The best known books set in each country: Togo

Posted on 12 April 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Postponed from last week.

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Greece

Posted on 5 April 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Portugal

Posted on 29 March 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Azerbaijan

Posted on 22 March 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on 15 March 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Sweden

Posted on 8 March 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on 1 March 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Tajikistan

Posted on 22 February 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Cuba

Posted on 15 February 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Honduras

Posted on 25 January 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on 18 January 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on 11 January 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Jordan

Posted on 4 January 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Belgium

Posted on 28 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

(Note a couple of unicorns in there.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Haiti

Posted on 21 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: South Sudan

Posted on 14 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Tunisia

Posted on 7 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Bolivia

Posted on 30 November 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Burundi

Posted on 23 November 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Rwanda

Posted on 16 November 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Benin

Posted on 9 November 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on 2 November 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Zimbabwe – and a note on my methodology

Posted on 26 October 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Before I get into this, I was challenged over the methodology of these posts last week by Dilman Dila, who pointed out, quite fairly,

the lists are misleading, especially in relation to the African countries, and only perpetuates systemic and platform / corporate biases against African authors. Eg, the Uganda list doesn’t have Okot p’Bitek and the Kenya list doesn’t have Ngugi, though both names are in the Top 10 of Goodreads list!

All feedback is welcome, and this spurs me to give a bit more detail about what I am doing here.

The lists I publish for each country are of the books which are more than 50% set in that country, and have the highest number of owners on LibraryThing and the highest number of raters on Goodreads, taking the geometric average of the two figures. I will generally do eight books for each country, unless there are very few, in which case I will stop at five. I may not always make it to five in the future, but so far it’s proved reachable every time.

At the early stages, I was listing all of the books tagged with the name of each country on LibraryThing and Goodreads. But I realised that in a significant number of cases, a lot of books get tagged as relevant to country X without the majority of the text actually being set there – sometimes the author has close links, sometimes the plot has a small element set in country X, sometimes it’s just reader ignorance. (You can imagine what I faced with Guinea, which is coming next week.)

This means that my lists differ from those that Goodreads and LibraryThing serve up for each country, which rank books by the number of times a book has been tagged as relevant to country X. I have deliberately chosen a different metric, taking the number of people who have rated (GR) or own (LT) a particular book, as long as more than half of it is set in country X. (You can also dig out the number of people who own a book on Goodreads, or who have rated it on LibraryThing, but it is more effort.)

So I record the extent to which books set in country X have penetrated Goodreads and LibraryThing, ie by and large the Western English-speaking world (though Goodreads has some interesting pockets of support for other languages); but in the relevant entries, I will also note with regret where these do not include indigenous authors and will suggest further reading – as I did with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o for Kenya.

For Uganda, the Ugandan writer Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi got two books in the top eight, and I’m afraid that the top book by Okot p’Bitek, a combined edition of his poems Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol, scores only 764 raters on Goodreads and 156 owners on LibrayThing, some way below the threshold to make my list.

Often, particularly in Africa, colonialist narratives have prevailed, and I hope that what I am doing is a first step to mapping out where that is worse and where it is better. (I was pleasantly surprised by Cambodia, for instance.)

This is a start, not an end, and perhaps I’ll be able to run a different methodology some time in the future. And don’t let me stop anyone else from looking for an improved version.

Having said that, on to this week’s country, Zimbabwe. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set there.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood	Alexandra Fuller	57,199	3,669
The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm	Nancy Farmer	16,328	6,042
Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters: An African Tale	John Steptoe	20,967	4,628
Nervous Conditions	Tsitsi Dangarembga	22,417	2,262
The Grass Is Singing	Doris Lessing	14,926	2,330
We Need New Names	NoViolet Bulawayo	23,165	1,487
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa	Peter Godwin	9,454	939
Martha Quest	Doris Lessing	2,642	1,125

This week’s winner, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, is a childhood memoir of growing up in a white farmer family in Rhodesia in the dying days of white rule, and what happened after the war was lost. I checked, and although the Fullers started in England and ended up moving to Malawi and then Zambia, that’s well after the halfway point in the book so it definitely qualifies. The LibraryThing winner, The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm, is a children’s science fiction novel set in a future Zimbabwe.

The top book set in Zimbabwe by a Zimbabwe-born author is Nervous Conditions, by Tsitsi Dangarembga, a semi-autobiographical novel about growing up in Rhodesia in the 1960s. The nearest miss – which would have been ninth on the list if I went any further – was Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo, a fantasy satire that is clearly about Zimbabwe.

I disqualified eight books. The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins, is mostly set in England and I don’t know why a number of readers have tagged it as relating to Zimbabwe. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, by Alexander McCall Smith, is firmly set in Botswana. The Man in the Brown Suit, by Agatha Christie, has about 20% of the plot in Rhodesia, with the rest in South Africa, England and at sea. The location of King Solomon’s Mines, by H. Rider Haggard, is disputed but in any case less than half of the book takes place there.

More than half of I Will Always Write Back: How One Letter Changed Two Lives, by Caitlin Alifirenka and Martin Ganda, is set in the USA (I found a copy and counted the pages). Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, by Alexandra Fuller, seems to be more Kenya than Rhodesia. I awarded A Girl Named Disaster, by Nancy Farmer, to Mozambique a few months back. And the majority of Scribbling the Cat, by Alexandra Fuller again, seems to be set just across the border in Zambia and I counted it in my Zambia list published (belatedly) last week.

This is the first in a run of five African countries (not sure if I have stated this previously, but in principle I am running through the countries of the world in order of population). The next four are Guinea (Conakry), Benin, Rwanda and Burundi.

The best known books set in each country: Zambia

Posted on 19 October 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

I realised to my dismay that I had skipped Zambia back in August, when it should have been between Malawi and Chad. I had done all the calculations, just failed to write the post and skipped from its neighbour to the more northern country. I’ll restore it to the correct order in my list of countries at the end of the post.

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Mrs. Pollifax on Safari	Dorothy Gilman	8,096	939
The Old Drift	Namwali Serpell	7,413	767
Scribbling the Cat	Alexandra Fuller	5,124	750
The Eye of the Leopard	Henning Mankell	2,059	646
The Eye of the Elephant: An Epic Adventure in the African Wilderness	Delia Owens	3,249	221
The Garden of Burning Sand	Corban Addison	3,575	152
Beautiful Blackbird	Ashley Bryan	788	603
The Africa House: The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream	Christina Lamb	832	254

This week’s winner, Mrs Pollifax on Safari, is the fifth in a series of novels about a grandmother who gets recruited by the CIA for a series of unlikely missions, in this case preventing the assassination of the President of Zambia. (Who in real life died in 2021, aged 97, though he had given up power after losing elections thirty years earlier.) I read a couple of them when I was a teenager, but not this one.

The second placed book on my list, The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2020, and worthily so in my view. It is the top book set in Zambia by a Zambian writer.

I am not completely sure about Beautiful Blackbird, by Ashley Bryan, but it is heavily marketed as being based on a Zambian folk tale, so I have included it.

I disqualified a bunch of books. Several were by Alexandra Fuller, who has spent a lot of her life in Zambia; but looking through the summaries of her memoirs, as far as I can tell Scribbling the Cat is the only one where the majority of the book is set in the country, and I disqualified Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, Leaving Before the Rains Come and Travel Light, Move Fast. All great titles though.

Wilbur Smith’s When the Lion Feeds seems to be mainly set in South Africa, or at least as much there as Zambia. Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone by Martin Dugard includes the territory of what is now Zambia as part of the story, but I think less than half. The same – I think, but I have not checked fully – for Out of Darkness, Shining Light, by Petina Gappah, which is about the transportation of Livingstone’s remains to the coast, and I think is more in what’s now Tanzania.

A couple more covered more African countries than just Zambia, including Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa by Dambisa Moyo and China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa by Howard W. French.

Normal service will be resumed next week with Zimbabwe, followed by Guinea (Conakry), Benin and Rwanda.

The best known books set in each country: Cambodia

Posted on 12 October 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers	Loung Ung	53,058	2,414
The Rent Collector	Camron Wright	57,712	718
In the Shadow of the Banyan	Vaddey Ratner	21,825	1,091
Never Fall Down	Patricia McCormick	12,254	737
The Road of Lost Innocence: The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine	Somaly Mam	8,739	510
When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge	Chanrithy Him	4,980	461
The Disappeared	Kim Echlin	3,752	409
Children of the River	Linda Crew	1,986	752

I’ve had a number of countries in this list with a particular national trauma that dominates the literature about them, but I think Cambodia is unusual in the proportion of such books written by actual Cambodians rather than well-meaning Americans, and which are set in the middle of the horror rather than in its aftermath. You could find that depressing, but I find it rather admirable.

This week’s overall winner, First They Killed My Father, is a first-person account from a child’s point of view of the violence meted out by the regime on pretty much anyone. Its historicity has been challenged, but it clearly carries an emotional punch.

This week’s Goodreads winner, The Rent Collector, is unfortunately by an American writer trying to imagine the situation of poor children in Phnom Penh, and doesn’t sound as good. I scores remarkably well on Goodreads relative to its LibraryThing ownership.

I disqualified only one book this week, Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So, which is set among the Cambodian diaspora in the USA.

Other countries where I only disqualified one book: India, the USA, Nigeria, Russia, Iran, the UK, Spain, Iraq.

Countries where I have not disqualified any books: Japan, Egypt, DRC, Vietnam, Colombia.

Coming next: a run of African countries, Zimbabwe, Guinea (Conakry), Benin and Rwanda.

The best known books set in each country: Ecuador

Posted on 5 October 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Galápagos	Kurt Vonnegut Jr.	87,317	8,121
Wish You Were Here	Jodi Picoult	281,521	2,100
Through Gates of Splendor	Elisabeth Elliot	31,697	3,556
The Old Man Who Read Love Stories	Luis Sepúlveda	29,251	1,780
Shipped	Angie Hockman	71,391	555
Shadow of the Almighty	Elisabeth Elliot	11,200	2,245
End of the Spear	Steve Saint	12,308	1,078
Natural Selection	Elin Hilderbrand	61,553	126

This week’s winner, Vonnegut’s Galápagos, is one of four books on the list which are set on or around the eponymous islands. Unlike Wish You Were Here, Shipped and Natural Selection, it is not a contemporary novel about relationships, but a gloomy post-apocalyptic reflection on the end of humanity. Wish You Were Here, which is far ahead on Goodreads but well behind on LibraryThing, is set during the pandemic and so has a certain post-apocalyptic element too. Notable that Shipped and Natural Selection score really well on Goodreads and much less well on LibraryThing.

Three of the other four books on the list are about the life and legacy of Jim Elliott, an American missionary who was killed by annoyed indigenous people in 1956. The two by his widow score particularly well on LibraryThing, less so on Goodreads. Luis Sepúlveda is from Chile, so unfortunately none of the top eight is by an Ecuadorean writer. The top book by an Ecuadorean author set in Ecuador is Jawbone, by Mónica Ojeda.

I disqualified four books. The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina, by Zoraida Córdova, gave me the most trouble, but in the end I concluded that more than half of it is set in the USA where Orquídea’s four children live. As we have seen previously, The Old Patagonian Express, by Paul Theroux, covers several countries. The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, is about the immigrant experience in the USA. Everything Here Is Beautiful, by Mira T. Lee, is set in the USA and Switzerland (one of the main characters has an Ecuadorean boyfriend).

Coming next: Cambodia, Zimbabwe, Guinea (Conakry) and Benin – we’ll be back in Africa for a bit.

The best known books set in each country: the Netherlands

Posted on 28 September 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
The Diary of a Young Girl	Anne Frank	4,099,132	40,263
Girl with a Pearl Earring	Tracy Chevalier	771,655	17,980
The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom	Corrie ten Boom	350,199	11,617
The Dinner	Herman Koch	173,306	5,406
The Miniaturist	Jessie Burton	151,062	4,466
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister	Gregory Maguire	62,023	9,067
Girl in Hyacinth Blue	Susan Vreeland	40,849	3,270
Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family	Miep Gies	66,423	1,600

The winner here is not at all surprising, and in fact we’ve only had two countries where the winner had a higher ranking on both Goodreads and LibraryThing – the USA and the UK; and only another three where the winner had a higher ranking on LibraryThing but not Goodreads – Russia, Kazakhstan and Afghanistan. This week’s winner also won when I did this exercise in 2015.

In the improbable case that you don’t know, The Diary of a Young Girl is the journal of a Jewish teenager hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam during the Second World War, with her own family, another family and a random dentist taking refuge in an hidden annex to her father’s office. The diary ends abruptly, because they were all arrested in August 1944 and deported to a series of concentration camps, where all of them except Anne Frank’s father died. I’m personally fascinated by the story, and have written about the translation and about Anne’s writing here and here, and also about the dentist who she shared her room with.

Goodreads combines the numbers for all three editions of The Diary of a Young Girl currently on the market, while LibraryThing separates them out (and I have combined them above), but it would have been the winner anyway. Also worth noting perhaps that the eighth book is also about Anne Frank.

I disqualified six books this time. Less than half of The Fault in Our Stars by John Green is set in the Netherlands (though I believe that it too has a lot of Anne Frank in it). The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt is set in New York. Amsterdam by Ian McEwan, despite the title, is mainly set in London. Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali is set in many countries, though she does end up in the Netherlands. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell is actually set in Japan. And Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman is global in scope.

That’s it from Europe for a while; next are Ecuador, Cambodia, Zimbabwe and Guinea-Conakry.

The best known books set in each country: Guatemala

Posted on 21 September 2025 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 set in each country: Romania

Posted on 14 September 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Senegal

Posted on 7 September 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
So Long a Letter	Mariama Bâ	11,741	1,413
Three Strong Women	Marie NDiaye	4,230	688
God’s Bits of Wood	Ousmane Sembène	3,076	733
Redemption in Indigo	Karen Lord	2,944	382
Beyond the Door of No Return	David Diop	1,890	161
Xala	Ousmane Sembène	1,018	191
Pure Men	Mohamed Mbougar Sarr	2,640	50
Scarlet Song	Mariama Bâ	965	130

So Long a Letter is an epistolary novel whose narrator is a recently bereaved widow; it reflects on the situation of women in West African Muslim communities in the wake of colonialism. At 90 pages, it is very short. Like most of the above list, it was first published in French, as Une si longue lettre.

It’s interesting to see the list so dominated by Senegalese writers (with one Barbadian), and also interesting that this week’s winner is so far ahead of the field, with more raters/owners on either system than the next two combined.

The English translation of Pure Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr has not yet been published (which perhaps explains its rather low LibraryThing score) but is apparently on the way.

I disqualified a dozen books. Some of these are set in various countries (or mainly in the USA or UK) with Senegal getting a bigger or smaller look-in along the way; this applies to Swing Time, by Zadie Smith; How the Word Is Passed, by Clint Smith; The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński; The Message, by Ta-Nehisi Coates; Travels with Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuściński again; The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, by Issa Rae; Sahara, by Michael Palin; and China’s Second Continent, by Howard W. French.

Others, however, are very directly addressing the Senegalese emigrant experience, and while I made a judgement that less than 50% in each case is set in Senegal, I may be wrong. Those were At Night All Blood is Black, by David Diop; The Most Secret Memory of Men, by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr; Ambiguous Adventure, by Cheikh Hamidou Kane; and The Belly of the Atlantic, by Fatou Diome.

Away from Africa for the next few weeks, with Romania, Guatemala, the Netherlands and Ecuador.

From the Heart of Europe

Books, politics, languages and life

Tag Archives: top books in each country

The best known books set in each country: Togo

The best known books set in each country: Greece

The best known books set in each country: Portugal

The best known books set in each country: Azerbaijan

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

The best known books set in each country: Sweden

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

The best known books set in each country: Tajikistan

The best known books set in each country: Cuba

The best known books set in each country: Honduras

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Jordan

The best known books set in each country: Belgium

The best known books set in each country: Haiti

The best known books set in each country: South Sudan

The best known books set in each country: Tunisia

The best known books set in each country: Bolivia

The best known books set in each country: Burundi

The best known books set in each country: Rwanda

The best known books set in each country: Benin

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

The best known books set in each country: Zimbabwe – and a note on my methodology

The best known books set in each country: Zambia

The best known books set in each country: Cambodia

The best known books set in each country: Ecuador

The best known books set in each country: the Netherlands

The best known books set in each country: Guatemala

The best known books set in each country: Romania

The best known books set in each country: Senegal