Daughter is an adventure novel of Tsarist times.

Red Crosses has an old woman telling the story of her long life, mostly in Belarus as far as I can tell.

Gingerbread and King Stakh’s Wild Hunt are both fantasy novels – a genre that kept popping up as I did my research here.

Бывший сын, “The Ex-Son”, doesn’t seem to have been translated into English. The protagonist wakes up after ten years in a coma to find that Minsk is both the same and different. Those who have read it rave about it.

The top Belarusian woman writer is of course Svetlana Aleksievich, but the other who scored in my research was Jeva Viežnaviec / Eva Vezhnavets, whose What Now, Mr Wolf? is coming out in English translation next month.

This is the last European country for a while, after a run of quite a lot in the 9-11 million population range (nine of the last twelve countries I have covered). Next up are Laos, Turkmenistan, Libya and Kyrgyzstan.

The best known books set in each country: Sierra Leone

Posted on 17 May 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Now that I am into the second hundred countries, I will start including brief geographical and historical notes about each. Sierra Leone is in West Africa, bordering Guinea to the north, Liberia to the southeast and the Atlantic Ocean to the southwest. It was a British colony from roughly 1808 to 1961, and then had an awful civil war from 1991 to 2002. One of the leaders in that period was Valentine Strasser, born on the same day as me, who seized power three days after his/my/our 25th birthday. Weirdly enough the man who overthrew him in 1996, Julius Maada Bio, is now president again, though this time through winning elections in 2018 and 2023, having spent time in exile in the USA in between.

See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I’m now also using numbers from Storygraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Sierra Leone. I’m stretching a point here, as discussed below.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviewers
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier	Ishmael Beah	195,447	8,011	14,240
The Gilded Ones	Namina Forna	56,520	2,246	20,033
The Heart of the Matter	Graham Greene	31,146	5,537	2,085
The Merciless Ones	Namina Forna	13,002	587	4,699
The Memory of Love	Aminatta Forna	5,249	750	656
The Eternal Ones	Namina Forna	4,843	212	1,979
Radiance of Tomorrow	Ishmael Beah	4,731	477	691
The Bite of the Mango	Mariatu Kamara	4,307	363	440

The winner this week is a memoir of a boy soldier in the Sierra Leone civil war, though I see from Wikipedia that its veracity on points of detail has been challenged. One of the same author’s novels also features on the list.

The Deathless trilogy (The Gilded Ones, The Merciless Ones and The Eternal Ones) by Amina Forma is set in a fantasy West African country, but the author is pretty clear that it is firmly based on her childhood experiences in Sierra Leone, so I am allowing it to qualify.

Graham Greene’s classic anguished novel The Heart of the Matter and two women actually from Sierra Leone, Aminatta Forna and Mariatu Kamara, make up the rest of the list.

Including StoryGraph didn’t change the top eight but did increase the margin by which Catch Me A Colobus by Gerald Durrell missed the cut.

I had to disqualify a number of books, and hesitated most over The Laughing Monsters, a thriller by Denis Johnson, which is set partly in Sierra Leone but also in Uganda and Congo, and my limited investigations indicated that the Sierra Leone sections amount to less than half of the book.

Next week back to Europe for Belarus; then Laos, Turkmenistan and Libya.

The best known books set in each country: Guatemala

Posted on 14 May 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Grave Secrets	Kathy Reichs	36,567	4,129
The Popol Vuh		7,537	2,083
I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala	Rigoberta Menchú	6,340	1,564
The President	Miguel Ángel Asturias	6,486	1,161
Harsh Times	Mario Vargas Llosa	8,026	358
The Bird Hotel	Joyce Maynard	14,457	164
Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala	Stephen C. Schlesinger	1,972	510
The Most Beautiful Place in the World	Ann Cameron	1,345	458

This week’s winner is one of a series about Canadian forensic investigator Temperance Brennan, called in to investigate two multiple murders in Guatemala. Published in 2002, and it sounds like its heart is in the right place. The runner-up is a Mayan sacred text, which is the winner this week for the top book by a local writer. (I hesitate to use the word ‘Guatemalan’ as the Popol Vuh was written long before the country was given that name.)

The country of which Miguel Ángel Asturias’ President is the head of state is not actually named, but everyone seems to think it is Guatemala. I also had to dig quite hard to get confirmation of the location of the Bird Hotel, but am confident in the end that it ticks my box.

Speaking of The Bird Hotel, it is second on Goodreads, and far ahead of the rest, but has a strikingly low LibraryThing score for a mainstream English-language lit fic book. I guess it’s possible that it was marketed heavily to Goodreads users.

I disqualified eight books which include Guatemalan passages but not for the majority of the text. They are Merrick by Anne Rice (mostly in the USA), Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano (covers the whole region), In the Midst of Winter by Isabel Allende (mostly in the USA), The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux (covers both continents), The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins (covers the whole region), We Are Not From Here by Jenny Torres Sanchez (mostly in Mexico as far as I could tell), Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer (covers the whole region) and Red Glass by Laura Resau (again, mostly in Mexico).

Back to Europe next for the Netherlands, and then Ecuador, Cambodia and Zimbabwe. I think I know which book will win next week.

The best known books: the top 100 countries

Posted on 10 May 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Well, Switzerland marks the 100th country in the world by population (of 234 on the Worldometer list), so i thought it would be a good moment to look back over the last two years of posting about the best known book in each country.

First of all, of course my methodology is a white, Western measure of the extent to which particular authors and works are recognised in the mainly Anglophone world of LibraryThing, Goodreads and StoryGraph. This doesn’t make my analysis valueless, but it does mean that each of my posts should be regarded as a jumping-off point rather than a definitive answer to the question, “What should I read about this country?”

(I was very amused when a work colleague, planning to go on holiday to Tunisia, told me that he had asked an AI agent what books to read about the country and it recommended my Tunisia page and therefore Flaubert’s Salammbô – I hope that the fictional account of Carthage in the third century BC was useful.)

Second, for developing economies there is therefore a bias towards Western writers who have gone in as white saviours – literally in a couple of cases where there is a strong Christian element to the story. For each country I have therefore tried to also note the top-ranked local authors, and in cases where the list is rather male, the top-rated women authors.

Third, I’m genuinely finding this project fun, especially as we get to countries that I know less and less about – though even in the more familiar European territory, I’m finding new work published since I did a similar analysis for European countries only in 2015.

Of the hundred books so far, there are fifty known to be by men, forty-nine known to be by women, and the Epic of Gilgamesh whose author is unknown.

54 are by authors who (in my judgement) are not from the country that they have written about in this case, but 46 are by local writers.

I count one play (Italy); two graphic novels (Iran and Côte d’Ivoire); 19 science fiction or fantasy; 22 non-fiction; and 56 fiction other than plays, graphic novels, or sff.

A few striking individual cases:

Continue reading →

The best known books set in each country: Switzerland

Posted on 10 May 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology, though NB that I’m now also using numbers from Storygraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Switzerland.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviewers
Heidi	Johanna Spyri	212,815	14,145	16,290
The Sanatorium	Sarah Pearse	205,740	2,418	29,120
The Magic Mountain	Thomas Mann	63,457	11,051	4,251
The Other Einstein	Marie Benedict	88,207	1,757	7,882
The Physicists	Friedrich Dürrenmatt	44,556	2,126	5,881
The Enigma of Room 622	Joël Dicker	76,499	1,019	5,884
The Visit	Friedrich Dürrenmatt	39,324	2,078	5,166
The English Assassin	Daniel Silva	45,379	2,413	2,200

When I did this survey less systematically back in 2015, I awarded the prize to Frankenstein; but I have checked, and in fact considerably less than half of the book is set in Switzerland. So I have had to disqualify it here.

I declared Heidi the runner up in 2015, and I declare her the winner this time. In case you don’t know, it’s a wholesome tale of an orphan girl, brought up by her grumpy grandfather, bringing hope and healing. Johanna Spyri, the author, lived in Switzerland all her life. (Incidentally the bridge over the Rhine near Maienfeld, the town where most of Heidi is set, is called the Tardis Bridge. Yes, really.)

The Sanatorium was only published in 2020, so would not have been on my 2015 list, but it has clearly done very well, rivaling Heidi on Goodreads and actually beating her on StoryGraph. It’s a murder mystery set in, er, a sanatorium. The Magic Mountain a classic novel which came third in my 2015 survey, comes third again; it too is set in a sanatorium.

The Other Einstein is about Albert’s first wife, Mileva, and her unhappy life with him in Zürich. She was an ethnic Serb from what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now Vojvodina, and was also a talented scientist to the point that she may deserve credit for some of the work published under Albert’s name.

I am not completely sure about The Physicists, a play about three physicists in, yes, a sanatorium. But it was originally written in German, and the name of the sanatorium, Les Cerisiers, is French, and Dürrenmatt is in general a very Swiss writer, so I think it counts.

The Enigma of Room 622 is a mystery novel by French-speaking Swiss writer Joël Dicker. All his previous books were set in America, but this one is in a somewhat fictionalized Geneva.

The Visit, like The Physicists, is a play by Dürrenmatt which is not explicitly set in Switzerland, but the protagonist’s real name turns out to be Kläri, which is very Swiss.

Again I wasn’t completely sure about The English Assassin, a baroque tale of wartime looting of Jewish property coming home to roost decades later, but I think enough of it happens in and around Zürich to count for my purposes.

Thanks to StoryGraph we gained The Enigma of Room 622, which scored relatively poorly on the less Francophone LibraryThing, and lost Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Jung. Hotel du Lac, by Anita Brookner, was in a very close ninth place both with and without StoryGraph numbers.

I disqualified a lot of other books without needing to think too hard. Only one apart from Frankenstein caused me any head-scratching – Daisy Miller by Henry James. However the action switches to Italy from Switzerland just before the half-way point in the book.

The next four countries are very different from each other – Sierra Leone, followed by Belarus, then Laos and then Turkmenistan.

The best known books set in each country: Austria

Posted on 3 May 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
The Wall	Marlen Haushofer	38,561	1,827	8,299
Letter from an Unknown Woman	Stefan Zweig	73,922	754	3,892
The World of Yesterday	Stefan Zweig	30,654	3,084	2,068
Love Virtually	Daniel Glattauer	31,275	1,208	3,190
Beware of Pity	Stefan Zweig	22,742	2,039	2,577
Dream Story	Arthur Schnitzler	22,245	2,094	2,347
The Piano Teacher	Elfriede Jelinek	16,914	2,227	2,054
A Whole Life	Robert Seethaler	24,289	1,000	2,874

When I did this exercise in 2015, I declared the winner to be Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, by Marjane Satrapi. But closer examination reveals that it (just) fails my criteria; the protagonist spends only the first 91 pages of a 187-page book in Vienna. Otherwise it would have been far ahead of the field.

The three sites have again served up three different winners. I had not previously heard of Marlen Haushofer, or her dystopian novel The Wall, in which the protagonist finds herself and her Alpine cabin sealed off from the outside world by an invisible barrier. I see that there was a film in 2012. It is way ahead on StoryGraph, second on Goodreads and not so very far behind on LibraryThing.

Letter from an Unknown Woman is a 68-page novella which wins on Goodreads, is in second place on StoryGraph, but lags on LibraryThing. It is about a years-later tragic resolution of an upstairs-downstairs love affair. For some reason Goodreads logs it under the Turkish translation, Bilinmeyen Bir Kadının Mektubu, which makes me suspect that it is a popular text for students learning German.

Zweig’s autobiography, The World of Yesterday, is ahead on LibraryThing but only fourth on Goodreads and further behind on StoryGraph. It is the only one of these that I have read, and I enjoyed it a lot.

Love Virtually, originally Gut Gegen Nordwind, is an email romance story. As far as I can tell, the setting is not specified, but everyone assumes that the protagonists live in Vienna.

I thought long and hard about Zweig’s Beware of Pity, as mentioned last week. The setting is described as “eine kleine Garnison an der ungarischen Grenze”, a garrison on the Hungarian border, on the main train line from Vienna to Budapest and closer to Vienna. Although the protagonist’s love interest is the daughter of the local Hungarian aristocrat, it is clear that everyone is speaking German (he comments on her Hungarian accent). I reckon that this would be one of the towns that was historically in Hungary and then briefly in the Banate of Leitha before being incorporated into today’s Austrian state of Burgenland.

Dream Story and The Piano Teacher are both explicitly set in Vienna, and A Whole Life is set in the Austrian Alps.

Bringing in the StoryGraph numbers again helped the gender balance; we lost The Third Man, by Graham Greene, and The Radetzky March, by Joseph Roth and gained The Piano Teacher and A Whole Life. I am not sure if The Radetzky March would have qualified geographically anyway.

I disqualified a number of books which had been tagged “austria” on LibraryThing and Goodreads. I already awarded Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and The Trial to the Czech Republic. Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl is mainly set in German concentration camps, some of which are now in Poland. Carmilla, by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, is set in what is now Slovenia. The Only Woman in the Room, by “Marie Benedict” (Heather Terrell) is about Hedy Lamarr, who was born in Vienna but spent most of her life elsewhere. I already mentioned Persepolis 2. The Hare with the Amber Eyes jumps around too. There were many others.

Next up will be Switzerland; then a jump south to Sierra Leone; then back to Europe, for the last time in a while, for Belarus; then way off east for Laos.

The best known books set in each country: Hungary

Posted on 26 April 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
Embers	Sándor Márai	46,359	4,379	3,393
The Door	Magda Szabó	37,546	2,202	5,947
The Notebook; The Proof; The Third Lie	Ágota Kristóf	44,782	1,274	2,516
Satantango	László Krasznahorkai	15,896	1,558	1,985
The Paul Street Boys	Ferenc Molnár	25,567	920	1,725
Abigail	Magda Szabó	10,845	525	2,133
The Melancholy of Resistance	László Krasznahorkai	8,123	1,337	1,003
The Good Master	Kate Seredy	4,851	2,401	393

As it was when I did this analysis in 2015, the winner is Embers, a book about an aristocratic household adapting itself to the post First World War with grim realism. In fact, all of the books here are novels by Hungarian writers – Kate Seredy was based in the USA for most of her writing career, but lived in Hungary until she was 23. It is interesting to see recent Nobel Prize winner László Krasznahorkai scoring well – I wonder if that would have been the case if I had done this analysis a year ago.

Including the StoryGraph numbers evened out the genders, losing Sandor Marai’s Esther’s Inheritance and bringing on Abigail.

I disqualified a few books which had Hungarian roots but are not set there, including The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer, one of several about Hungarian experience of the Holocaust mainly set outside Hungary, and Flesh by David Szalay, which has clearly been a big hit since its 2024 publication but is set much more in England than in Hungary.

I also thought long and hard about Beware of Pity, by Stefan Zweig, but decided that in the end it is probably set in what is now the northern Burgenland of Austria, in one of the towns which had historically been part of Hungary with a Hungarian landlord but a mostly German-speaking population. More on that next week.

Next up are Austria and Switzerland, then a jump south to Sierra Leone, then back to Europe for Belarus which will be the last European country for a while.

The best known books set in each country: Israel

Posted on 19 April 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set within what are usually called the 1967 internationally recognised borders of Israel.

To get one thing out of the way: I disqualified the Bible. A lot of it is simply not sufficently narrative in format that you can reasonably describe it as being set in a particular locality, and a lot of the rest is set in places other than the Holy Land, and a lot of what is set in the Holy Land is the wrong side of the 1967 border for my purposes here. Otherwise it would have won this week’s list by a long way.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
The Dovekeepers	Alice Hoffman	80,485	3,327	5,986
Exodus	Leon Uris	101,539	4,532	2,629
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil	Hannah Arendt	34,384	4,895	3,480
The Bronze Bow	Elizabeth George Speare	28,331	5,728	2,276
The Source	James A. Michener	45,782	4,318	1,337
The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East	Sandy Tolan	18,910	1,362	1,773
A Tale of Love and Darkness	Amos Oz	12,981	2,587	823
A Horse Walks into a Bar	David Grossman	15,864	856	1,846

This is the first time since I started incorporating StoryGraph numbers that I’ve had three different books topping the charts on the three different systems. The winner on StoryGraph, and the overall winner (second on Goodreads but only fifth on LibraryThing) is The Dovekeepers, about the siege of Masada in 72-73 CE, published in 2011 and adapted for television in 2015, which will have helped its sales. The LibraryThing winner, The Bronze Bow, is also set in the first century CE, but a little earlier, about a boy who is a contemporary of Jesus and fights the Romans.

The Goodreads winner, Exodus by Leon Uris, which I had honestly expected to top the charts overall, is a novel about the twentieth-century creation of Israel, a topic also addressed by The Lemon Tree (a novel about the inhabitants of a particular house in Ramla) and A Tale of Love and Darkness (an autobiography).

The Source is the only one of these that I have read; it’s a set of stories set across the centuries mostly in a particular (fictional) ancient city, with the framing narrative being the twentieth-century archaeologists who dig it up.

Given that Adolf Eichmann’s trial was in 1961, there is no question that the location of Eichmann in Jerusalem is the right side of the line for my purposes.

Finally, A Horse Walks into a Bar is about a comedian in Tel Aviv.

Including the StoryGraph numbers meant gaining A Horse Walks into a Bar at the expense of The Attack, by Yasmina Khadra, also set in Tel Aviv.

I don’t find any record that Hannah Arendt became an Israeli citizen. In that case, the top book by an Israeli woman, set in Israel, is Exit Wounds, a graphic novel by Rutu Modan. (Yasmina Khadra is Algerian and a man, despite his female pen-name.)

I disqualified a couple of books about the history of Jerusalem, which are clearly mainly about the Old City (the other side of the 1967 border); a couple of books about the history of Mossad, which concentrated on its operations abroad; and a couple of books about the history of Palestine, which seemed to be mainly addressing the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. We’ll get to some of those in due course.

Next, a run of European countries – Hungary, Austria and Switzerland – followed by a jump to Africa for Sierra Leone.

The best known books set in each country: Togo

Posted on 12 April 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Postponed from last week.

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
The Village of Waiting	George Packer	479	151	61
The Shadow of Things to Come	Kossi Efoui	61	24	12
Adikou	Raphaëlle Red	125	4	25
Descent into Night	Edem Awumey	72	13	13
Dirty Feet	Edem Awumey	57	25	8
Neyla	Kossi Komla-Ebri	50	31	1
The Fixer: Visa Lottery Chronicles	Charles Piot	39	3	8
Cola Cola Jazz	Kangni Alem	9	5	3

This was particularly challenging, with a lot of people having tagged their books “to go” as “togo”, which is confusing, and additionally there are many fans of the well-known 1920s sled dog Togo. In the end, I found only eight books which have owners on all three of GR, LT and SG and which also appear to be more than 50% set in Togo, so they are all listed above.

The Village of Waiting sets a new record for the least widely owned winner in any country, beating the UAE handily. I’m afraid it’s by a chap who worked there in the Peace Corps. The Fixer: Visa Lottery Chronicles is also by a white American guy, about how US visas are allocated to applicant Togolese.

My research indicated that none of the other six novels on the list is explicitly set in Togo, but that in each case the unnamed country in which most or all of the action takes place is pretty clearly based on their home countries by the Togolese writers. I am not totally certain about the two books by Edem Awumey.

Raphaëlle Red is the only woman writer on the list. My research indicated that more than half of Do They Hear You When You Cry, by Fauziya Kassindja, is set after she escaped the threat of mutilation in Togo and went first to Germany and then the USA, where she was treated brutally by the authorities. Une Esclave Moderne, by Henriette Akofa, is about her life in Paris. Fetish, by Christine Garnier, has no StoryGraph owners and may not be set in Togo. Very Young Catholics In Togo, by Emily Koczela, has no Goodreads or StoryGraph owners. I can see that as I get to less well-known countries I may have to tweak my listing criteria.

One comparatively popular book by a Togolese writer that I disqualified after research was An African in Greenland, by Tété-Michel Kpomassie; it does indeed start with his birth and early life in Togo, but more than half of it seems to be about his later travels, ending up in Greenland.

Jumping over to Israel next, then back to Europe for Hungary, Austria and Switzerland.

The best known books set in each country: Greece

Posted on 5 April 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

This week should have been Togo, but I have decided arbitrarily to swap it and Greece which would have been next week.

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
The Song of Achilles	Madeline Miller	2,042,176	19,326	373,920
The Odyssey	Homer	1,207,320	61,067	88,675
Oedipus Rex	Sophocles	239,352	7,452	25,429
Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold	Stephen Fry	166,904	5,043	34,202
Antigone	Sophocles	178,998	6,383	22,204
Ariadne	Jennifer Saint	149,260	3,264	44,198
The Penelopiad	Margaret Atwood	89,778	6,517	21,234
Mythology	Edith Hamilton	60,337	17,020	8,477

All of these are ancient Greek legends, or adaptations of them.

When I did this exercise in 2015, The Odyssey was far ahead of the field, so I was really surprised to see that it has now been beaten (on Goodreads and StoryGraph at least) by Madeleine Miller’s The Song of Achilles, which was published in 2012 but apparently got a major boost through BookTok in 2021.

In 2015, Oedipus Rex was second and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, which is set in the twentieth century, third. More recent adaptations of the ancient myths have clearly been selling well. Stephen Fry’s Mythos was published in 2017 and Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne in 2021 (though Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad came out in 2005).

I disqualified four books which might be considered to have strong Greek content. Circe by Madeline Miller is mostly set on the island of Aiaia, which most people (including I think Miller) locate near Italy. The setting of The Iliad by Homer is mostly today’s Türkiye. None of Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides is set in today’s Greece. And The Republic by Plato describes an ideal state which is definitely not Greece.

Including the StoryGraph numbers brought Margaret Atwood and Edith Hamilton onto the list, and knocked off Sophocles’ Theban cycle considered as a whole and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.

Women writers have done well on my list this week, but Greek women have not (with the caveat that we don’t know much about Homer). The top Greek woman writer that I found was Sappho, quite a long way down, followed by Margarita Liberaki.

Next up is Togo, then Israel, then back to Europe for Hungary and Austria.

The best known books set in each country: Portugal

Posted on 29 March 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
Blindness	José Saramago	343,703	14,451	28,534
The Book of Disquiet	Fernando Pessoa	38,290	6,060	3,355
Night Train to Lisbon	Pascal Mercier	28,219	3,368	2,142
Seeing	José Saramago	32,209	3,108	2,341
Baltasar and Blimunda	José Saramago	26449	2,747	2,821
All the Names	José Saramago	24,470	3,240	1,917
Pereira Maintains	Antonio Tabucchi	36,726	2,492	2,770
The Double	José Saramago	25,571	2,720	2,038

The list this week is dominated by a single, Nobel Prize-winning writer, and one of his books far outstrips all competition. It is about life in a city and society where everyone wakes up blind one day, and has been filmed starring Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore. The location is rather ambiguous, but I side with those who think it must be in Portugal because of one character’s fondness for chouriço. Seeing is a sequel to Blindness with some characters in common, so I’m taking it as having the same setting.

When I did this exercise in 2015, I had the same result – Blindness first, The Book of Disquiet second.

I disqualified two Saramago books. Death with Interruptions is also set in an anonymous country, but it is explicitly landlocked, which rules Portugal out. And The Gospel According to Jesus Christ is set in the Holy Land, not surprisingly.

The list is all-male, as previously with Russia, South Africa, Colombia (a special case), Spain and perhaps surprisingly Sweden. The top book by a woman that turned up in my searches was The Librarian Spy, by Madeline Martin, but it seems to fail my location criterion, with significant chunks set in France and the USA. I am much more certain of Alentejo Blue, a collection of short stories set in the Alentejo region, by Monica Ali. The top book by a Portuguese woman with a majority of the action set in Portugal is The Return, by Dulce Maria Cardoso, which I disqualified from Angola but happily acknowledge here.

After four European countries in a row, we’ll be skipping back and forth over the next few weeks, with Togo, then Greece, then Israel, then Hungary.

The best known books set in each country: Azerbaijan

Posted on 22 March 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology, though NB that I’m now also using numbers from Storygraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Azerbaijan.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviewers
Ali and Nino	Kurban Said	9,761	1,033	835
Mobility	Lydia Kiesling	2,326	118	605
Caucasus Days	Banine	1,124	98	193
The Colonel’s Mistake	Dan Mayland	1,755	94	75
Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War	Thomas de Waal	830	127	56
The Orphan Sky	Ella Leya	553	69	137
Stone Dreams: A Novel-Requiem	Akram Aylisli	450	17	117
7 Seconds to Die: A Military Analysis of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War and the Future of Warfighting	John Antal	300	31	19

Well, it’s a very clear win for one of my favourite books, the mercifully short romance Ali and Nino by the enigmatic Kurban Said. It’s about an Azeri boy and Georgian girl who fall in love in Baku before and during the First World War and Azerbaijan’s first go at independence; global, local and family politics all intersect with a dramatic conclusion. Go get it. It also won when I did this exercise back in 2015.

In his The Orientalist: In Search of a Man Caught Between East and West, Thomas Reiss marshals the evidence that “Kurban Said” was born Lev Nussimbaum, apparently on a train in 1905, and grew up in Baku where his father was a minor oil magnate; his mother invited Stalin round for tea occasionally; when the revolution came they fled to Constantinople, then Paris, and finally Berlin; he died in Italian exile, aged just 37, Ezra Pound’s last-minute efforts to help him being all in vain; and his grave became the butt of a comic anecdote told by John Steinbeck. That summary does not do the story justice.

I’m not completely certain about Mobility, a story about the daughter of US diplomats based in Baku, who grows up to join the oil industry and comes back to Azerbaijan, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt.

Banine was the pen name of the Azeri-born writer Umm-El-Banine Assadoulaeff (whose name is spelt in modern Azeri as Ümmülbanu Əsədullayeva) who lived most of her life in Paris after the fall of independent Azerbaijan. Caucasus Days was first published in French as Jours caucasiens and has also been translated as Days in the Caucasus. It sounds rather autobiographical.

Dan Mayland has written four novels about a former CIA agent doing daring deeds in Azerbaijan and nearby countries. It’s fairly clear that the first of these, The Colonel’s Mistake, is mainly set in Azerbaijan. I disqualified the second, The Leveling, which seems to have large chunks set in Central Asia. The other two didn’t have enough support to qualify.

I am allowing Thomas de Waal’s Black Garden to qualify for the list because if you combine the bits set in Nagorno-Karabakh and the rest of Azerbaijan, you probably have a majority of the page count.

Ella Laya is a jazz musician from Azerbaijan who has built her career in the USA. Her novel The Orphan Sky is about a young woman musician in Azerbaijan during the Cold War.

Stone Dreams / Daş yuxular got its writer Akram Aylisli / Əkrəm Əylisli into a lot of trouble for its sympathetic portrayal of the Armenians expelled from Azerbaijan in the 1989 pogroms.

I don’t know much about 7 Seconds to Die, but the remarkable 2020 war very much deserves close analysis.

I disqualified a number of books which covered the Caucasus as a whole, because generally Azerbaijan will only take up around a third of those if they cover Armenia and Georgia as well. I hesitated a bit more over Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon (but its setting is mostly now in the Russian Federation); The Book of Dede Korkut, which comes very close in that most of the ancient epic stories are set in the Caucasus but in my judgement not quite 50% in today’s Azerbaijan; and the novels of Olga Grjasnowa, who is Azeri but sets most of her action in Germany among the Azeri community there.

Six of the next nine countries on my list are in Europe, but three are not, and we have a balanced run coming up: Portugal, the Togo, then Greece, then Israel.

The best known books set in each country: Czechia / The Czech Republic

Posted on 15 March 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

I had expected a lot of confusion with Slovakia here, but in fact most people are pretty clear on whether a book is set in the one country or the other.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
The Metamorphosis	Franz Kafka	1,445,797	30,000+	128,460
The Unbearable Lightness of Being	Milan Kundera	547,805	24,490	42,366
The Trial	Franz Kafka	399,285	22,293	33,296
Daughter of Smoke & Bone	Laini Taylor	385,328	7,465	55,852
Days of Blood & Starlight	Laini Taylor	171,302	3,801	29,219
The Castle	Franz Kafka	76,255	9,351	6,490
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting	Milan Kundera	54,517	6,553	4,548
Letter to His Father	Franz Kafka	63,459	1,914	4,869

This week’s winner is a bit confused and variable in form, which is appropriate enough. Both Goodreads and Storygraph have combined individual printings of The Metamorphosis with collections of Kafka’s short fiction where it is the title story, while LibraryThing tallies every edition and collection separately. However, I did enough lumping of the options on LibraryThing to assure me that the winner there is definitely the same as on the other two systems.

In case you don’t know, the story is about a man who is trasformed overnight into an enormous beetle or cockroach (the German word is “Ungeheuer”, which means “monster”). One could query whether The Metamorphosis is really set in Prague, in that the location is not specified, but it can hardly be anywhere else. (Similarly for the other three Kafka books on the list; they are certainly set in what was then Bohemia rather than anywhere else.)

The runner-up is a novel by Milan Kundera which was made into a famous film starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche, about a randy doctor and his girlfriend whose lives are up-ended by the Prague Spring of 1968. Another of Kundera’s novels makes the list and several more are bubbling under.

The result when I last measured this, less systematically, in 2015 was much the same.

The effect of including the Storygraph numbers was to lose The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka and gain his Letter to his Father.

The third author on the list, Laini Taylor, is American, and her very successful series of fantasy novels are set in today’s Prague.

The top book by a woman author who is actually from the Czech republic is Hana by Alena Mornštajnová, which scores decently on Goodreads and StoryGraph but very poorly on LibraryThing. Unless you count Madeleine Albright, who was born in Prague and whose autobiographical Prague Winter scores better.

I disqualified several of Milan Kundera’s later novels set in Paris, Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke as the letters were written when he too lived in Paris, Amerika by Franz Kafka which is, oddly enough, set in America, and The Lost Wife by Alyson Richman which is a Holocaust survivor story mostly set elsewhere than the Czech Republic.

Next up are Azerbaijan and Portugal, followed by Togo and then back to Europe again for Greece.

The best known books set in each country: Sweden

Posted on 8 March 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

This was pretty straightforward; there is not much doubt about what books are set in Sweden, and there was not really much doubt about which book was going to win.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo	Stieg Larsson	3,459,224	47,185	155,356
A Man Called Ove	Fredrik Backman	1,222,085	13,882	136,951
The Girl Who Played with Fire	Stieg Larsson	989,205	33,154	70,309
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest	Stieg Larsson	778,147	27,654	57,445
Anxious People	Fredrik Backman	816,177	6,363	128,278
Beartown	Fredrik Backman	606,932	5,788	93,031
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared	Jonas Jonasson	304,460	8,752	29,072
My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry	Fredrik Backman	291,256	5,675	35,205

This week’s winner, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is the first of a trilogy published after the author’s death, about a punk computer genius who helps the viewpoint character Solve Crime. It’s violent, sexy and compelling. The other two books of the trilogy also make the list.

Fredrik Backmann’s books, four of which are on the list, are slice-of-life stories from contemporary Sweden, some of which I suspect may be funny.

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared is another slice-of-life story with a humorous tone. I was not quite sure if it met my geographical criteria, but I got a friend who has a copy to count the chapters (thanks, Mike!) and indeed a majority of it is set in-country.

One surprising thing jumps out at me from this list. All eight of the books are by men, ironically for a post on International Women’s Day. Looking through my archives, this has happened four times before: Russia, South Africa, Colombia (a special case) and Spain. Also, for two of the countries where I was only able to compile a list of five rather than eight books, all five were by male authors: Uzbekistan and Guinea-Conakry. On the other hand, I’ve had seven countries where seven of the eight books were by women (nowhere yet has had a clean sweep on that side).

This turns out to be thanks to my including the StoryGraph numbers. On Goodreads and LibraryThing alone, Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren would have made the list; but My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, by Fredrik Backman, has more than twice as many owners on StoryGraph and nipped into the eighth place. Backman is relatively more popular with StoryGraph users; indeed his top two books are very close behind The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo there.

It’s also quite a turnaround from my previous research in 2015, where the only books that scored were the Stieg Larsson trilogy and Pippi Longstocking. Obviously the recent surge in popularity of Fredrik Backmann had not yet taken off at that point. Perhaps surprisingly, Henning Mankel was quite a long way down, both in 2015 and in 2026. The next highest woman writer after Astrid Lindgren was Camilla Läckberg.

For once, I did not disqualify any books – the top eight from my calculations are all set mainly in Sweden. Other countries where I did not disqualifiy any books: Japan, Egypt, DRC, Vietnam, Colombia.

Coming next: three more European countries – Czechia, Azerbaijan and Portugal – followed by Togo.

The best known books set in each country: Papua New Guinea

Posted on 1 March 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology (though NB I am now also taking Storygraph into account, as well as LibraryThing and goodreads). Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Papua New Guinea.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

This was one of the most fiendishly difficult of these lists to produce, because there are a lot of books set in western half of New Guinea, now part of Indonesia but formerly ruled by the Dutch, and to make matters more complicated the Indonesian part is also known as Papua (the names of the Indonesian provinces are Papua, Central Papua, Highland Papua, South Papua, Southwest Papua and West Papua).

Tell me if I have got any wrong, but I have done my best to keep to books which are set in the borders of what is now the state of Papua New Guinea, formerly ruled by Australia, Britain and Germany. This includes the troubled autonomous island of Bougainville, which despite a strong independence movement remains under Papua New Guinean sovereignty. One helpful point that I had not previously realised is that the majority of the WW2 fighting in New Guinea took place in the eastern half, so in general, books about those campaigns qualify by my criteria.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
Euphoria	Lily King	102,510	3,010	14,134
Mister Pip	Lloyd Jones	24,136	3,644	2,400
No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison	Behrouz Boochani	9,095	495	1,274
Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas	Christian Kracht	4,412	384	516
Kokoda	Peter FitzSimons	1,922	315	92
A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea	Don Kulick	1,049	132	211
The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea–The Forgotten War of the South Pacific	James Campbell	1,327	290	57
The White Mary	Kira Salak	997	268	79

This week’s winner, Euphoria, is a novel about three anthropologists carrying out research in New Guinea in 1933, very much based on the real life of Margaret Mead. Anthropology pops up a lot in books about both parts of New Guinea.

This week’s LibraryThing winner, Mister Pip, is a novel about a schoolteacher and his class caught up in the conflict in Bougainville. I read it a few years ago and was very moved.

No Friend but the Mountains is an autobiographical account of being imprisoned in an Australian immigration detention camp on Manus Island, one of the off-shore islands of Papua New Guinea.

Imperium is based on the true story of August Engelhardt, who founded a German colony based on the principles of nudity and eating coconuts in the part of New Guinea under German rule at the start of the twentieth century.

Kokoda and The Ghost Mountain Boys are both about the Second World War fighting, the former about the Australians and the latter about the Americans, in both cases trying to secure safe routes across the island.

A Death in the Rainforest is an anthropologist’s account of the disappearance of a language and a culture in Papua New Guinea. The country is estimated to have over 800 languages, 12% of the world’s total, and this diversity is fragile. (This book’s relatively high Storygraph rating bumped another anthropology book, Throwim Way Leg: Tree-Kangaroos, Possums and Penis Gourds, by Tim Flannery, off the list.

The White Mary is about a journalist who goes in search of her missing mentor in the jungle and Learns Things. It starts in America but as far as I can tell, most of it is set in Papua New Guinea.

All of the above are about and by foreigners. Papuan writers are few and far between. The top book I found by a Papua New Guinea-born writer is The Shark Caller by Zillah Bethell, but her family background seems to be British. The top book by a writer who was born and still lives in the country is Maiba, a Papuan Novel, by Russell Soaba. The top writing by Papua New Guinean women (if we don’t count Bethell) is My Walk to Equality: Essays, Stories and Poetry by Papua New Guinean Women, edited by Rashmii Amoah Bell.

The top book that I excluded because it is mainly set in the western half of the island (then Netherlands New Guinea, now Indonesia) is Lost in Shangri-la: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II, by Mitchell Zuckoff. It would have ranked below Imperium but ahead of Kokoda.

We have a run of European countries coming now: Sweden, Czechia, Azerbaijan and Portugal; indeed nine of the next twelve countries are European. I might pause for breath when we get to Switzerland, which is the

The best known books set in each country: Tajikistan

Posted on 22 February 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology, though NB that I’m now also using numbers from Storygraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Tajikistan.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviewers
Neanderthal	John Darnton	3,104	1,141	198
Hurramabad	Andrei Volos	88	39	11
A History of the Tajiks: Iranians of the East	Richard C. Foltz	39	17	8
The Disobedient Wife	Annika Milisic-Stanley	101	5	10
Huit monologues de femmes [8 монологов женщины] [Eight Women’s Monologues]	Barzou Abdourazzoqov	39	8	12
Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan	Artemy M. Kalinovsky	30	11	6
The City Where Dreams Come True	Gulsifat Shakhidi	42	3	11
The Birth of Tajikistan: National Identity and the Origins of the Republic	Paul Bergne	30	15	3

Poor Tajikistan! Most of the books that I found with that tag on LT and GR are about Central Asia in general, and Tajikistan is always the last of the five republics that people write about – more difficult to get to, very different language to the other four, devastated in the war of the 1990s which the rest of the world has forgotten.

The top book here (by a long way), Neanderthal by John Darnton, is actually a novel about discovering two lost tribes of Neanderthals in the mountains of Tajikistan. The Neanderthals have psychic powers, and one tribe is peaceful while the other is aggressive. It sounds like rubbish to be honest.

Hurramabad, this week’s runner-up, is about the Russian minority in Tajikistan after independence. Its author, Andrei Volos is an ethnic Russian from Tajikistan. The Disobedient Wife is about an expat western woman in Dushanbe and her maid.

The City Where Dreams Come True is about the civil war of the 1990s and its impact; Gulsifat Shakhidi is the top Tajik woman writer on my list. It made the list thanks to a better Storygraph rating, bumping Uncertain Light by South African writer Marion Molteno off the end.

I put a slight question mark against Huit monologues de femmes [Eight Women’s Monologues], which has not been translated into English (and I also could not find much by searching on its original title, 8 монологов женщины). One summary that I have seen says that it is set on the border with Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. However Barzu Abdurazzoqov is a Tajik writer (mainly for the theatre) so I’m assuming that the monologues are set on the Tajik side of the Uzbek and Afghan borders with his country.

A History of the Tajiks, Laboratory of Social Development and The Birth of Tajikistan are all self-explanatory. (I say that, and then someone will write to me to say that at least one of them is really a great work of post-Soviet magical realism.)

I disqualified, though again with question marks, two books about great Tajik cultural figures, because both seemed to me to be more set in Uzbekistan than Tajikistan. These were the autobiographical The Sands of Oxus, by Sadriddin Ayni, who spent much of his youth in Bokhara, and Возвращение в Панджруд [Return to Panjrud], by Andrei Volos, which is about the poet Rudaki; although his eponymous home, Rudak, is in Tajikistan, his career peaked under the Samanids who were based further west.

This was unusually enlightening and humbling – it turned out that I know much less about Tajikistan than I thought.

Next up is Papua New Guinea; then we’re into a run of European states, with Sweden, Czechia and Azerbaijan.

The best known books set in each country: Cuba

Posted on 15 February 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

From now on, I intend to add numbers from Storygraph to the numbers from LibraryThing and Goodreads. It didn’t change the top eight in this case, though it did bump Our Man in Havana to third rather than second.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
The Old Man and the Sea	Ernest Hemingway	1,316,371	34,464	88,298
Next Year in Havana	Chanel Cleeton	147,809	1,115	18,080
Our Man in Havana	Graham Greene	41,277	5,871	3,937
When We Left Cuba	Chanel Cleeton	46,335	496	6,264
Dreaming in Cuban	Cristina García	12,445	1,681	1,978
Before Night Falls	Reinaldo Arenas	7,410	1,206	800
Waiting for Snow in Havana	Carlos Eire	7,664	1,165	579
Havana Bay	Martin Cruz Smith	8,563	1,587	332

This week’s winner is an epic but short story about a Cuban fisherman. It’s Hemingway’s second win after, oddly enough, Tanzania; he also had a book on the Italy list and two on the Spain list. Strictly speaking, most of The Old Man and the Sea is set, well, at sea, but it’s clearly meant to be in Cuban territorial waters, so I’m giving it the win. It has the highest rankings on both GR and LT of any book since Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl back in September.

All of the above are in dialogue with the US-Cuba relationship. I was not entirely sure about the two Chanel Cleeton novels – and I did disqualify a third by her, The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba, which is clearly mainly set in the USA. Though born in the USA, Cleeton identifies as Cuban-American. I also wasn’t completely sure about Dreaming in Cuban, but on balance it seems to be mostly set on the island.

I disqualified a lot of other books which are only partially set in Cuba, or not at all. Works by and about Che Guevara figured in the list. I did pagecounts of two more Hemingway books, Islands in the Stream and To Have and Have Not, but concluded that neither qualified.

Next up is Tajikistan; then Papua New Guinea, and after that a run of European countries starting with Sweden and Czechia.

The best known books set in each country: Honduras

Posted on 25 January 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
The Lost City of the Monkey God	Douglas Preston	62,615	2,338
The Codex	Douglas Preston	21,153	2,221
The Mosquito Coast	Paul Theroux	13,895	2,413
Miss Quinces	Kat Fajardo	3,856	291
Jungleland: A Mysterious Lost City, a WWII Spy, and a True Story of Deadly Adventure	Christopher S. Stewart	1,580	218
Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo	Elvia Alvarado	642	221
The Summer We Came to Life	Deborah Cloyed	763	86
The Good Garden: How One Family Went from Hunger to Having Enough	Katie Smith Milway	246	174

This week’s winner, The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston, is a non-fiction book about archaeologists investigating the legendary lost White City, Ciudad Blanca, in the Honduran jungle. The Codex, by the same author, takes the same scenario but recasts it as a thriller.

The Mosquito Coast, this week’s LibraryThing winner, is about an American who decides to move his family to Honduras to escape the modern world, with disastrous consequences; it has been adapted for both film and television.

Most of these books are about Americans encountering Honduras. The only Honduran writer on the list is Elvia Alvarado. (One of Kat Fajardo’s parents is Honduran, but she herself was born and brought up in New York.) Alvarado’s Don’t Be Afraid, Gringos is non-fiction; the top novel that I found by a Honduran writer set in Honduras is Libertad, by Bessie Flores Zaldivar.

I disqualified more than twenty books. Most of them were about Hondurans in, or trying to get into, the United States. Some are by authors who have a link to Honduras but set their work elsewhere, most notably Augusto Monterroso, who was born in Tegucigalpa, but moved to Guatemala when he was 15, and did most of his best known work there and in Mexico.

This series is going to take a break for the next couple of weeks, as I will concentrate on Doctor Who posts at the beginning of February. After that, the next country is Cuba, which will be our last American jurisdiction for a while; after that come Tajikistan, Papua New Guinea, and a run of Europeans starting with Sweden.

The best known books set in each country: United Arab Emirates

Posted on 18 January 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
The Dog	Joseph O’Neill	2,371	351
Layover in Dubai	Dan Fesperman	894	186
Temporary People	Deepak Unnikrishnan	1,025	135
City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism	Jim Krane	764	122
The Sand Fish	Maha Gargash	820	109
Desperate in Dubai	Ameera Al Hakawati	1,464	33
From Rags to Riches: A Story of Abu Dhabi	Mohammed Al Fahim	362	61
Sleepless in Dubai	Sajni Patel	882	24

It was surprisingly tough to find books set in the UAE – using my usual methodology, I checked for ‘uae’, ‘dubai’ and ‘abu-dhabi’ tags on both GR and LT, and found rather a limited output. (Yes, I did check for the smaller emirates on Goodreads, and didn’t find much; I didn’t bother checking them on LibraryThing.) This week’s winner, The Dog, by Joseph O’Neill, has the lowest aggregate score for any of the winners for any of the countries I have covered. (Other contenders: Niger and Benin.)

The Dog is about a chap from New York who moves to Dubai and finds himself perpetually in the metaphorical doghouse for one reason or another. It got a couple of award nominations (including the Booker Prize longlist) but doesn’t seem to have resonated strongly with the market. The author is much better known for his New York-set novel, Netherland.

I excluded a lot of books without hesitation, but I will note two here that gave me a moment or two’s pause for thought. Omar Saif Ghobash, the author of Letters to a Young Muslim, is a senior UAE diplomat; but the book is written from the vantage point of the Emirati embassy in Moscow, and also apparently has a global scope in its content, so I don’t think it qualifies under my criteria. And Arabian Sands, by Wifred Thesiger, has troubled me before (see Saudi Arabia and Yemen) but unfortunately it seems to be split between several countries without being more than 50% in any one of them (and anyway more in Oman than in the UAE).

Coming next: Honduras, Cuba, Tajikistan and then Papua New Guinea.

The best known books set in each country: the Dominican Republic

Posted on 11 January 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
In the Time of the Butterflies	Julia Alvarez	79,101	4,961
Clap When You Land	Elizabeth Acevedo	109,418	1,869
The Feast of the Goat	Mario Vargas Llosa	42,462	3,596
The Farming of Bones	Edwidge Danticat	9,907	1,510
Before We Were Free	Julia Alvarez	9,474	1,427
Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship	Robert Kurson	11,821	591
The Cemetery of Untold Stories	Julia Alvarez	15,639	439
The Color of My Words	Lynn Joseph	2,109	650

The dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, from 1930 to 1961, looms large over the Dominican Republic. This week’s winner, In the Time of the Butterflies, is about the four Mirabal sisters, who fought back against the regime, which then killed three of them. It has been adapted into a film produced by and starring Selma Hayek. The Feast of the Goat is about the assassination of Trujillo in 1961. The Farming of Bones is about the Trujillo regime’s 1937 Parsley massacre of tens of thousands of resident Haitians. Before We Were Free is set at the end of Trujillo rule in 1960-61. The Cemetery of Untold Stories is about a writer in the 2020s who is researching the life of one of Trujillo’s wives. The Color of My Words is also set during the Trujillo regime, though as far as I know the precise date is not specified.

The other constant in the literature of the Dominican Republic is the relationship with the United States, and in particular the emigrant experience. This week’s Goodreads winner, Clap When You Land, is about two girls, one in the Dominican Republic and one in New York, who discover that they have the same father when he suddenly dies.

Most of the books by Dominican writers about the emigrant experience are set mainly in the USA. I disqualified no less than sixteen books for that reason – six more by Julia Alvarez, four by Junot Diaz (including The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao), and two by Angie Cruz, another two by Elizabeth Acevedo, and two by other writers. I also disqualified Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys, which is set in Jamaica, and Collapse, by Jared Diamond, whose remit is worldwide.

Although Pirate Hunters is set off the coast of the Dominican Republic rather than on the country’s land territory, it seems to be close enough to the shore to qualify for the list by my criteria.

Next week’s country is the United Arab Emirates, which provides a challenge to my research strategy, followed by a return to Latin America for Honduras and Cuba, and then over to Central Asia for Tajikistan.

The best known books set in each country: Jordan

Posted on 4 January 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Jordan under today’s boundaries.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Appointment with Death	Agatha Christie	68,580	4,513
Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life	Queen Noor	10,227	1,459
Mrs. Pollifax, Innocent Tourist	Dorothy Gilman	4,792	859
Married to a Bedouin	Marguerite van Geldermalsen	3,786	261
Forbidden Love / Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day Jordan	Norma Khouri	1,688	313
Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril	Abdullah II of Jordan	935	169
Fencing with the King	Diana Abu-Jaber	1,088	83
Pillars of Salt	Fadia Faqir	710	110

Starting the year with a colonial adventure, in which Poirot is summoned to the rose-red city of Petra to solve the murder of a tourist. Agatha Christie also featured on the lists for Syria, Morocco and Iraq (twice), and topped the Egypt chart, though I disqualified her from Zimbabwe.

It is striking how many books on the list are about foreign women encountering Jordan. Queen Noor is an American who married a Jordanian in 1978, Marguerite van Geldermalsen is a New Zealander who also married a (less prominent) Jordanian in 1978, Norma Khouri is another American (and her supposedly factual book was exposed as a hoax), and Diana Abu-Jaber was also born and brought up in America to a Jordanian family. The fictional Mrs Pollifax is an American secret agent pretending to be a tourist.

The top author on the list who is actually from Jordan is King Abdullah II, and the top woman author from Jordan (given my caveats about the others) is Fadia Faqir.

If I have counted correctly, this is the seventh country where seven out of eight books are by women, following on from Côte d’Ivoire, Canada, South Korea, Kenya, the United Kingdom and Iran.

I disqualified all of Robert Jordan’s books, which are frequently tagged “jordan” by Goodreads and LibraryThing users. I also disqualified Six Days of War, by Michael Oren, because most of the then Jordanian territory where the 1967 war was fought is no longer regarded as Jordanian, including by the Jordanian government. There is additionally some confusion about other Middle Eastern countries, with books set in Syria and Lebanon (and possibly Saudi Arabia) popping up too.

Three of the next four countries will be Caribbean: we head to the Dominican Republic next week, then back to the Middle East for the U.A.E., then back over again for Honduras and Cuba.

The best known books set in each country: Belgium

Posted on 28 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Ending the year with my adopted home country. For those of you who are new to this, I’m going through every country in the world, trying to identify the best known books set there (or at least more than half set there).

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Villette	Charlotte Brontë	80,023	9,720
The Lady and the Unicorn	Tracy Chevalier	47,371	5,018
The Secret of the Unicorn	Hergé	18,003	2,252
The Seven Crystal Balls	Hergé	15,121	1,970
The Warm Hands of Ghosts	Katherine Arden	29,935	934
The Castafiore Emerald	Hergé	12,026	1,982
Hygiene and the Assassin	Amélie Nothomb	18,793	1,239
The Misfortunates	Dimitri Verhulst	15,232	989

(Note a couple of unicorns in there.)

There are a couple of these which aren’t explicitly set in Belgium, but I am allowing them for reasons that I will explain. This week’s winner, Villette, is set in the eponymous fictional city, capital of the small fictional country of Labassecour. But there can be no doubt in the minds of any informed reader that Villette is Brussels and Labassecour is Belgium. The protagonist comes to the city to teach in a girls’ school and has an unhappy romantic adventure; this is drawn from Charlotte Brontë’s own experience in the 1840s. In her first novel The Professor, published only after her death, she is more explicit about the setting and more lyrical:

Belgium! name unromantic and unpoetic, yet name that whenever uttered has in my ear a sound, in my heart an echo, such as no other assemblage of syllables, however sweet or classic, can produce. Belgium! I repeat the word, now as I sit alone near midnight.

The other book on the list where a bit of special pleading may be required is Amélie Nothomb’s first novel, Hygiene and the Assassin, in which a dying writer gives obnoxious interviews to journalists in his apartment. Most readers assume that the apartment is in Paris, but no explicit Parisian cue is given. On the other hand, I note the following passage (on page 37 of the English translation):

Il y a des publicités à n’en plus finir, surtout des publicités alimentaires. Je zappe de manière à me constituer la séquence publicitaire la plus longue du monde: avec les seize chaînes européennes, il est tout à fait possible, en zappant intelligemment d’avoir une demi-heure de réclames sans interruption. C’est un merveilleux opéra multilingue: le shampooing hollandais, les biscuits italiens, la lessive biologique allemande, le beurre français, etc. Je me régale.

There are endless amounts of commercials, primarily about food. I channel surf in order to put together the longest sequence of commercials on earth: with the sixteen European channels, it is perfectly feasible, if you surf intelligently, to get a full half-hour of uninterrupted commercials. It’s a marvelous multilingual opera: Dutch shampoo, Italian cookies, German organic washing powder, French butter, and so on. What a treat.

(Note that “to channel surf” in French is “zapper”.)

Now, I ask you, if you were a French person in France, would you identify French butter as such, in that way, fourth in a list of products from other countries? To adapt a line from Friends, in France they just call it ‘butter’. I think that the protagonist’s apartment is in Europe but not in France, and given Nothomb’s Belgian roots, it’s more likely to be in Belgium than anywhere else. Dutch shampoo is less likely to be found in Geneva or Lausanne; and we are told that the protagonist speaks no language other than French, which means that he cannot be from Luxembourg, where all schoolchildren are fluent in at least three languages before they leave elementary school.

I disqualified a lot of books this time. Top of the list were Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, and Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray, both of which have memorable passages set in Belgium but for much less than 50% of the book. I scratched my head for some time about I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman, but decided in the end that the blasted and desolate landscape in which her protagonist finds herself doesn’t really fit a Belgian setting, even post-apocalypse. King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild, was on my DR Congo list last year, because it is about Congo and what Belgians did there. I disqualified two of Amélie Nothomb’s other books, Fear and Loathing and The Character of Rain, because they are set in Japan. And Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memories of Hadrian has no connection with Belgium, apart from the birthplace of its author.

On top of that, I disqualified seventeen of the twenty classic Tintin books by Hergé because they are not set in Belgium. But The Secret of the Unicorn and The Seven Crystal Balls are; they are both first parts of two-part stories, where our hero and friends prepare at home for the adventures concluded respectively in Red Rackham’s Treasure (set at sea) and Prisoners of the Sun (set in Peru); and also The Castafiore Emerald, with all its eccentricities, is definitely set not just in Belgium but in Captain Haddock’s home, Marlinspike Manor.

When I did this calculation in 2015, I got much the same answer, though I’m also just going to note that The Warm Hands of Ghosts, by Katherine Arden, is scoring very well, especially on Goodreads, for a book that was only published last year.

Coming in 2026: Jordan, the Dominican Republic, the United Arab Emirates and Honduras.

The best known books set in each country: Haiti

Posted on 21 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Island Beneath the Sea	Isabel Allende	46,230	2,717
Breath, Eyes, Memory	Edwidge Danticat	31,110	3,114
The Comedians	Graham Greene	10,038	2,893
An Untamed State	Roxane Gay	19,695	1,053
Libertie	Kaitlyn Greenidge	15,751	857
Krik? Krak!	Edwidge Danticat	9,653	1,326
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution	C.L.R. James	7,433	1,676
The Kingdom of This World	Alejo Carpentier	8,185	1,355

Quite a close result at the top, with Isabelle Allende’s tale of slavery in Saint-Domingue in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Island Beneath the Sea, sufficiently in the lead on Goodreads to beat Edwidge Danticat’s best known novel, the coming of age story Breath, Eyes, Memory, which however had the lead on LibraryThing. I was not quite sure about Breath, Eyes, Memory, part of which is set in New York, but as far as I could tell the majority of it is on Danticat’s native island. Danticat has two books on this week’s list; Krik? Krak! is a short story collection.

I disqualified five books. Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder, is a biography of the doctor Paul Farmer, who worked also in Peru and Rwanda. Deadeye Dick, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., is told in flashback from the narrator’s later life in Haiti, but the setting of the majority of it is the USA. The Black Count, by Tom Reiss, is about the father of Alexandre Dumas, who was born in Saint-Domingue but moved to Paris as a teenager. American Street, by Ibi Zoboi, is about the immigrant experience in the USA. And The Farming of Bones, by Edwidge Danticat again, is set across the border in the Dominican Republic.

This was one of the easier countries to rank – on the whole, users of LibraryThing and Goodreads are in agreement about which books are relevant to Haiti.

I’ll end the year next week with my adopted home country, Belgium, and will start 2026 with Jordan; followed by Haiti’s neighbour, the Dominican Republic, and then the United Arab Emirates.

The best known books set in each country: South Sudan

Posted on 14 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
A Long Walk to Water	Linda Sue Park	101,897	4,876
They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan	Benson Deng, Alephonsion Deng, Benjamin Ajak and Judy A. Bernstein	10,305	817
Acts of Faith	Philip Caputo	1,865	626
Emma’s War	Deborah Scroggins	2,103	303
War Child: A Child Soldier’s Story	Emmanuel Jal	2,158	218
War Brothers: The Graphic Novel	Sharon E. McKay	1,596	168
Songs of a War Boy	Deng Thiak Adut	1,686	72
Nya’s Long Walk: A Step at a Time	Linda Sue Park	568	136

I mentioned under Sudan that I had excluded four books which scored highly on both LT and GR, but appeared to be set in what is now South Sudan: A Long Walk to Water, by Linda Sue Park; They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky, by Benson Deng, Alephonsion Deng, Benjamin Ajak and Judy A. Bernstein; Acts of Faith, by Philip Caputo; and Emma’s War, by Deborah Scroggins. I checked as far as I could, and all four of those seem to indeed be set mainly south of the line.

I note that there is a character in the novel Acts of Faith who is very obviously based on Emma McCune, the subject of the biography Emma’s War. I never met her myself, but I know many people who did, and she clearly left her mark. If she had lived, she would be turning 62 in a few weeks’ time, and she would have been all over the political processes of the last thirty years, probably for better rather than worse.

Five of the other six books are about the terrible experiences of the Lost Boys, child soldiers conscripted into the Sudanese war in the 1990s, who then managed to escape to other countries and rebuild their lives. This week’s winner, A Long Walk to Water, combines such a story with the story of a girl in a tribal village in South Sudan who must keep her family supplied with water; her story on its own is the eighth of the books listed here.

I disqualified loads of books, starting with What is the What by Dave Eggers, another book about one of the Lost Boys, but as far as I can tell mainly set after the protagonist gets out of his home country. Also, some people seem to confuse South Sudan with South Africa when tagging their book collections.

The top book by a South Sudanese woman is Hopeless Kingdom, by Kgshak Akec, but it is mainly about the emigration experience. A near miss in several respects is Ghost Country, by Fatin Abbas, which is set in a fictional version of the disputed Abyei and whose author is from Khartoum.

This is the last African country for a while, and the last African country on the list of the six that I have actually visited myself. We’ll leap across the Atlantic next to Haiti, then back this side for Belgium, then Jordan, then back over again to Haiti’s neighbour the Dominican Republic.

The best known books set in each country: Tunisia

Posted on 7 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Salammbô	Gustave Flaubert	6,550	2,059
Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization	Richard Miles	4,664	938
The Ardent Swarm	Yamen Manai	8,352	315
The Tremor of Forgery	Patricia Highsmith	2,833	622
Benny and Omar	Eoin Colfer	895	301
The African Quest	Lyn Hamilton	475	204
The Italian	Shukrī Mabkhoūt	2,737	26
The Pillar of Salt	Albert Memmi	459	155

Well, there are a couple of names on that list who I did not expect to see. But it’s a fair cop; both Patricia Highsmith and Eoin Colfer have put their protagonists in Tunisia for the whole book.

There is a real schism between LibraryThing and Goodreads here. Normally the ratio between the two is somewhere around ten or twenty GR raters for every LT user. But the books above by non-Tunisian writers score surprisingly well on LT – the ratio varies from 2.3 (The African Quest) to 5.0 (Carthage Must Be Destroyed). And a phenomenon I had previously observed, that Goodreads scores very well among Arabic speakers and LibraryThing very poorly, is dramatically illustrated here: The Italian, by Shukrī Mabkhoūt, has over a hundred times as many raters on GR as owners on LT.

This week’s winner is Salammbô, a historical novel by Gustave Flaubert set around 140 BCE during one of the wars between Rome and Carthage. It was his next novel after Madame Bovary and was followed by Sentimental Education. It sounds a bit melodramatic but was clearly popular enough at the time, and indeed now.

This week’s Goodreads winner is a 2017 novel, The Ardent Swarm (originally L’Amas ardent), by Yamen Manai, a Tunisian writer based in Paris. It is about a rural bee-keeper who goes to the city looking for answers to what is happening to his hives, and finds revolution in full flow when he gets there. It is only 174 pages and may well be worth a look.

I hesitated a bit about the eligibility of Carthage Must Be Destroyed, by Richard Miles, as it clearly covers the whole Carthaginian Empire, which at its peak covered all of North Africa apart from Egypt and chunks of Spain, Corsica, Sicily and Malta. But I decided in the end that it probably focuses enough on the territory which is now in Tunisia to be eligible.

I disqualified fourteen books for various reasons, too many to list them all. The only one I’m going to call attention to is The Muqaddimah, by the fourteenth-century writer Ibn Khaldūn, full name Abū Zayd ‘Abdu r-Rahman bin Muhammad bin Khaldūn Al-Hadrami, the introduction to his seventeen-volume history of the world, which is pioneering in its approach to historical verification and to sociology.

Next up is South Sudan, the last African country for a while, and also the first country that I have actually visited since the Netherlands back in September. After that will come Haiti, lovely Belgium and then Jordan.

The best known books set in each country: Bolivia

Posted on 30 November 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Women Talking	Miriam Toews	66,544	1,745
Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine, and South America’s Strangest Jail	Rusty Young	30,320	559
Woven in Moonlight	Isabel Ibañez	10,433	668
The Puma Years	Laura Coleman	14,246	305
The Bolivian Diary	Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara	3,074	927
Jungle: A Harrowing True Story of Survival	Yossi Ghinsberg	9,539	297
Into the Jungle	Erica Ferencik	4,161	211
I Am a Taxi	Deborah Ellis	1,414	177

There’s a real theme of jungle here, with a side-helping of capitalist exploitation. But this week’s winner is a 2018 novel about the women of a Christian cult village who discover that they are all being drugged and sexually assaulted in their sleep. The novel was adapted to become a 2022 film, which will have helped its visibility in the markets.

Isabel Ibañez, author of this week’s runner-up, identifies as a Bolivian writer, born in the USA to Bolivian parents. Rodrigo Hasbún was the highest scoring writer actually born in Bolivia; his Affections just missed the cut, Liliana Colanzi’s You Glow in the Dark being a bit further down.

I disqualified seven books. The Lost City of Z, by David Grann, is mainly set in Brazil. The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein, has a global remit. What the River Knows, by Isabel Ibañez again, has a Bolivian protagonist but is set in Egypt. From Here to Eternity, by Caitlin Doughty, has a global scope. Only about a quarter of Purity, by Jonathan Franzen, is set in Bolivia, the rest in Germany and the USA. The Old Patagonian Express, by Paul Theroux, covers the whole region. And Bolívar, by Marie Arana, also covers a wider region.

Back to Africa for the next two weeks, with Tunisia and South Sudan, and then we go elsewhere, with Haiti and then good old Belgium.

The best known books set in each country: Burundi

Posted on 23 November 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Small Country	Gaël Faye	28,162	682
Baho!	Roland Rugero	150	37
The True Sources of the Nile	Sarah Stone	101	44
The Night the Angels Came: Miracles Of Protection And Provision In Burundi	Chrissie Chapman	137	19
The Tears of a Man Flow Inward: Growing Up in the Civil War in Burundi	Pacifique Irankunda	171	10
Life after Violence: A People’s Story of Burundi	Peter Uvin	60	22
Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide	René Lemarchand	30	31
From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi: Our Embassy Years during Genocide	Robert Krueger	36	19

This week’s winner is by Gaël Faye, who identifies himself as French-Rwandan, though in fact he grew up in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, and Small Country reflects his experiences there (though we are warned not to take it as autobiography).

I cannot remember a case where there was such a big gap between the winner and the rest of the field.

Roland Rugero, the author of this week’s runner-up, does identify as Burundian, and Baho! is set in a fictional Burundian village. The top book set in Burundi by a women from Burundi is Weep Not, Refugee, by Marie-Therese Toyi.

I was not sure about the setting of The True Sources of the Nile, by Sarah Stone, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt. I also looked closely at The Chimpanzee Whisperer, by Stany Nyandwi, and in the end decided that probably less than half of it is set in the author’s homeland of Burundi.

I disqualified dozens of books here. There is a huge number of books which have been given the ‘Burundi’ tag on either Goodreads, LibraryThing or both, but have less than 50% (usually much less than 50%) set there.

There is for two slightly different reasons. The first is that there are a lot of books about Africa, or Central Africa, that touch on Burundi but only as a minor element of a bigger picture. The second is that Burundi’s awful conflict of the 1990s tends to get lumped in with the even more awful conflict in Rwanda next door, which usually gets top billing. Even Small Country, this week’s winner, has a Rwandan protagonist.

Also I noted Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder, last week as a book which is more about Burundi than Rwanda. This is true, but it is mainly set in the USA.

Next week we move away from Africa, to Bolivia, and then back again to Tunisia and South Sudan, but they will be the last African countries for a while; in four weeks time we come to Haiti.

The best known books set in each country: Rwanda

Posted on 16 November 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families	Philip Gourevitch	36,385	3,747
Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust	Immaculée Ilibagiza	47,158	2,003
Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda	Roméo Dallaire	13,713	1,823
Gorillas in the Mist	Dian Fossey	21,128	1,146
Baking Cakes in Kigali	Gaile Parkin	6,881	806
An Ordinary Man: An Autobiography	Paul Rusesabagina	6,762	788
Running the Rift	Naomi Benaron	7,210	598
A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali	Gil Courtemanche	4,522	770

As with some other countries, there is one dominant historical event in Rwanda: the genocide of 1994. Six of the above eight books are directly about it, the top two being non-fiction accounts: Philip Gourevitch’s prize-winning account, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, and Immaculée Ilibagiza’s first person story of how her faith helped to get her through those dreadful days, Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust.

Immaculée Ilibagiza is the top Rwandan writer on the list; Paul Rusesabagina is also Rwandan, though his autobiography was ghost-written by Tom Zoellner. The top fiction book set in Rwanda by a Rwandan writer is Our Lady of the Nile, by Scholastique Mukasonga.

It is easy to forget that other things have happened in Rwanda, but in fact it was also the location of Dian Fossey’s work, recounted in her own Gorillas in the Mist, later adapted as a film starring Sigourney Weaver. I should also add that Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin looks at the country having moved on, with the genocide in the background but receding.

I disqualified eight books this week. Collapse, by Jared M. Diamond, and A Problem from Hell, by Samantha Power, take Rwanda as a case study in their wider arguments. Say You’re One of Them (fiction), by Uwem Akpan, and The Shadow of the Sun (non-fiction), by Ryszard Kapuściński, look at Africa more broadly including sections set in Rwanda. The Girl Who Smiled Beads, by Clemantine Wamariya, and Pagan Babies, by Elmore Leonard (an author who I did not expect to be mentioning in this context), have substantial chunks of the narrative set in Rwanda but they seem to amount to less than half of each book. And finally, Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder, and Small Country, by Gaël Faye, are about Burundi rather than Rwanda.

Speaking of Burundi, it’s up next, followed by a step away from Africa to Bolivia, and then back again to Tunisia and South Sudan.

The best known books set in each country: Benin

Posted on 9 November 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
The Viceroy of Ouidah	Bruce Chatwin	1,409	768
It Takes a Village	Jane Cowen-Fletcher	153	948
Instruments of Darkness	Robert Wilson	490	257
A Darkening Stain	Robert Wilson	275	112
Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey	Stanley B. Alpern	123	69
The Dahomean	Frank Yerby	109	55
Spirit Rising: My Life, My Music	Angelique Kidjo	156	21
The Hand of Iman	Ryad Assani-Razaki	119	15

This week’s winner, The Viceroy of Ouidah, is a 1980 novel about a European slave trader who builds a life for himself in West Africa; it was filmed by Werner Herzog as Cobra Verde, starring Klaus Kinski.

This week’s LibraryThing winner, It Takes a Village, has been overshadowed by the book of the same title published two years later by Hillary Clinton. It is a 1994 children’s book about living in a village in Benin and being looked after by the neighbours.

Of the listed authors, Angelique Kidjo is from Benin; I am not quite sure how much of her autobiography is set there, but I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt. Ryad Assani-Razaki is also from Benin, and my sources seem to agree that The Hand of Iman (original French title just Iman) is set there.

I disqualified a lot of books. Some are about the Benin Bronzes, which however originated in the historical Kingdom of Benin, in what is now Nigeria.

There are also a lot of books about slavery with the ‘benin’ tag in both systems; these however tend to concentrate on the protagonists’ lives after they left West Africa. It’s not at all certain that Olaudah Equiano, the most celebrated example, was even from what’s now Benin (though personally I’m pretty sure he was from West Africa). It seems more likely for Cudjoe Lewis / Oluale Kossola.

The protagonist of the Bruce Medway thrillers by Robert Wilson lives in Benin. I was sufficiently sure of Instruments of Darkness and A Darkening Stain to list them above; I wasn’t quite so sure of the third novel in the series, Blood is Dirt.

Coming next: Rwanda, Burundi, a step away from Africa to Bolivia and a step back again to Tunisia.

The best known books set in each country: Guinea-Conakry

Posted on 2 November 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
The African Child (aka The Dark Child)	Camara Laye	2,527	758
The Radiance of the King	Camara Laye	787	378
The Hanged Man of Conakry	Jean-Christophe Rufin	1,065	103
The King of Kahel	Tierno Monénembo	247	73
A Dream of Africa	Camara Laye	30	32

The pickings were very thin this week. I disqualified dozens of books which had nothing to do with the Republic of Guinea, often called Guinea-Conakry to try and minimise confusion with the other possibilities. The data were badly contaminated by references to Papua New Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and Equatorial Guinea (all of which are different countries from each other and from Guinea-Conakry), also confusion with Guiana, and Guinea pigs.

This week’s winner, eventually, is an autobiographical memoir by Guinea’s most famous writer, Camara Laye (Camara is his family name, Laye his given name) about growing up in central Guinea. Two of the other four books on the list are by him as well.

With a slightly heavy heart I disqualified Little Brother: A Refugee’s Story, by Ibrahima Balde and Amets Arzallus Antia, because as far as I can tell from reviews the protagonist leaves Guinea before the half-way point of the book. I was also not sure about The Guardian of the Word, by Camara Laye, which retells part of the Sundiata epic – most of which takes place in what is now Mali, but some in what is now Guinea.

Bubbling under I was pleased to see two books by my former colleague Mike McGovern, Unmasking the State: Making Guinea Modern and A Socialist Peace?: Explaining the Absence of War in an African Country.

Coming next: Benin, Rwanda, Burundi and a step away from Africa to Bolivia.

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