The best known books set in each country: Oman

Posted on 27 September 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Oman is the state at the eastern end of the Arabian Peninsula, with the UAE to the northwest, Saudi Arabia to the west, Yemen to the southwest and the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Oman, both part of the extended Indian Ocean, to the east. It is the oldest independet state in the Arab World, the locals having expelled the Portuguese in the 17th century and then established an empire down the coast of Africa to Zanzibar. (As I always say, the Indian Ocean is a corridor, not a barrier.)

It came under strong British influence in the mid-20th century, most notably when Sultan Said bin Taimur was overthrown by his son Sultan Qaboos bin Said in 1970. Said had ruled for 38 years, and Qaboos then ruled for almost 50 years until 2020, so this was not a volatile regime change. Qaboos had no children and nominated his cousin Haitham bin Tariq as his successor, and Haitham has ruled since 2020.

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 Liberia.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
Sandstorm	James Rollins	55,782	2,760	3,507
Celestial Bodies	Jokha Alharthi	18,335	739	3,385
The Turtle of Oman	Naomi Shihab Nye	2,581	473	565
The Zanzibar Wife	Deborah Rodriguez	2,493	86	221
Z miłości? To współczuję. Opowieści z Omanu	Agata Romaniuk	12,050	5	707
The Road To Ubar: Finding the Atlantis of the Sands	Nicholas Clapp	464	281	55
The English Girl	Katherine Webb	996	59	77
Silken Gazelles	Jokha Alharthi	653	23	86

This week’s winner, by a long way on Goodreads and LibraryThing and by a closer margin on StoryGraph, is Sandstorm, the first in the Sigma Force series of thrillers by James Rollins. I had hoped that it might be set mainly outside the country, but it seems that our heroes pursue the bad guys to the desert well before the half-way point of the book, so it qualified under my criteria.

Celestial Bodies, by Omani writer Jokha Alharthi, is about three Omani sisters and their unhappy marriages. Silken Gazelles, also on the list, is about two women coming to terms with the gap between tradition and modernity.

The Turtle of Oman is about a little boy whose family is about to emigrate to America, and his farewell to different places in the country.

The Zanzibar Wife is about three women, one American, one British and Zanzibari, getting to know each other in Oman.

Z miłości? To współczuję. Opowieści z Omanu is the second most popular book set in Oman on both Goodreads and StoryGraph, but has almost no owners on LibraryThing, which shows LT’s bias against certain countries, unfortunately. It is about Oman under the late years of Sultan Qaboos, as observed keenly by a Polish woman living there, and appears to be non-fiction. It has not been translated into English; the title means roughly, “For love? I’m so sorry: Stories from Oman”.

The Road To Ubar: Finding the Atlantis of the Sands is about the search for a lost Arab city in the desert of Oman, by the leader of the expedition. Sir Ranulph Fiennes, who was also on the expedition, has written a book about it as well, but it hasn’t had the same impact.

The English Girl is about a young archaeologist visiting 1950s Oman, where she meets her heroine and gets into trouble.

Including the StoryGraph numbers gained us Silken Gazelles at the cost of The Secret of the Sands by Sara Sheridan, a romantic thriller set in the 19th century.

Three books by Omani authors did very well on Goodreads, but are completely absent from StoryGraph, with two of them scoring in the low single figures on LibraryThing and the third absent there as well. They are Dilshad and The Garden by Bushra Khalfan, and Exile of the Water Diviner by Zahran Alqasmi, all of which appear to be set in Oman.

I disqualified a lot of books for not being set in Oman. The only one I have actually read is also the most popular on all three platforms – The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty, which was up for the Hugo in 2024, and whose heroine lives in a small village in what we would call Oman, but spends most fo the book travelling.

My only personal connection with Oman is that our dear family friend Matt Cummins, who died last May, worked there for several years in the 1990s. Apart from The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, I have no books on my shelves with much to say about it – Hourani’s History of the Arab Peoples is the closest.

Four of the next five countries will be European: Norway, Finland, a leap south to Mauretania, and then back again for Slovakia.

The best known books set in each country: Palestine

Posted on 20 September 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

For people who come across this page out of context: I have been doing a series of posts researching the best known book set in each country in the world, and this is the 119th country on my list. “Best known” is assessed by the attention paid to each book on three major book-logging platforms, Goodreads, LibraryThing and StoryGraph. “Set in” is assessed by my own desk research, as far as that is possible. “Country” is as defined in this list. So I do not need to hear views on whether or not a particular place is a country; someone else has made that call, and you can complain to them.

I have been doing brief pen-portraits of each country in recent weeks, but that seems unnecessary here. The international statistical definition of Palestine consists of the Gaza Strip, under Egyptian control from 1948 to 1967, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem (including the Old City), under Jordanian control from 1948 to 1967. Both have been under varying degrees of Israeli control and occupation ever since. The technicalities of this are, like so much else, disputed, but here I will do as I did with Israel and disqualify books unless more than 50% of them is set on the right side of the old Green Line.

See here for methodology, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph.

Again, as with Israel: 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 the purpose of this post. Otherwise it would have won this week’s list by a long way.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017	Rashid Khalidi	39,186	1,815	11,931
Mornings in Jenin	Susan Abulhawa	58,189	1,365	6,451
Against the Loveless World	Susan Abulhawa	34,056	547	10,466
Palestine	Joe Sacco	22,420	2,092	3,841
O Jerusalem	Laurie R. King	20,021	2,427	2,137
Jerusalem: The Biography	Simon Sebag Montefiore	13,951	2,803	1,117
Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City	Guy Delisle	17,792	925	2,174
Enter Ghost	Isabella Hammad	13,755	412	5,402

The geographical criteria have been particularly tricky to apply here, and I will accept correction if I have got any of the above wrong (or indeed if I have incorrectly disqualified any of the books I will mention below). I initially excluded The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine because a lot of it is set in Israel and a certain amount in Lebanon, but when I went back for a second look I realised that three solid chapters out of six cover mainly the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, and it’s (unsurprisingly) a repeating location for events described in the rest of the book. It was far ahead on StoryGraph and is this week’s overall winner. Khalidi has a Palestinian family background but was born in the USA.

Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa seems to be more than 50% set in the Jenin refugee camp and in East Jerusalem, though the opening chapters are set in Ein Hod which is now in Israel, and other parts of the book are set elsewhere again. It’s this week’s winner overall on LibraryThing. Susan Abulhawa is from a Palestinian family, but was herself born in Kuwait.

Again, as far as I can tell more than half of Abulhawa’s novel Against the Loveless World is set in the West Bank, though the framing narrative has the protagonist in an Israeli prison cell and the story starts in Kuwait and Jordan.

Joe Sacco’s Palestine is on my bookshelves waiting for me to read it. I expect that it will be his usual compelling journalistic account of being embedded in a society while also being alien to it.

O Jerusalem takes young detective Mary Russell and old detective Sherlock Holmes to Jerusalem in 1919, under the British Mandate. Given that the built up sections of the city were mainly in the East, I’m awarding it a place on the list.

Jerusalem: The Biography is a massive 688-page history book about the city, and again, given the location of the Old City with respect to the Green line, I’m including it on the list. It’s this week’s LibraryThing winner.

Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City is another graphic novel travelogue, set in the east of the city with excursions to the West Bank and Gaza, so I think it definitely counts.

Enter Ghost is about a British actress producing Hamlet in the West Bank. Isabelle Hammad has a Palestinian family background, but was born and brought up in the UK.

Including the StoryGraph numbers gained us Enter Ghost at the cost of On Palestine, by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé.

I disqualified several books which at first looked like they should qualify geographically but did not do so. These included:

Minor Detail, by Adania Shibli, which is about a Palestinian woman investigating a war crime perpetrated in 1948; however the crime itself took place in what is now Israel and so does most of her investigation, so it fails my test.

Apeirogon, by Colum McCann, seems to have a number of different settings, but none of them occupies 50% of the book.

The Lemon Tree, by Sandy Tolan, is about the successive inhabitants of a house in Ramla/Ramle, which is in Israel.

Men in the Sun, by Ghassan Kanafani, is about Palestinian men trying to get to Iraq across the desert, but most of it is set after they leave their home country.

This was a particularly difficult set of statistics to assemble, for fairly obvious reasons.

Next up are Oman, Finland, Norway and Mauretania.

The best known books set in each country: Central African Republic

Posted on 13 September 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

The Central African Republic is a landlocked country in western Central Africa. Its neighbors, going clockwise from the north, are Chad, Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo, and Cameroon.

Its history since independence from France in 1960 has been a grim cycle of authoritarian leaders coming to power either through elections or coups d’état and staying there. The most colourful of these was Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who declared himself emperor in 1976 but was overthrown in 1979.

The current president, Faustin-Archange Touadéra, has been in office since 2015. However he controls only part of the country; a civil war between the government and regional factions has been running since 2012. As with several other countries in the neighbourhood, the government has developed a close security relationship with Russia.

The CAR has one of the lowest Human Development Index ratings of any country in the world.

I did not know this before researching this post: the main language of the CAR is Sango, which is generally classified as a creole of Congo-group languages with substantial injections from French. French and Sango are the two official languages. There are over 80 ethnic groups.

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 the Central African Republic.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
Co-Wives, Co-Widows	Adrienne Yabouza	480	26	252
Batouala	René Maran	263	142	33
The Good News Must Go Out: Stories of God at Work in the Central African Republic African Republic	Rebecca Davis	246	188	20
Foreign Words	Vassilis Alexakis	179	49	10
Breakup: A Marriage in Wartime	Anjan Sundaram	111	15	20
Song from the Forest: My Life Among the Ba-Benjelle Pygmies	Louis Sarno	85	96	3
African Tales: Folklore of the Central African Republic	tr. Polly Strong, ill. Robert Wimer	36	22	15
State of Rebellion: Violence and Intervention in the Central African Republic	Louisa Lombard	48	11	10

The CAR’s leading contemporary writer is Adrienne Yabouza, and I’m glad to see her top this week’s list with Co-Wives, Co-Widows, about two women in a polygamous marriage whose husband dies. She writes in French; this is the only one of her novels which has been translated into English.

Batouala was written in 1921 by French-Guyanese writer René Maran; it’s about traditional life being disrupted by colonialism.

The Good News Must Go Out is a biography of mid-20th century American missionary Mrgaret Nicholl Laird. It is this week’s Goodreads winner (and would have been top overall without the StoryGraph ratings).

In Foreign Words, the Greek protagonist processes his grief at losing his father by going to the Central African Republic to learn Sango.

Breakup is about a Canadian war correspondent who discovers that the CAR conflict matters more too him than his family does.

Song from the Forest is an anthropological participant-observer account, where the researcher integrated into the tribe more than is usual.

African Tales is a collection of CAR folk tales in English translation.

State of Rebellion, published in 2016, covers the more recent war since it started in 2013.

I scratched my head about a couple of disqualifications. A Bend in the River, by V.S. Naipaul, is generally thought to be set in one of the Congos. Mrs. Pollifax and the Lion Killer is set in the fictional Ubangida, which at first sight resembles Ubangi-Sgari, the old name for the CAR; but apparently the fictional Ubangida is a desert county, while the real CAR is mostly savannah.

There are a couple of books about the Lord’s Resistance Army, but none of them seemed to me to be more than half set in the CAR. Adrienne Yabouza’s book The Magic Doll: A Children’s Book Inspired by African Art is about Ghanaian sculptures rather than her own country.

Including the StoryGraph numbers did not change the top eight, though they did change the winner as noted above.

I have no personal connection with the Central African Republic. The French photojournalist Camille Lepage, killed by militia in 2014 at the age of 26, was a friend of friends.

Next up are Palestine, Oman, Norway and Finland.

Twenty-first Century Blues, by Steve Walker; Last Exit, by Max Gladstone

Posted on 8 September 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter of Twenty-first Century Blues:

’Howdeedoodee! Chaffinch Chaffinch. Delegate 426. Chehee!’

I was originally attracted to this by the fact that part of it is set in 2024, when the central character accidentally takes over the UK, and there is a quirky 1990s radio series attached to it. The book, however, has way too many dick jokes to be readable and I put it down after fifty pages. I will not bother with the sequel, Twenty-second Century Blues, which is also on my shelves.

Twenty-First Century Blues was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next after that is Blake’s 7: Scorpio Attack, by Trevor Hoyle.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Last Exit is:

She did not want to talk to June.

Crazy kids on a magical quest of some kind through alternate versions of America. I’m afraid that when I picked it up after having laid it aside for a couple of days, I could not remember what exactly was going on or why we were supposed to care about the plot, so I stopped reading at page 500 of 640. You can get Last Exit here.

Last Exit was my top unread book acquired in 2023. Next on that pile is Silent Earth, by Dave Goulson.

The best known books set in each country: Liberia

Posted on 6 September 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Liberia is on the west coast of Africa. Its neighbors are Sierra Leone to the northwest, Guinea-Conakry to the north and Côte d’Ivoire to the east, with the ocen to the south and west. Its history is rather unusual: it was set up as a kind of reverse colony for freed slaves from the United States, and has been functionally independent since 1847, recognized by the USA and other countries since 1862. Indigenous Liberians got a raw deal from this settlement, and the elected government was overthrown in a coup in 1980. Two civil wars followed, from 1989 to 1997 and from 1999 to 2003. The 2005 elections brought Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first woman president, to power for the first of two six-year terms. She was succeeded in the 2017 election by well-known football player George Weah, who then lost his bid for re-election in 2023 by a margin of less than 1.3% to Joseph Boakai, who had been Sirleaf’s vice-president.

Liberia remains a country with a low Human Development Index, though still ahead of its neighbors Guinea and Sierra Leone. The main industry is subsistence agriculture. Its major exports are gold, iron ore, cacao and rubber, and it also has the second biggest maritime registry in the world after Panama. The lingua franca is English, and the overwhelming religious tradition is Protestant. The largest indigenous ethnic group are the Kpelle, but they are only 20% of the population.

Liberia has not touched my own life and career much. When I was a PhD student in Belfast, the head of the social anthropology department was Elizabeth Tonkin, who was an expert on Liberian society and culture. Later on I worked alongside the late great Stephen Ellis, whose view on Liberia were controversial but heartfelt. I did have the opportunity to ask both about Liberia, and listened in awestruck silence to what they told me. I also encountered Ellen Johnson Sirleaf at a couple of International Crisis Group board meetings just before she was elected president, but was too overawed to talk to her.

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 Liberia.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
She Would Be King	Wayétu Moore	7,495	644	2,826
The House at Sugar Beach	Helene Cooper	8,118	814	617
Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War	Leymah Gbowee	4,361	312	629
The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir	Wayétu Moore	3,175	229	846
The Darling	Russell Banks	2,656	861	203
Allah Is Not Obliged	Ahmadou Kourouma	2,576	449	340
Journey Without Maps	Graham Greene	1,889	837	135
This Child Will Be Great: Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa’s First Woman President	Ellen Johnson Sirleaf	1,997	293	163

The top writer this week is a Liberian woman, Wayétu Moore, whose novel She Would Be King is a magical realist tale set early in Liberia’s history. Her The Dragons, the Giant, the Women is an autobiography, and I think the majority of it is set in Liberia before her family fled the civil wars.

The House at Sugar Beach is also an autobiography, about how Helene Cooper’s family was disrupted by the 1980 coup. She is now the Pentagon correspondent for The New York Times. This was the winner this week on both Goodreads and LibraryThing, but Wayétu Moore seems to have scored big time with StoryGraph users.

Mighty be Our Powers is the story of how Leymah Gbowee built a women’s peace movement to end the civil war, and won the Nobel Peace Prize for it alongside Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

The Darling is about an American woman who gets sucked into Liberian politics in the 1970s and 1980s.

Allah Is Not Obliged is about a Guinean boy who is recruited as a child soldier in the Liberian civil war.

Journey Without Maps tells the story of Graham Greene’s walk across Liberia in 1936 with his cousin (who wrote her own book about it).

This Child Will Be Great is another autobiography, this time by the president herself.

Including the StoryGraph numbers did not change the top eight, though it did rocket She Would Be King to the top of the list.

I had no tough disqualification decisions this week. I hesitated a bit about both The Dragons, the Giant, the Women and Allah Is Not Obliged, but in the end I think more than half of both is set in the country.

Very few of the books on my shelves have much to say about Liberia. I think there is half a chapter in Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures), by Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlethwait, and Andrew Thomson.

Next up are the Central African Republic and Palestine, followed by Oman and Norway.

The best known books set in each country: Lebanon

Posted on 30 August 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Lebanon sits at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, with Syria to the east and north, and Israel to the south. It is an ancient centre of civilization and culture, and was part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries. It was established as a Christian-ruled protectorate in the nineteenth century and was then ruled by France from after the First World War until 1946. Its people mainly speak Arabic. It is believed that about a third of the population are respectively Shia, Sunni and various Christian denominations, with also an influential minority of the local Druze faith.

I have never been to Lebanon myself, though I love the food. It has a tragic recent history: a power-sharing arrangement between politicians of various Christian and Muslim traditions lasted until 1976, but proved unable to protect the country from internal instability and external attacks. The massive explosion at the docks in Beirut in 2020 (in which a friend of mine was injured) seemed indicative of the failure of the country’s governance.

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 Lebanon.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
An Unnecessary Woman	Rabih Alameddine	14,652	1,465	2,462
The Broken Wings	Kahlil Gibran	29,451	684	2,078
The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)	Rabih Alameddine	13,463	327	2,571
The Arsonists’ City	Hala Alyan	8,482	249	2,622
The Hakawati	Rabih Alameddine	4,660	1,008	701
The Gabriel Hounds	Mary Stewart	5,727	1,172	448
The Rock of Tanios	Amin Maalouf	8,446	684	353
A Game for Swallows: To Die, to Leave, to Return	Zeina Abirached	4,878	373	1,080

As sometimes happens, the three systems have three different winners. The LibraryThing winner, also this week’s overall winner, is An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine, about a widow in Beirut with few social contacts but a rich inner life. Alameddine was born in Jordan and partly grew up in Kuwait; but he identifies as Lebanese.

He has two other books in the table. The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), which came out only last year, is about growing up and living in Lebanon over the last sixty years. The Hakawati is about a Lebanese man returning from America to be at his father’s deathbed.

I disqualified two of Khalil Gibran’s best known books, The Prophet and The Madman, because neither is sufficiently moored in real-world geography for me to allow them as set in Lebanon. However, The Broken Wings, this week’s Goodreads winner, is definitely set in Beirut.

The Arsonists’ City, this week’s StoryGraph winner, is about a Lebanese family who try emigrating to the USA and find it doesn’t work. As far as I can tell the US sections amount to less than half of the book. It owes its place on the list to the StoryGraph numbers; otherwise it would have slipped off the end.

I was surprised to see Mary Stewart’s name pop up here. The Gabriel Hounds, set in the 1960s, is about two British cousins who visit their mysterious great-aunt in the Lebanese mountains. It sounds like a lot of fun.

Amin Malouf is probably the best known Lebanese writer, but few of his books are actually set there. I disqualified his Samarkand, Leo Africanus, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, and Ports of Call before ending up with The Rock of Tanios, a novel set in Lebanon in the 1880s.

A Game for Swallows: To Die, to Leave, to Return also owes its place on the list to strong StoryGraph numbers. It is a graphic novel about life in Beirut. Zeina Abirached is the top Lebanese woman writer on the list (Hala Alyan identifies as Palestinian, and Mary Stewart of course was British).

The two books which fell off the list due to insufficiently strong StoryGraph numbers were De Niro’s Game, by Rawi Hage, and The Disoriented by Amin Maalouf.

I have already noted a number of disqualifications. The only other one that I scratched my head about was From Beirut to Jerusalem, by Thomas Friedman, which is evenly split between Lebanon and Israel/Palestine – except that one of the Lebanon chapters is actually set in Syria, which must sink the strictly Lebanese part to below 50%.

The Middle East is not my area of expertise and I own few books with anything much about Lebanon. The one that I love is The Twenty-Two Letters by Clive King, about a boy who invents the alphabet in the city now known as Byblos on the Lebanese coast in about 1600 BC, though I don’t think it would qualify for my list even if it was better known, as much of the story concerns the journeys of the protagonist and his brothers elsewhere in the Levant. Clive King wrote it while working for the British Council in Beirut. His best known book is Stig of the Dump.

The other book almost entirely set in Lebanon that I used to own, but cannot now find on my shelves, is An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan, his account of being held hostage by Islamic Jihad from 1986 to 1990, and his friendship with fellow hostage John McCarthy. It won the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize.

Coming next are three more conflict-riven countries, Liberia, the Central African Republic and Palestine, followed by Oman.

The best known books set in each country: Singapore

Posted on 23 August 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Singapore is a city-state on an island off the southern end of the Malay peninsula. Famously established by Stamford Raffles as a British port in 1819, it was actually under British rule for less than a century, from 1867 to 1963, with also several years of Japanese occupation during the second world war. For less than two years after the end of British rule, Singapore was one of the states in the federation of Malaysia, but declared independence on its own from 1965.

The People’s Action Party has been in power since before independence, regularly winning huge majorities in the legislature. Unlike most single-party states, Singapore has a strong market economy and a reputation for very low levels of corruption. Singapore has one of the highest PPP-adjusted GDP per capital numbers of any country in the world, certainly the highest in Asia (other competitors include Luxembourg and Liechtenstein).

Its official languages are English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil. I don’t have a lot of personal knowledge of it. It’s a constant reference point for my grandmother during the years she lived in Penang (1927-1931), which would have been just after Singapore eclipsed Penang as the most populous Chinese city outside China. I have been friendly with the contemporary sf writer Neon Yang since our Livejournal days.

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 Singapore.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
Crazy Rich Asians	Kevin Kwan	559,748	7,372	91,168
Rich People Problems	Kevin Kwan	187,952	2,788	34,489
King Rat	James Clavell	45,455	3,196	2,100
Last Tang Standing	Lauren Ho	18,080	281	4,553
How We Disappeared	Jing-Jing Lee	12,315	326	2,670
Sister Snake	Amanda Lee Koe	5,329	147	2,279
Soy Sauce for Beginners	Kirstin Chen	8,034	198	1,066
The Original Daughter	Jemimah Wei	7,333	163	1,128

As with Denmark last week, people are generally pretty clear about which books are and aren’t set in Singapore. The clear winners are the first and third books in the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy, about a young American woman’s culture shock encountering her boyfriend’s family (her in-laws in later books). The second book of the three, China Rich Girlfriend, is set in China as you might guess from the title. The writer, Kevin Kwan, was born in Singapore but has lived in the USA since he was 11.

King Rat was James Clavell’s first novel and is based on his experiences in a Japanese prison camp in Singapore during the second world war.

Last Tang Standing is a romance novel about the last unmarried woman in a large Singapore family. The author, Lauren Ho, has lived in Singapore for many years but describes herself as originally from Malaysia.

How We Disappeared is a novel about the Japanese occupation (and its penances two generations later). Jing-Jing Lee is the top woman writer from Singapore on this list. (The other three books below are also by Singaporean women.)

Sister Snake is about two women born as snakes in ancient China who live in today’s Singapore.

Soy Sauce for Beginners is about a Singaporean woman who moves home from America to run the family soy sauce business.

The Original Daughter is again about two sisters making their way in contemporary Singaporean society, though I don’t think either of them is secretly a snake.

Including the StoryGraph numbers made a bigger change than usual, bringing on the bottom three and losing Snake Agent, by Liz Williams, and two books by men, The Singapore Grip by J.G. Farrell and the autobiographical From Third World to First by the country’s long time leader, Lee Kuan Yew.

I disqualified only three books for being insufficiently set in Singapore: China Rich Girlfriend as noted above, Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal, which is set in London, and my friend Neon Yang’s fantasy novella The Black Tides of Heaven.

Coming next: Lebanon, Liberia, the Central African Republic and the State of Palestine.

The best known books set in each country: Denmark

Posted on 16 August 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Denmark is in Northern Europe, with a land border with Germany to the south (adjusted after the first world war) and a very close sea border with Sweden to the northeast. It has been a recognised state for almost 1100 years, and historically at different times controlled Sweden, Norway, Estonia, Iceland, New Jersey, what are now the US Virgin Islands, chunks of England and Germany, and is still the sovereign power over Greenland and the Faroe Islands. Fans of politics will know the TV show Borgen, based on a slightly alternate reality where Margrethe Vestager (or someone rather like her) becomes prime minister.

Danish is one of the northern Germanic languages, related to English, Dutch and German, more closely to Swedish and even more closely to Norwegian, which only became a separate literary language in the nineteenth century.

I have only been to Denmark a couple of times, though I have many Danish contacts – in particular, I was friendly with Uffe Ellemann Jensen, the former foreign minister who missed out on becoming prime minister in 1998 by 85 votes. In my 27 years in Brussels, I have always found Danish officials (and other Danish people) easy to engage with. So it’s a place I have positive feelings 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 the current boundaries of Denmark.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
Hamlet	William Shakespeare	1,081,659	37,487	116,575
Number the Stars	Lois Lowry	633,464	22,154	51,186
Beowulf		354,096	29,424	41,910
The Little Book of Hygge	Meik Wiking	116,858	2,315	18,324
The Keeper of Lost Causes	Jussi Adler-Olsen	97,246	4,165	8,001
The Complete Fairy Tales	Hans Christian Andersen	108,877	2,866	6,326
Smilla’s Sense of Snow	Peter Høeg	53,252	7,938	4,620
The Chestnut Man	Søren Sveistrup	90,469	1,694	12,689

The top three here were also the top three, in the same order, when I crunched these numbers in 2015, and the other books I found then also feature in the above list.

Hamlet is Shakespeare’s best known play, and it is very specifically set in Denmark. We had the Shakespeare effect before for Italy, and I haven’t crunched the numbers yet, but I expect the same for Cyprus.

Number the Stars is a novel about a Jewish girl in hiding during the Holocaust. Some of it is set in Sweden, but the majority in Denmark.

More than half of Beowulf is explicitly set in Denmark. Hrothgar is the king of the Danes and Heorot is his palace.

The Little Book of Hygge is about good living, firmly set in Danish culture and habits.

The Keeper of Lost Causes aka Mercy (originally Kvinden i buret, “The Woman in the Cage”) is the first in a series of crime novels featuring Department Q of the Copenhagen police.

I hesitated for a moment or two over Hans Christian Andersen’s Complete Fairy Tales, but actually the majority of them have pretty clear Danish settings.

Smilla’s Sense of Snow aka Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (the latter is closer to the original Danish title, Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne) is another crime novel, about the death of a Greenlandic boy and the Greenlandic roots of the woman who investigates it.

The Chestnut Man is another crime novel.

For once, I did not have to disqualify any books here; the top eight tagged as ‘denmark’ on the various sites are the eight listed above. However that’s only because I included the StoryGraph numbers; without them, two books which I would have disqualified were ahead of The Chestnut Man: Out of Africa by ‘Isak Dinesen’ (set in Kenya) and Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard (set in Biblical Palestine).

Danish women writers bubble under on my calculations. Karen Blixen (‘Isak Dinesen’) has already been mentioned. The Employees by Olga Ravn is set in outer space. On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle is set in France. The top book by a Danish woman writer (probably) set in Denmark is Janne Teller’s existential teen story, Nothing.

There’s not a lot of Denmark on my own shelves. Apart from Hamlet and Beowulf, I have Music and Silence, by Rose Tremain, and also read the amusing comic book Hr. Alting (Mr Everything), by Bente Olesen Nyström.

Coming next: Singapore, Lebanon, Liberia and the Central African Republic.

The best known books set in each country: El Salvador

Posted on 9 August 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

El Salvador is on the Pacific coast of Central America, with Guatemala to the northwest, Honduras to the northeast and the ocean to the south. Like all the other Spanish-speaking Latin American countries, it became independent from Spain in 1821 and independent from its neighbours in 1841. Its subsequent history was one of military coups and authoritarian governments, with heavy US interference towards the end of the 1931-79 military regime.

A bitter and brutal civil war between left-wing guerilla groups and the US-backed government ran from 1979 to 1992. Most notoriously, a government-backed death squad assassinated Archbishop Óscar Romero while he was saying Mass at a hospital chapel in 1980. 75,000 people (of a population then of roughly 5 million) are reckoned to have died in the conflict. The war ended with the Chapultepec Peace Accords which established a peaceful settlement that has lasted to this day.

The current government is led by President Nayib Bukele, elected in 2019 and re-elected in 2024. He has controversially cracked down on organised crime, reportedly at the expense of civil liberties, and adopted Bitcoin as legal currency. Having said that, El Salvador has the lowest income inequality of any Central American country. Its main exports are textiles, sugar and coffee.

The one personal contact I had with El Salvador was my colleague from NDI days, Gerardo Le Chevallier, who had been a negotiator for the government side in the process that led to the Chapultepec Accords. We had a couple of very collegial evenings at internal work events in 1997 and 1998. He later joined the United Nations, and was killed in the Haiti earthquake of 2010, when the entire leadership of the UN mission there was wiped out.

See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if, as far as I can tell, less than 50% of them is set in the current boundaries of El Salvador.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
Salvador	Joan Didion	3,961	791	704
What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance	Carolyn Forché	3,516	297	623
The Country Between Us	Carolyn Forché	2,823	477	303
Archive of Unknown Universes	Ruben Reyes Jr.	2,546	83	702
The Massacre at El Mozote	Mark Danner	1,687	352	241
There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven: Stories	Ruben Reyes Jr.	1,251	91	638
One Day of Life	Manlio Argueta	1,025	421	153
Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador	Horacio Castellanos Moya	1,871	169	135

This week’s winner, Salvador by Joan Didion, is well ahead on LibraryThing and wins on Goodreads and StoryGraph too, the latter by a hair’s breadth. It was published in 1987 and adapts three essays by Didion from the New York Review of Books, her first substantial publication on foreign policy (she was already well known as a commentator on US culture).

Carolyn Forché is also American, but has written a lot about El Salvador. What You Have Heard Is True is non-fiction. The Country Between Us is poetry, and I believe the majority of it is inspired by Forché’s experiences in El Salvador.

Ruben Reyes Jr is another American writer, though his parents are from El Salvador. Archive of Unknown Universes is about two Salvadoran students at Harvard using a time machine to explore different alternate histories of the civil war. There is a Rio Grande in Heaven is a short story collection, and the majority of them appear to be set in El Salvador.

The Massacre at El Mozote is about a particularly awful incident in 1981 during the civil war, when government forces killed 811 non-combatant villagers, and also about the Reagan administration’s successful suppression of coverage of the story in the US media.

Manlio Argueta is the top writer on this week’s list who actually lives in El Salvador. One Day of Life is about one woman’s experience of state violence immediately before the war.

Horacio Castellanos Moya is also Salvadoran (though born in Honduras and having spent much of his life in exile). Revulsion is a 119 page book written as a single paragraph, about an exiled writer returning to San Salvador in the 1990s and hating the place.

Including the StoryGraph numbers meant that we gained the two books by Ruben Reyes Jr. and lost two by Sandra Benitez, The Weight of All Things and Bitter Grounds.

Benitez grew up in El Salvador but her parents were from Puerto Rico and she identified as American, as far as I know. The top woman Salvadoran writer who I found was Claudia Hernández, best known for her novel Slash and Burn (originally Roza, Tumba, Quema).

I did not have any tough disqualification choices (or rather, I hesitated with both The Country Between Us and There is a Rio Grande in Heaven, but ruled them in rather than out). Two novels that scored very well on all the systems, but are mainly set outside El Salvador, are Solito by Javier Zamora and The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende.

The Soccer War, by Ryszard Kapuściński, is a collection of articles including the title piece, which is about the 1969 war between El Salvador and Honduras sparked by a soccer match, but it is just one of a number of geographically varied essays in the book.

Apart from Gerardo, mentioned above, I have no personal connection with El Salvador, and there are no books on my own shelves about the country.

Coming next: Denmark, Singapore, Lebanon and Liberia.

May 2006 books

Posted on 3 August 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.

A month when I visited Berlin and London for work, and I have a note that I was in Bath too, but am really not sure why. (Anne’s birthday fell in the middle of my Berlin trip, so we must have celebrated at the weekend.) I also got a really weird phone call from someone who felt it really important to tell me that “je suis” is “Jesus” with “I” in the middle. At work, I took some time off Crisis Group to do a chunky bit of consulting for my future employers Independent Diplomat. I also applied for a job with the European Commission, but it was one of those cases where they were really formalising someone’s existing job and the advertisement was not serious.

As the fine weather came in, U and F dressed up, and B climbed a tree.

The big geopolitical news was Montenegro voting for independence, and its subsequent peaceful separation from Serbia. I still feel rather proud that I helped make the argument for Montenegro as an independent state to EU policymakers long before it became fashionable.

This was also the month that I had my infamous exchange with John Scalzi over his novel Old Man’s War (see here, here, here and here). We are friends now (picture from the 2019 Hugo ceremony).

A couple of other blog posts from that month have stood the test of time: the 1996 Northern Ireland elections, and the East Rumelia vote of 1879.

I read 15 books in May 2006, more than any of the previous months that year, fewer than any later month that year.

Non-fiction 4 (YTD 21)
Roger Zelazny, by Carl Yoke
Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, by Lawrence Durrell
Moondust, by Andrew Smith
Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide, by Yiannis Papadakis

Non-genre 3 (YTD 6)
Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
Ivanhoe, by Walter Scott (did not finish)

SF 5 (YTD 26)
Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson
Dark Side of Venus, by “Clem Macartney” (W.D. Flackes)
Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi
Alternate Generals, ed. Harry Turtledove
Daughter of the Drow, by Elaine Cunningham (did not finish)

Doctor Who 3 (YTD 3)
Doctor Who and the State of Decay, by Terrance Dicks
Blood Harvest, by Terrance Dicks
Goth Opera, by Paul Cornell

3,300 pages (YTD 18,600)
1/15 by a woman (YTD 8/57)
1/15 by PoC (YTD 3/57)

Lots of good books here, but the two I enjoyed most were both non-fiction, Moondust, about the Apollo astronoauts, which you can get here, and Echoes from the Dead Zone, a Cypriot anthropologist’s take on his island’s problems, which you can get here. On the other hand, two of these books were so awful that, unusually, I could not finish them, Ivanhoe being slightly the worse of the two. You can get it here, if you want.

The best known books set in each country: Republic of Congo

Posted on 2 August 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

The Republic of Congo, often referred to as Congo-Brazzaville to avoid confusion with its much larger neighbor the Democratic Republic of Congo (aka Congo-Kinshasa), is on the western coast of Africa, straddling the equator. Its northern neighbors are Cameroon and the Central African Republic; the Democratic Republic of Congo borders it to the east and south, along with the Cabinda enclave of Angola also to the south; to the west are the Atlantic Ocean and Gabon.

Its history since independence from France in 1960 has been a dismaying sequence of single-party Communist-leaning regimes punctuated by military coups, with two full-blown civil wars in 1993-94 and 1997-99. At the end of the second civil war, President Dennis Sassou, who claimed to have won the 1997 elections, was installed in power with help from the Angolan army, and has stayed there ever since.

In 2016 I actually got to know the then main opposition leader, Guy Brice Parfait Kolélas; he stood in the 2021 presidential election, and came second but got less than 9% of the total vote. It did not matter to him, because tragically he died of COVID on the day of the election, while on a plane flying to France for medical treatment.

These days the Republic of Congo’s economy depends on oil exports. There are untapped mineral resources which will no doubt become more important as the developed world searches for critical raw materials. 70% of the population lives in one of the two big cities in the south, Pointe-Noire and Brazzaville, or along the railway line connecting them; the north and centre are very sparsely inhabited. The official languages are French, Kituba and Lingala, these last two being local languages of the Bantu family.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
Black Moses	Alain Mabanckou	2,324	246	446
Broken Glass	Alain Mabanckou	2,085	279	339
No Mercy: A Journey Into the Heart of the Congo	Redmond O’Hanlon	1,825	749	92
African Psycho	Alain Mabanckou	1,211	186	325
Memoirs of a Porcupine	Alain Mabanckou	1,243	205	188
Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty	Alain Mabanckou	710	93	80
Johnny Mad Dog	Emmanuel Dongala	454	112	63
The Death of Comrade President	Alain Mabanckou	618	60	74

There was a fair amount of confusion with the Democratic Republic of Congo this week, but I think I successfully sifted for the books set on the northwestern side of the river.

One writer dominates here, Alain Mabanckou, born in Pointe-Noire in 1966, and now teaching literature at UCLA. Most of his books are explicitly set in the Republic of Congo.

This week’s overall winner, also on Goodreads and StoryGraph, is Black Moses (original title Petit Piment, “Little Pepper”) which is an Oliver Twist-like story of a lad making good in Pointe-Noire in the 1980s and 1990s.

Broken Glass is about the lives and travels of the patrons of a Congolese pub; I am taking a chance that more of it is set in-country than not.

African Psycho is about a man who calls on the spirit of a dead murderer to plan his own crime.

Memoirs of a Porcupine is told by a porcupine which has a mystical spiritual link with a human.

Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty is a more frankly autobiographical novel drawing on Mabanckou’s own childhood.

The Death of Comrade President (original title Les cigognes sont immortelles, “Storks are Immortal”) is about a boy growing up in Pointe-Noire who has to protect his family when the president of the country, to whom they are related, is assassinated.

Two other writers feature this week. Redmond O’Hanlon’s No Mercy: A Journey to the Heart of the Congo, originally published just as Congo Journey, is this week’s LibraryThing winner (by quite some way). It is about a journey through the jungle to find a mysterious dinosaur-like creature. I checked, and it’s quite clear that it’s set on the Brazzaville side of the river.

Johnny Mad Dog is by Congo’s other well known writer, Emmanuel Dongala, and is about a child soldier in an African civil war of the 1990s. English Wikipedia thinks it is set in Rwanda or Liberia, and the film adaptation is definitely set in Liberia, but French Wikipedia and the other sources I have consulted in French are fairly sure that the original book is set in the Republic of Congo.

Including the StoryGraph numbers didn’t change the top eight, but did move Redmond O’Hanlon down from the top spot to third place.

As noted above, I scratched my head about a couple of the books included on the list; the one I excluded at the last moment was Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd, where although the framing narrative is set near Brazzaville, the core of the novel is set on a chimpanzee reserve in an unnamed country which is probably Angola and definitely speaks Portuguese rather than French. Otherwise it would have easily topped this week’s table.

It’s an all-male list this week. The top women writers from the Republic of Congo who I found on Goodreads and LibraryThing are Mambou Aimée Gnali (best known work set in Congo: L’or des femmes) and Adèle Caby-Livannah (best known work set in Congo: Les contes de la Pleine Lune: Congo), but with rather low numbers in each case. I did not find any books by women writers from the Republic of Congo on StoryGraph.

I have no books on my own shelves relating to the Republic of Congo.

Across the Atlantic next for El Salvador; then back to Europe for Denmark; then over to the far side of Asia for Singapore; then back west for Lebanon.

The best known books set in each country: Serbia

Posted on 26 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Serbia is at the heart of the Balkans; south of Hungary, north of North Macedonia, east of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, northeast of Montenegro and Kosovo, west of Romania and Bulgaria. It became autonomous from the Ottoman Empire in 1804 and gradually expanded in territory and upgraded in status to the point that it became the spark for the First World War in 1914.

The war was pretty disastrous for Serbia – around 20-25% of its entire population is thought to have died during the 1914-18 period. But after the war it became the centre of the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, incorporating large chunks of what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the neighbouring state of Montenegro. Renamed Yugoslavia, this state was broken up during the second world war, but reassembled under the leadership of Marshal Tito, and lasted another 45 years after that.

There is no space to go into detail here about the break-up of Yugoslavia, which involved another three and a half wars (Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo and the ten days of conflict in Slovenia) and also two peaceful separations (Macedonia and Montenegro). By the end, Serbia was back down to almost its 1914 borders with the addition of the Vojvodina north of Belgrade. Slobodan Milošević, who had become the Serbian leader in the late stages of Communism, remained in power until 2001. Since 2014 it has been under the increasingly authoritarian rule of President Aleksandar Vučić and the Serbian Progressive Party.

I have been to Serbia many times, starting in 1998, and have many friends in and from there. My former assistant R from my Bosnia days now lives in Belgrade and has an Instagram travel blog called “Price iz kofera“, “Stories from a Suitcase”. Going back a lot further, my grandfather was given a Serbian military decoration, the Order of the White Eagle, for his part in the unsuccessful defence of the front line in Macedonia in 1915. I always enjoy going back. (Here’s Sirmium.)

Serbian is a Slavic language, mutually intelligible with Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, not quite as close to Slovenian in one direction and Macedonian and Bulgarian in the other. I am slightly above casual tourist level.

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 Serbia.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
Fatherland – A Family History	Nina Bunjevac	1,700	135	352
The Library	Zoran Živković	3,042	139	158
The Inner Side of the Wind, or The Novel of Hero and Leander	Milorad Pavić	1,461	197	112
With Their Backs to the World: Portraits from Serbia	Åsne Seierstad	1,029	282	92
Miss Ex-Yugoslavia: A Memoir	Sofija Stefanovic	1,177	46	247
At The Lucky Hand	Goran Petrović	2,482	40	130
Götz and Meyer	David Albahari	614	214	91
The Use of Man	Aleksandar Tišma	886	180	49

This was unusually difficult to tally. Many books are tagged “serbia” on LibraryThing and Goodreads even if they are mostly set in Bosnia (or sometimes Kosovo). On the other hand, Serbian writers like Danilo Kiš, Zoran Živković and Milorad Pavić love setting their writing in an anonymous Eastern European location, which sometimes might be Serbia and sometimes might not. Indeed, when I did this analysis in 2015 I awarded the top spot to The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Olbreht, but having read it since then, I don’t think it is sufficiently explicit that the setting is Serbia for it to qualify. I have done my best with the list above.

This week’s winner, Fatherland, by Nina Bunjevac, also the StoryGraph winner, is a graphic novel about a girl whose mother moves the family back home to Serbia from Canada, to get away from the Serbian nationalist father who eventually accidentally blows himself up in Toronto. I have not been able to check in detail but it sounds similar to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, though maybe not such a classic.

I’m glad to see that this week’s Goodreads winner, The Library, is by the great Serbian magical realist writer Zoran Živković, who I actually met two decades ago. I’m aware that this requires some special pleading, in that the locations of the stories are not specified, but I thin most of the stories can be taken as set in the writer’s home of Belgrade – though admittedly the fourth story of the six is set in Hell and the fifth in a city where there are bookstalls under the Great Bridge, which I don’t think is the case in Belgrade.

The Inner Side of the Wind is a time travel romance set in Belgrade between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.

With Their Backs to the Wind, this week’s LibraryThing winner, is reportage about life under Milošević.

Miss Ex-Yugoslavia is also non-fiction, about a girl growing up between Serbia and Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. It sounds like more of it is set in Serbia than Australia so I have allowed it on the list.

At The Lucky Hand is more magical realism set in Belgrade.

Götz and Meyer is about a Serbian teacher today obsessed with two SS men committing genocide in and around Belgrade in the second world war.

The Use of Man is about four people from Novi Sad, the capital of the autonomous province of Vojvodina, and their experiences in the second world war.

I excluded Srdja Popović’s Blueprint for Revolution which draws on the real-life lessons of the author’s involvement with the anti-Milošević Otpor movement, because when I checked I found that he had also drawn on a lot of other countries’ experiences of civil resistance.

I also excluded Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kiš, because on a page count it became clear to me that more than half of it is set in Hungary rather than Serbia.

Both Nina Bunjevac and Sofija Stefanovic found their muses by emigrating. The top Serbian woman writer by my metrics who is still in the country is Mirjana Novaković, best known for her Fear and His Servant.

Using the StoryGraph numbers gained us Miss Ex-Yugoslavia at the expense of Hourglass, by Danilo Kiš, who unfortunately ends up unrepresented here as a result.

Serbia is well represented on my own bookshelves, particularly in books which cover the whole former Yugoslavia or the wider Balkans such as Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West, The Balkans by Mark Mazower, The Fall of Yugoslavia by Misha Glenny and Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation by Laura Silber and Allan Little.

Some Serbia-specific books that I own which are not listed above include The Serbs by Tim Judah; White Eagles over Serbia by Laurence Durrell; Esprit de Corps, also by Lawrence Durrell; Impossible Stories by Zoran Živković, which includes the stories originally published as The Library; The Politics of Serbia in the 1990s by Robert Thomas; Serbian Folktales, ed. J.K. Jackson; The Banovina, by Donka Stančić and Miško Lazović; and Yugoslavia’s Implosion: The Fatal Attraction of Serbian Nationalism, by Sonja Biserko.

The next four countries are in four different continents: the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), El Salvador, Denmark and Singapore.

The best known books set in each country: Bulgaria

Posted on 19 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Bulgaria is in southeastern Europe, south of Romania, north of Greece, east of Serbia and North Macedonia and west of the Black Sea.

It’s a country that I know relatively well – I first visited for a week at the age of 8 for a family holiday in the Golden Sands beach resort near Varna, and have gone back reasonably frequently since 2000. My many Bulgarian friends and colleagues include half a dozen of its former foreign ministers. (In fact I introduced one of them to his wife.)

Me speaking on Bulgarian TV in February 2020, just before the pandemic. My name is spelt “*Никълас Уайт*» in Bulgarian Cyrillic, and the caption describes me as “*инфлуенсър*”, an influencer. On a good day, perhaps.

Bulgaria became de facto independent from the Ottoman Empire in 1878, though the reduction by Western European diplomacy of its originally large assigned territory caused resentment for decades. In 1885 it annexed the neighbouring Ottoman province of Eastern Rumelia, and fought off a punitive attack from Serbia (we’ll hear more about that).

Having defeated the Ottomans in alliance with Serbia and Greece in 1912, Bulgaria then lost to Bulgaria, Greece and Romania in the next war in 1913, and after the first world war lost some more territory and settled down to a period of political instability. Bulgaria allied with Germany during the second world war, and by the end was occupied by the Soviets who installed a Communist government which lasted until 1989.

Since then, power alternated between the ex-Communist Bulgarian Socialist Party and centrist or right-wing alternatives, notably the former king Simeon, who had been forced to abdicate at the age of 9 in 1946 and returned as prime minister from 2001 to 2005, and more recently the GERB party founded by Boyko Borisov, which has been in power for the majority of the time since 2009. In this year’s elections, a new leftish political party founded by former president Rumen Radev won and took power.

The Bulgarian language is a Slavic language, related to Russian, more closely to Serbian and Croatian, and even more closely to Macedonian. If you know the basic Cyrillic alphabet, you can always spot Bulgarian by the fact that it uses the letter ъ as a vowel – the ‘u’ in ‘Bulgaria’, in fact, or the middle letter of the Bulgarian spelling of my own first name; its use as a vowel is unique to Bulgarian – in Russian, ъ does not have a sound but separates hard consonants from soft vowels; in Tajik, ъ is a consonant (the glo’’al stop); and other currently used versions of the Cyrillic alphabet just don’t have it. Also, unlike other Slavic languages (apart from Macedonian), Bulgarian doesn’t do evil things to its nouns, and translates ‘the’ as a suffix.

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 Bulgaria.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
What Belongs to You	Garth Greenwell	15,898	857	3,443
The Shadow Land	Elizabeth Kostova	16,240	1,128	2,392
Cleanness	Garth Greenwell	10,333	494	2,696
Arms and the Man	George Bernard Shaw	11,475	1,243	924
The Elusive Mrs. Pollifax	Dorothy Gilman	10,092	1066	984
The Physics of Sorrow	Georgi Gospodinov	13,720	415	1,070
Death and the Gardener	Georgi Gospodinov	15,325	158	751
The Balkan Escape	Steve Berry	4,864	247	417

This is the biggest shift I have yet seen from when I did this analysis for Bulgaria back in 2015. Then, the top book by far was Arms and the Man, George Bernard Shaw’s play set during and immediately after the 1885 war, in which the protagonist Bluntschli famously declares, “My rank is the highest known in Switzerland: I’m a free citizen.” It’s still ahead, if not by much, on LibraryThing, but behind on Goodreads and way behind on StoryGraph. Basically a lot of new Bulgarian-set novels, or novels newly available in translation, have appeared in the intervening years.

Garth Greenwell is an American writer who has worked as a teacher in Bulgaria. His two novels here, What Belongs To You, which is the StoryGraph and overall winner this week, and Cleanness are about an American teacher facing the challenges of gay romance with Bulgarians while working there.

Elizabeth Kostova has a Bulgarian surname, but it is her husband’s; she was originally Elizabeth Johnson from Tennessee. I really didn’t much like her runaway hit, The Historian, but The Shadow Land, this week’s Goodreads winner, sounds like it’s much more under control and restricts its setting to Bulgaria.

The Elusive Mrs Pollifax is the third in the series of novels about an unlikely CIA agent (the first two are set in Albania and Turkey). It was the runner-up when I did this analysis in 2015.

With reluctance I had to disqualify Georgi Gospodinov’s International Booker Prize-winning science fiction novel Time Shelter, which would otherwise have been this week’s winner. I actually went to the lengths of buying it and doing a swift page count, but strictly speaking more of it is set in Switzerland than in Bulgaria. On the other hand his next two novels, The Physics of Sorrow and Death and the Gardener, are much more firmly set there. (Maybe the latter more firmly than the former.)

Finally The Balkan Escape is a YA fantasy adventure story, the first in a series (though none of the others seems to be set in Bulgaria). It came third when I counted in 2015.

Regrettably the StoryGraph numbers knocked The Broken Road by Patrick Leigh Fermor off the list. Ivan Vazov’s classic Under the Yoke was next after that (did very well on Goodreads, worse on the other two). Next would have been the top book by a Bulgarian woman writer, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, by Kapka Kassabova.

On my own shelves, apart from Arms and the Man, The Broken Road and Under the Yoke, I don’t have a lot of books with Bulgarian content. My grandmother’s boyfriend Alan Bott managed to reunite with the Allies there after escaping Turkish captivity at the end of the First World War. I once had, but seem to have lost, Richard Crampton’s excellent history of the country. I also commend the writing of Bulgarian thinker Ivan Krastev, who I collaborated with a couple of times, more than twenty years ago now, and whose pessimism about the political future comes from a place of love and liberalism.

Next up is Bulgaria’s neighbour Serbia; then the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), El Salvador and back to Europe for Denmark.

The best known books set in each country: Paraguay

Posted on 12 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Paraguay is in South America, squeezed between Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina. It became independent from Spain in 1811, but was not recognized by any other countries for over 30 years. The three awful events of Paraguayan history are the War of the Triple Alliance, from 1864-1870, which they lost to Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay; the Chaco War against Bolivia in 1932-35, which they won; and the brutal and isolationist dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner from 1954 to 1989 (Europe was not the only place where revolutions happened that latter year). His right-wing Colorado Party have won every presidential election but one since 1948.

These days Paraguay is best known for the Itaipu Dam on the River Parana, shared with Brazil, the largest hydro-electric dam in the world outside China. The official languages are Guaraní and Spanish, though given Paraguay’s close relationship with Brazil, Portuguese is widely understood and is thought to be the first language of as much as 20% of the population. The main exports are electricity from the dam, bought by Brazil, agricultural products, also bought by Brazil, and Chinese goods, imported into Paraguay and smuggled into Brazil.

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 Paraguay.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
Zama	Antonio di Benedetto	3,961	612	502
The News from Paraguay	Lily Tuck	2,497	756	267
Ada’s Violin: The Story of the Recycled Orchestra of Paraguay	Susan Hood	2,152	545	321
The Drunken Forest	Gerald Durrell	2,117	690	177
I, the Supreme	Augusto Roa Bastos	1,029	660	82
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay	John Gimlette	775	327	78
Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche	Ben Macintyre	834	299	78
Son of Man	Augusto Roa Bastos	764	221	35

This week’s overall winner, Zama, also the Goodreads and StoryGraph winner, is considered one of the great novels of Argentine rather than Paraguayan literature; its protagonist, Don Diego de Zama, is stuck in Paraguay at the end of the eighteenth century, trying to get back to Argentina.

This week’s LibraryThing winner, The News from Paraguay, is one of several books that I found about the glamorous figure of Eliza Lynch (1833-86), from Cork by way of Paris, who at the age of 19 became the girlfriend of Francisco Solano López, the son of the President of Paraguay. When the President died in 1862, Francisco succeeded him, and Eliza was the First Lady of the country (though they never actually married) until Francisco was overthrown and killed in 1870 at the end of the war. She returned to Paris and died there.

Ada’s Violin is about impoverished children forming an orchestra with instruments made from material recycled from the city rubbish dump. It sounds a bit glurgy to be honest but reviews seem positive.

The Drunken Forest is one of Gerald Durrell’s earlier travel books about collecting animals for his zoo, in Argentina and Paraguay in 1954. The process is interrupted by a real-world political intrusion unusual in Durrell’s writing, when the 1954 coup that brought Alfredo Stroessner to power forces him and his wife to go home in a hurry, leaving behind most of the animals.

I, the Supreme is the top book on this list by a Paraguayan author. It is a fictionalized biography of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia y Velasco, known as Doctor Francia, Paraguay’s first dictator who ruled from 1814-1840. Published in 1974, it was seen as commentary on the Stroessner regime (not least by Stroessner himself) and Roa Bastos was exiled.

At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig is a travel book about Paraguay from 2003.

Forgotten Fatherland traces another European woman who, like Eliza Lynch, had a Paraguayan adventure: Elizabeth Nietzsche, sister of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who set up the colony of Nueva Germania in Paraguay on Aryan and anti-Semitic principles in 1886. It collapsed almost immediately.

Son of Man, Roa Bastos’ second book in this week’s table, chronicles the struggles of the oppressed in Paraguay between 1912 and 1936 through a Biblically inspired magical realist lens.

The book that I hesitated about disqualifying is Novela B by Mónica Bustos, Paraguay’s best known contemporary woman writer, but the summaries of it that I found indicate that it is set across South America in various locations, so I deduce that less than half of it is in Paraguay. In fact none of her books appears to be set in Paraguay as far as I can tell.

The one woman writer who I find on all three systems and whose work does seem to be set in Paraguay is Josefina Plá. Although she was born in Spain, she adopted Paraguayan citizenship.

Paraguay figures in three books on my own shelves: Siân Rees’ The Shadows of Eliza Lynch is on the same subject as Lily Tuck’s book above; Paraguay (played by Spain in the TV series) is where Kessler ends up in the sequel to Secret Army and its novelisation; and one of the members of Brian Killick’s The Camelot Club invades Paraguay.

Back to Europe for the next two countries, Bulgaria and Serbia; then Congo (Brazzaville) and El Salvador.

The best known books set in each country: Nicaragua

Posted on 5 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Nicaragua is the largest country by area in Central America, though with a smaller population than Guatemala and Honduras. It shares its northern border with Honduras and its southern with Costa Rica. Most of it was under Spanish rule from the sixteenth century until 1821, and like the other Central American countries it became fully independent in 1838. The Atlantic coast was under British rule as the Mosquito Coast until 1860.

Nicaragua’s history features a lot of, well, involvement, to choose a term, by the United States. An American mercenary seized power in 1857, only to be overthrown the following year. There was a full scale US military occupation from 1909 to 1933. Both the Somoza family, who ruled from 1937 to 1979, and the Sandinistas who overthrew them, owed their rise to US influence. The lefty Sandinistas then were attacked by ‘Contra’ guerrillas, illegally funded by the Reagan administration with money raised by arms sales to Iran. When I was a student at Cambridge, there was an active Nicaraguan Solidarity Campaign, and we would drink the bitter Nicaraguan coffee as a kind of penance for the sins of the West.

The Sandinistas lost power in the 1990 election, but their leader Daniel Ortega won again in 2006 and has been president ever since, with his wife appointed co-president last year, and increasing pressure on civil society and the political opposition. The democratic opening of twenty to thirty years ago has been lost.

One of the fascinating might-have-beens of history is the prospect that the Panama Canal could have been pre-empted by a canal through Nicaragua. Although the length of the route is longer, less engineering would have been needed, as the natural waterways and geology are much more favourable. It’s also considerably further north, which makes a big difference to shipping times. If it had not been for French lobbying – their Panama scheme had collapsed and they were keen to dump the assets for any price they could get – we’d be looking at a very different economic geography of Central America.

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 Nicaragua.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
The Inhabited Woman	Gioconda Belli	7,975	597	646
The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey	Salman Rushdie	2,649	790	296
The Country Under My Skin: A Memoir of Love and War	Gioconda Belli	3,523	385	353
Azul…	Rubén Darío	3,487	340	175
El país de las mujeres	Gioconda Belli	3,159	78	256
The Stars at Noon	Denis Johnson	1,300	275	174
Sofía de los presagios	Gioconda Belli	1,254	117	61
Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua	Stephen Kinzer	713	126	73

The political divide dominates everything in Nicaragua, and Gioconda Belli, who wrote four of this week’s eight books, was a fervent Sandinista for most of her career, though in 2018 she fell out with Ortega to the extent that he revoked her Nicaraguan citizenship in 2023. (Her brother Humberto, meanwhile, was on the other side and served as Minister of Education in 1991-1998. Ortega revoked his Nicaraguan citizenship too.)

Gioconda Belli’s The Inhabited Woman, this week’s overall winner and the top book on Goodreads and StoryGraph, is a semi-autobiographical magical realist novel, linking feminism, the struggles of indigenous people, and the twentieth-century conflict, in the fictional country of Faguas which everyone will understand to be Nicaragua. The Country Under My Skin is a purely autobiographical work, with no fictional pretensions.

Her other two books on this week’s list don’t appear to have been translated into English yet. El país de las mujeres (“The Country of Women”, in French and German translation “The Republic of Women”) takes us back to the fictional country of Faguas (which again is clearly meant to be Nicaragua) where woman have taken over politically and face violent resistance. Sofía de los presagios (literally “Sofia of the Omens”, translated into Dutch and German as “Daughter of the Volcano”) is about an abandoned Roma girl, adopted by a rich landowner, and finding her personal liberation. It’s impressive that both books score well on the normally unforgivingly Anglophone metrics of the three sites.

This week’s LibraryThing winner is The Jaguar Smile, a factual account by Salman Rushdie of visiting Nicaragua in 1986 during the height of the Sandinistas’ first time in power.

I am not completely certain about Azul… (literally “Blue”, but usually retaining its original Spanish title when translated). It is a collection of essays and poetry by Nicaragua’s great nineteenth century poet Rubén Darío. I am assuming, but have not checked, that at least half of them relate to his own country.

The Stars at Noon is a novel about an American woman in Nicaragua in 1984, disaffected with both the Sandinistas and the CIA.

Blood of Brothers tells the story of what led up to the 1979 revolution and its aftermath, by the New York Times’ then Managua correspondent.

Incorporating the StoryGraph numbers did not change the top eight.

I disqualified a bunch of books about either Latin America in general or U.S. imperialism in general, or both.

I thought long and hard about Barbara Kingsolver’s second novel, Animal Dreams, but in the end less than half of it is set in Nicaragua. Likewise Clive Cussler’s Trojan Odyssey, which I have not read.

Looking further down the list, StoryGraph has some odd blind spots – its users own very few of the many books by Sergio Ramírez, once Ortega’s vice-president, now another of those who were stripped of their citizenship in 2023. He was not strongly represented enough among LT and GR users to have scored anyway, but the SG gap is unusual and surprising.

Staying in Latin America next week for Paraguay; then back to Europe for Bulgaria and Serbia, and then down south for the Republic of Congo (Congo-Brazzaville).

The best known books set in each country: Hong Kong

Posted on 28 June 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Why do I count Hong Kong separately here? I’m using the population estimates from the Worldometer website, which are presumably based on some international standard or other. They separate out a number of non-sovereign territories; we’ve already had Taiwan, and in due course we’ll get to Macau (and before that Réunion). I don’t dispute Chinese sovereignty over Hong Kong or Macau (or French sovereignty over Réunion for that matter). I could have restricted myself to countries that are full members of the UN, but that would have lost some granularity and also excluded a couple of pretty clear cases of countries recognised by a majority of UN states which are not yet members (Palestine and Kosovo).

Hong Kong was a small but strategically placed settlement on an island off the coast of southern China when it was ceded to the British “in perpetuity” in 1842. A neighbouring part of the mainland was similarly transferred in 1860, and then, as the city expanded dramatically, a large chunk of territory was leased to the British for 99 years starting in 1898. By the 1970s it was clear that it would not be viable for the British to hang on to the earlier acquisitions while handing back the later lease, and in 1984 the British pledged to hand over the whole territory in 1997, while China guaranteed that it would retain its different economic and political systems, and the transfer duly took place.

Since 2014 or so, the Chinese authorities have steadily eroded free speech and democratic openness in Hong Kong, while the rest of China has surged – in 1997, Hong Kong’s GDP was about 18% of the mainland’s, now it is is more like 2%. However the story does not end there. In Beijing last year, I had a discussion with two Western diplomats and a Western journalist who assured me that Hong Kong is still the happening place in terms of economic activity and centre of gravity in South-East Asia. One of them wondered, “Is this the model that they will offer to Taiwan?” Another replied, “Is it the model they might offer the whole of China?” The happy ending of Zen Cho’s 2005 London-set romance Behind Frenemy Lines is that the protagonists decide to move to Hong Kong together, rather than stay in London.

I have never been there myself, but the brides at the last two weddings I attended had both grown up in Hong Kong. This humble blog gets more hits from Hong Kong-based IP addresses than from any other country apart from the UK and the USA. (Mainland China is fourth, Belgium fifth, and Singapore sixth. I suspect that the VPNs from mainland China to Hong Kong and Singapore are pretty busy.) All of the countries I write about here are places of fascination for me, but Hong Kong is particularly interesting.

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 Hong Kong.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
Exciting Times	Naoise Dolan	76,833	704	23,517
Tai-Pan	James Clavell	60,179	4235	2,753
The Honourable Schoolboy	John le Carré	26,934	4514	2,271
Noble House	James Clavell	42,949	3251	1,352
The Piano Teacher	Janice Y.K. Lee	24,135	2382	1,997
The Expatriates	Janice Y.K. Lee	16,635	505	1,884
Love in a Fallen City	Eileen Chang	4,811	795	970
Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha	Dorothy Gilman	6,373	909	624

This week’s winner, Exciting Times, is a romance involving an Irishwoman and her lovers, an Englishman and a Chinese woman. It has an incredibly high score on StoryGraph and a pretty high score on Goodreads, but has clearly failed to chime with LibraryThing users. I note that reviews of it are distinctly mixed; it must have benefited from smart marketing.

Tai-Pan and Noble House are the second and fourth of James Clavell’s six-volume sequence of Asian-set novels. They are set in 1841 and 1963 respectively.

The Honourable Schoolboy is the sixth of John le Carré’s novels about George Smiley and the British Secret Service. Not all of it is set in Hong Kong – there is a framing narrative in London and excursions to Thailand and Cambodia – but I think enough is for it to count for my purposes.

Janice Y.K. Lee is the top writer actually from Hong Kong on this week’s list (her family is Korean but she was born and brought up in Hong Kong). The Piano Teacher is set in the 1940s and 1950s; The Expatriates (filmed as the mini-series Expats starring Nicole Kidman) has a contemporary setting.

Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City (傾城之戀) was first published in Chinese in 1943, shortly after the setting of the story, which is about a woman in Shanghai and her lover in Hong Kong at the time of the Japanese invasion. As far as I can tell it is set more in the latter than the former. Chang herself was from Shanghai, but studied in Hong Kong.

Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha sees the CIA’s least likely agent sent on a mission to Hong Kong, with excursions to the mainland. It is reportedly somewhat darker than most books in the series.

Integrating the StoryGraph numbers meant that we gained Love in a Fallen City and lost Women of the Threads by Gail Tsukiyama.

I disqualified a few books given the ‘hong-kong’ tag by users of LibraryThing and Goodreads which are not actually set there, notably the trilogy by Kevin Kwan that starts with Crazy Rich Asians and is mostly set in Singapore. The one that caused me the most head-scratching was The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham, but only three of its seven chapters are set in Hong Kong. Jane Gardam’s novels Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat feature Hong Kong as one of several settings in the narrative.

There are a few books on my own shelves set in Hong Kong: the Doctor Who novel Bullet Time, by David McIntee, featuring the Seventh Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith; the Lovejoy novel Jade Woman, by Jonathan Gash; and The Smile on the Face of the Tiger, by future foreign secretary Douglas Hurd and Private Eye co-founder Andrew Osmond, set in the mid-1970s (the near future, at the time of writing) with China threatening to invade Hong Kong and deterred only by British nuclear bluff.

Next up are a pair of Latin American countries, Nicaragua and Paraguay, and then back to Europe for Bulgaria and Serbia.

The best known books set in each country: Kyrgyzstan

Posted on 21 June 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

~~Kyrgyzstan is half of the answer to a favorite trivia question: which two landlocked countries are bordered only by other landlocked countries, therefore being doubly landlocked?~~ Someone points out to me that that is actually Uzbekistan. Whoops! (The other is Liechtenstein.)

It became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991, and unusually for the region developed quite an open and democratic political system after the 2005 Tulip Revolution. However under president Sadyr Japarov, in power since 2021, things have tightened up considerably and it is now once again effectively a one-party state. Its main exports are minerals, especially gold, and textiles, both wool and cotton. The Kyrgyz language, like Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen and Azeri, is closely related to Turkish.

The dominant writer here – the most dominant for any country since Colombia – is Chengiz Aitmatov (1928-2008). I must have been in the same room as him on a number of occasions, as he was Kyrgyzstan’s ambassador to Belgium and the EU at the start of the century (having originally moved to these parts as the last Soviet ambassador to Luxembourg, which is coincidentally where I slept last night) and we probably attended a few of the same diplomatic receptions without my realising that a giant of Central Asian literature was present.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
Jamilia	Chingiz Aitmatov	10,761	784	1,143
The White Steamship	Chingiz Aitmatov	7,660	277	236
The Place of the Skull	Chingiz Aitmatov	2,363	229	93
Farewell Gul’sary!	Chingiz Aitmatov	1,913	149	59
The First Teacher	Chingiz Aitmatov	2,738	54	85
To Have and to Lose	Chingiz Aitmatov	1,787	74	45
Mother Earth	Chingiz Aitmatov	5,343	66	13
Over the Edge	Greg Child	646	128	49

You can imagine how much fun I had tracking down all the variant titles of these books in Russian, Kyrgyz and English.

Jamilia or Jamila (“Жамийла” in Kyrgyz, “Джамиля” in Russian) is about illicit love in Kyrgyzstan’s patriarchal society as viewed by a teenage sibling.

The White Steamship or The White Ship (“Ак кеме” in Kyrgyz, “Белый пароход” in Russian) is about ships on Issyk-Kul Lake in the centre of Kyrgyzstan, and a sacred deer and old beliefs.

The Place of the Skull / The Scaffold (“Плаха”) is about a wolf, and two good men fighting evil, including drug smugglers.

Farewell, Gulsary! / Farewell, Gyulsary (“Прощай, Гульсары!” in Russian, “Жаныбарым, Гүлсары!” in Kyrgyz) is about a man and his horse.

The First Teacher / Duishen (“Первый учитель” in Russian, “Биринчи мугалим” in Kyrgyz) is about an art teacher and the girl he inspires and defends.

To Have and to Lose (“Тополёк мой в красной косынке” in Russian) was adapted into the Turkish film The Girl with the Red Scarf (Selvi Boylum, Al Yazmalım). It is about a girl who falls in love with a truck driver.

Mother Earth (“Саманчынын жолу” in Kyrgyz, “Материнское поле” in Russian) is about a heroic woman in the Great Patriotic War.

Finally, Over the Edge is a non-fiction account by one of four American mountaineers who were held hostage by Islamist guerrillas in 2000, and escaped by throwing one of them off a cliff.

A Killing Winter, by Tom Callaghan, which I have actually read, missed the last spot on the list (by quite some way).

I disqualified a load of books which covered all of Central Asia, or indeed the former Soviet Union. The only one that I hesitated about was A Light through the Cracks: A Climber’s Story, by Beth Rodden, who was in the same group of kidnapped mountaineers as Greg Child; but it seems that more than half of the book is more about her personal healing journey after they were rescued and went home.

I also disqualified two other books by Chengiz Aitmatov, with less hesitation. His top book is The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years (“И дольше века длится день” in Russian, “Кылым карытар бир күн” in Kyrgyz), but it is set in Kazakhstan not Kyrgyzstan (and indeed was second on my Kazakhstan list, after Solzhenitsyn). Piebald Dog Running Along the Shore / Spotted Dog Running Along the Seashore (“Деңиз Бойлой Жорткон Ала Дөбөт” in Kyrgyz, “Пегий пес, бегущий краем моря” in Russian) is set among the Nivkh people who live on the Russian shores of the Sea of Okhotsk.

Thanks to Aitmatov’s dominance, it is a rather male list this week. The top woman writer in Kyrgyz is generally acknowledged to be Zuura Soorobaeva (1924-2012), but none of her work has been translated into English as far as I can tell, and she does not show up on the book logging sites.

I do find books in English by a couple of political analysts, Cholpon Orozobekova and Syinat Sultanalieva. There is also a three-volume anthology of Kyrgyz women’s poetry translated into English.

Next we go to a different part of Asia, Hong Kong; then Latin America for Nicaragua and Paraguay; then back to Europe for Bulgaria.

The best known books set in each country: Libya (and my own encounter with Colonel Gaddafi)

Posted on 14 June 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Libya should need little introduction. On the southern side of the Mediterranean, between Tunisia and Algeria on the one side and Egypt on the other, it was part of the Roman Empire, then of the Ottoman Empire, and then under Italian influence in the mid twentieth century before becoming independent in 1951. The independent kingdom lasted only 18 years, and in 1969 was overthrown by army officer Muammar Gaddafi, not yet thirty years old, who ruled for 42 years until he was in turn overthrown in 2011. He established a personality cult and was notorious as a funder and supporter of terrorism in Western Europe in the 1980s, though reputedly changed his ways later in his time in power.

I myself had a close encounter with Gaddafi in July 2010, at the African Union summit in Uganda which I attended as part of the delegation of Southern Sudan (yes, really). We were milling around the buffet tables beside Lake Victoria finding our lunch, when we became aware of a biggish crowd, focussed on a single individual, approaching us from the main meeting tent. It was not difficult to see who was at the centre of this group, and I got a couple of pictures as he came towards where we were standing, before he swept past us.

It was the Colonel himself, in green, surrounded by bodyguards. He was deep in conversation with President Ahmed Abdallah Mohamed Sambi of the Comoros (in green and white headscarf). The Libyan regime had put up a lot of the funding for the summit, with large billboards all over Kampala and Entebbe expressing the continent’s gratitude to him in return. (I was using my much-loathed Android HTC Desire for photos at the time, so my photos are rather crappy.)

Less than a year after I saw him by the lake, Gaddafi was overthrown, and a few months later he was captured hiding in a sewer and brutally killed. Since his overthrow, there has been an ongoing political and human security crisis in the country, with different factions in control of different regions, and everyone interested in getting hold of the oil.

In one notorious incident in September 2012, militants attacked the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, resulting in the deaths of the U.S. Ambassador and three other Americans. This awful event was shamefully weaponised by Republicans in the U.S. Congress as part of their campaign against the then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, and the Obama administration. We’ll come back to it.

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 Libya.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened In Benghazi	Mitchell Zuckoff	25,968	1,010	1,388
The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between	Hisham Matar	16,390	873	1,909
In the Country of Men	Hisham Matar	7,872	1,396	888
My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route	Sally Hayden	1,978	118	485
Gold Dust	Ibrahim al-Koni	2,240	108	170
Gaddafi’s Harem: The Story of a Young Woman and the Abuses of Power in Libya	Annick Cojean	3,102	117	86
The Dictator’s Last Night	Yasmina Khadra	1,577	106	170
The Bleeding of the Stone	Ibrahim al-Koni	1,657	94	129

As occasionally happens, the three systems have served up three different winners. This week’s Goodreads winner, and the overall winner, is 13 Hours, an account of the 2012 Benghazi attack which draws extensively on the recollections of the security contractors who were charged with defending the American compound. (It was later adapted into an unsuccessful film.)

This week’s StoryGraph and LibraryThing winners are both by Hisham Matar, who identifies as a Libyan writer; though he was born in New York, his family is Libyan and the country informs his writing. Like 13 Hours, The Return is also set in 2012 and is Matar’s non-fiction memoir of searching for his father, who disappeared in 1990 and was never found, presumably murdered by the Gaddafi regime. In the Company of Men, his first book, is about a young boy growing up in Tripoli under the Gaddafi regime.

My Fourth Time, We Drowned, by an Irish journalist, turns to a later political crisis, documenting irregular migration through Libya in the words of migrants in the camps there.

Ibrahim al-Koni now lives in Switzerland but was born and brought up in Libya. Gold Dust and The Bleeding of the Stone are both novels about nomads in the Libyan desert.

Gaddafi’s Harem and The Dictator’s Last Night are both non-fiction accounts of different unpleasant aspects of the Gaddafi regime.

Integrating the StoryGraph numbers resulted in Gaddafi’s own Green Book losing out to The Bleeding of the Stone for eighth place. There were some other quirks. Mohammed Alnaas’ graphic novel خبزعلى طاولة الخال ميلاد (“Bread on Uncle Milad’s Table“, not yet translated into English, though available in French) did very well on Goodreads and badly on the other two; and several books, most notably the YA fantasy adventure Hunt for the Devil’s Dragon, by Mariane Hering and Wayne Thomas Batson, did well on LibraryThing and badly on the other two.

I had to disqualify a lot of books that were just about North Africa or the Arab world in general, and also a couple more by Hisham Matar that are simply set elsewhere. None of those calls was difficult to make.

The top work that I found by a Libyan woman and set in Libya was The Slave Yards by Najwa bin Shatwan (or Najwa Binshatwan). It looks worth checking out.

I don’t have much on my own shelves about Libya; most notably the passage in Terre des Hommes where Antoine de Saint-Exupéry writes about his plane crashing in the desert, and a memorable chapter by Kate Adie in her autobiography.

Coming next: Kyrgyzstan, then Hong Kong, Nicaragua and Paraguay.

The best known books set in each country: Turkmenistan

Posted on 7 June 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Turkmenistan is one of the five Central Asian former Soviet states, sometimes collectively referred to as “the ‘Stans”, though strictly that would cover Afghanistan and Pakistan as well (of course, some would argue that Afghanistan is better understood in the context of Central Asia anyway). It is immediately east of the Caspian Sea, and is best known as a source of fossil fuels and horses. Like most of the other Central Asian states, its language is closely related to Turkish.

After the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, Turkmenistan was ruled by Saparmurat Niyazov, known as Türkmenbaşy, who established an unusual personality cult, After his death his close ally Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow ruled until 2022, when he partially handed over to his son Serdar Berdimuhamedow. It is described as one of the least democratic regimes in the world.

Turkmenistan’s biggest tourist attraction used to be a 60 metre wide natural crater near Darvaza filled with burning natural gas, known as the Door to Hell. However the government has taken action to put the flames out, so you’ll have to look elsewhere for the entrance to hell, and go to Turkmenistan for the horses. (Or the fossil fuels.)

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
The Tale of Aypi	Ak Welsapar	224	35	95
Joe and Azat	Jesse Lonergan	88	24	18
Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan	Adrienne Lynn Edgar	64	36	8
Daily Life in Turkmenbashy’s Golden Age: A Methodologically Unsound Study of Interactions Between the Tribal Peoples of America and Turkmenistan	Sam Tranum	91	12	8
Death of the Snake Catcher: Short Stories	Ak Welsapar	32	11	17
Sacred Horses: Memoirs of a Turkmen Cowboy	Jonathan Evan Maslow	40	16	6
Ruhnama: The Book of the Soul	Saparmurat Niyazov	68	6	5
Unknown Sands: Journeys Around the World’s Most Isolated Country	John W. Kropf	46	26	1

I commented a few months back that Tajikistan seemed to be the least well known of the Central Asian states; well, I was wrong. Turkmenistan is the most literarily obscure country I have covered so far, comfortably outdoing Togo, the previous record holder, in terms of how little known the top book is on the three online systems. Perhaps the oppressive political context dampens creativity from locals and visitors alike.

This week’s winner, The Tale of Aypi, is a short magical realist story about a fisherman and a vengeful ghost on the shores of the Caspian Sea. The author was expelled from Turkmenistan in 1993 and has lived in Sweden since 1994. He also has a short story collection, Death of the Snake Catcher, on the list.

The other Turkmen writer on the list is Türkmenbaşy himself, Saparmurat Niyazov, whose philosophical text Ruhnama was part of his personality cult and was routinely inflicted on foreigners showing even a hint of polite interest in the country.

Tribal Nation, the winner on LibraryThing, is a historical account of how Turkmenistan was formed under the Soviet Union. Adrienne Lynn Edgar is the only woman on this week’s list.

The other four are foreigner-goes-to-funny-country books, though it’s worth noting that Joe and Azat is a graphic novel by the author of Drome, and Sacred Horses concentrates on the horses.

Integrating the StoryGraph numbers did not change the top eight, or the winner, which was far ahead on both StoryGraph and Goodreads.

There are many many books covering Turkmenistan as part of a wider look at Central Asia or indeed the former Soviet Union, and I disqualified them all. The only other one that I scratched my head over was Turkmeniscam: How Washington Lobbyists Fought to Flack for a Stalinist Dictatorship, by Ken Silverstein, but on closer examination it appears to be mainly set in the lobbying world of Washington DC.

Wikipedia tells me that the best known woman writer from Turkmenistan is Towshan (or Toushan, or Tovshan) Esenova (1915-1988), but none of her work appears to have been translated into English, and anyway she mainly wrote poetry and plays, which tend to do less well in my system (another methodological flaw, I admit).

I don’t normally count travel books here, but I just want to note that the Bradt Guide to Turkmenistan is by the former British ambassador Paul Brummell, who as an undergraduate founded the Cambridge University Diplomacy Society (dedicated to the boardgame, not the profession). I succeeded him in 1987 as its second president. He is currently the British ambassador to Latvia.

Some geographical diversity coming up: Libya next, then rounding off Central Asia with Kyrgyzstan, then Hong Kong (counted separately from China because I’m using Worldometer numbers), then Nicaragua.

The best known books set in each country: Laos

Posted on 31 May 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Laos is a landlocked country in south-east Asia, bordered by Vietnam to the East, Thailand to the west, Cambodia to the south and Myanmar and China to the north. I have not been there myself, but my wife visited with Oxfam in late 2019. A French colony, it became independent in 1953 but then was the scene of a brutal civil war from 1959 to 1975 between Royalists, backed by the Americans, and the Communists, who eventually won and are still in power, fifty years on. Reputedly it is the most bombed country in the world, with the Americans having dropped roughly a ton of explosives per person during the war.

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 Laos.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
The Coroner’s Lunch	Colin Cotterill	15,389	1,829	1,551
Thirty-Three Teeth	Colin Cotterill	6,470	910	630
Disco for the Departed	Colin Cotterill	4,919	681	504
Anarchy and Old Dogs	Colin Cotterill	4,326	633	452
Run Me to Earth	Paul Yoon	3,673	254	840
Curse of the Pogo Stick	Colin Cotterill	3,715	528	394
The Merry Misogynist	Colin Cotterill	3,433	456	350
Love Songs from a Shallow Grave	Colin Cotterill	3,165	389	328

Strong domination for the popular series of mystery novels about coroner Dr. Siri Paiboun, set immediately after the Communist takeover. I am not completely sure if Run Me to Earth, a story of three boys growing up in Laos and what happens to them after the war, fits my geographical criteria, but is seems more likely than not. It appears on the list thanks to StoryGraph numbers; otherwise the eighth enrty would have been the eighth Siri Paiboun book, Slash and Burn.

I disqualified a lot of books about Laotian refugees / migrants in the USA and Canada, and they were mostly by women: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman; How to Pronounce Knife, by Souvankham Thammavongsa; several by Kao Kalia Yang – I think the one about her mother, Where Rivers Part, probably would have matched my geographical criteria, but the numbers were a long way down. The top book set in Laos by a woman actually born in Laos was the children’s tale, Nine-In-One, Grr! Grr!, by Blia Xiong.

Turkmenistan next, then Libya, then Kyrgyzstan and then Hong Kong, which gets counted separately by Worldometer.

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.

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