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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Somalia (including Somaliland).
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War
Mark Bowden
68,067
4,798
A House in the Sky
Amanda Lindhout
70,898
1,187
Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth
Warsan Shire
21,170
513
In the Company of Heroes: The Personal Story Behind Black Hawk Down
Michael J. Durant
5,877
533
Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head
Warsan Shire
9,123
239
Desert Dawn
Waris Dirie
4,340
468
Call Me American: A Memoir
Abdi Nor Iftin
4,561
233
The Orchard of Lost Souls
Nadifa Mohamed
1,822
216
I’m going to start providing summaries of the winning books (should probably have done that much sooner). Black Hawk Down, published in 1999, is about the unsuccessful 1993 US military raid in Mogadishu to try and capture a local warlord. It was later adapted into a film directed by Ridley Scott.
It’s a bit unfortunate that three of the top four books, including the top two, are about violent foreign experiences of Somalia rather than giving voice to the people themselves, and I also freely admit that I’ve stretched a point with Warsan Shire’s two poetry collections – on a quick scan, they did seem to be well grounded in Somalia as a location, but I did not go through and tally pages. The Orchard of Lost Souls represents Somaliland here; hopefully some day we’ll be able to tally it separately.
I disqualified ten books. Ayaan Hirsi Ali leaves Somalia early in her autobiography, Infidel, and does not return; the second volume of her autobiography, Nomad has her travelling further afield. Desert Flower, Waris Dine’s better known book, is mostly set in the UK. When Stars Are Scattered, by Victoria Jamieson, and City of Thorns, by Ben Rawlence, are mostly in Kenya. Don’t Tell Me You’re Afraid, by Giuseppe Catozzella, is about the refugee experience en route to Europe. Djibouti, by Elmore Leonard, is mostly set in, er, Djibouti. Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men is mainly set in the UK, and her Black Mamba Boy is mostly in Yemen. Ilhan Omar’s This Is What America Looks Like is more about her life in the USA than her life before.
Next up: Senegal, Romania, Guatemala and the Netherlands.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Chile.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
The House of the Spirits
Isabel Allende
305,449
14,895
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Pablo Neruda
79,849
4,108
Violeta
Isabel Allende
101,789
1,330
Of Love and Shadows
Isabel Allende
36,211
3,327
Inés of My Soul
Isabel Allende
32,358
2,778
Maya’s Notebook
Isabel Allende
32,002
1,246
My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile
Isabel Allende
11,999
2,589
100 Love Sonnets
Pablo Neruda
18,311
1,695
There’s a very clear winner here, and equally clear domination of the list by a single author – and that doesn’t include the books by Isabel Allende that I disqualified because as far as I could tell there was not sufficient Chile-based content; they were Daughter of Fortune, Eva Luna, Paula, A Long Petal of the Sea, Portrait in Sepia, City of the Beasts, The Stories of Eva Luna, In the Midst of Winter and The Infinite Plan.
I disqualified another six, which I think all have Chilean authors but are not set there. Roberto Bolaño may be Chilean, but his two best known books, 2666 and The Savage Detectives, are set in Mexico. When We Cease to Understand the World, by Benjamín Labatut, is about scientists globally. I credited In Patagonia, by Bruce Chatwin, to Argentina a while back. Luis Sepúlveda’s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories is explicitly set in Ecuador, and his The Story of a Seagull and the Cat Who Taught Her to Fly sounds like it could be set anywhere with seagulls.
I admit I’ve stretched a point with a couple of those that I allowed onto the list: I suspect that Neruda’s poetry is not full of explicit geographical references, but it can hardly be set anywhere other than Chile; and I gave Maya’s Notebook the benefit of the doubt as the framing narrative is definitely in Chile even if most of the book is flashbacks.
That was unexpectedly tough, and I think they will get tougher as I go on. Next up are Somalia, Senegal, Romania and Guatemala.
Apples Are from Kazakhstan: The Land that Disappeared
Christopher Robbins
1,309
264
A Shadow Intelligence
Oliver Harris
1,821
84
The Dead Lake
Hamid Ismailov
959
112
The Faculty of Useless Knowledge
Yury Dombrovsky
376
186
I was a bit surprised by the winner this time, but it is indeed firmly set in Kazakhstan, so it matches my criterion. It’s really unusual for such a well-known book to have more LibraryThing owners than Goodreads raters – the ratio is usually more like 10 or 20 to 1 in favour of GR. It’s also getting increasingly rare that I have read the top book in the list – the last one was Sri Lanka a month ago, the one before that was Saudi Arabia in April.
There is a distinct lack of Kazakh writers on this list. Chingiz Aitmatoc is Kyrgyz, and Hamis Ismailov is Uzbek (though born in what is now Kyrgyzstan). The top Kazakh writer from my survey was some way below my threshold; it is Mukhamet Shayakhmetov, whose best known book is The Silent Steppe.
I’m a little uncertain about a couple of these. Half a World Away starts in the USA, and A Shadow Intelligence in the UK. But my assessment from what I could fins about them online is that probably more than 50% is set in Kazakhstan in both cases.
I disqualified ten books this time. The top book that I disqualified just has one character from Kazakhstan, and as far as I can tell isn’t set there at all; it is The Zahir by Paulo Coelho. Most of the others cover Kazakhstan as part of Central Asia, of the old Mongol Empire, or indeed the whole post-Soviet region. They were The Silk Roads, by Peter Frankopan; Bones of the Hills, by Conn Iggulden; The New Silk Roads, by Peter Frankopan; Sovietistan, by Erika Fatland; The Lost Heart of Asia, by Colin Thubron (which I have read); The Border, by Erika Flatland; On the Trail of Genghis Khan, by Tim Cope; The Catch Me if You Can, by Jessica Nabongo; and
The Tombs by Clive Cussler and The Good Angel of Death, by Andreï Kourkov, both have their protagonists on odysseys that end up in Kazakhstan, much more than half way through the book. Jamilia, by Chingiz Aitmatov, is set in Kyrgyzstan, but I think some taggers are confused about the difference. (I don’t think any of Ken MacLeod’s books qualifies either, and anyway GR and LT users have not tagged them.)
Coming next: Chile, Somalia, Senegal and then our first European country for a while, Romania.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Chad.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
The Roots of Heaven
Romain Gary
2,653
526
Rain School
James Rumford
803
472
Told by Starlight in Chad
Joseph Brahim Seid
160
36
African Rice Heart
Emily Star Wilkens
72
10
To Catch a Dictator: The Pursuit and Trial of Hissène Habré
Reed Brody
55
10
The Trial of Hissène Habré: How the People of Chad Brought a Tyrant to Justice
Celeste Hicks
18
6
France’s Wars in Chad: Military Intervention and Decolonization in Africa
Nathaniel K. Powell
7
5
The Plagues of Friendship
Sem Miantoloum Beasnael
4
4
This was unusually tough. Several users of both Goodreads and LibraryThing have used the “chad” tag for a lot of their books which have absolutely nothing to do with the country, and it must therefore refer to something else. Several political analyses had a handful of owners on LibraryThing, but none on Goodreads. This is the first time that I’ve had to go down to single figures on either system. I’m not going to list the disqualified books because there are too many of them and most of them are completely irrelevant.
Today’s winner was famously adapted into a 1958 film starring Errol Flynn, and it sounds interesting enough to track down. Two Chadian writers appear in today’s list. As well as the non-fiction, there’s also a high-scoring children’s book and a missionary testimony. But I think that all in all, Chad is the most literarily obscure country I have yet covered. I am sure that there will be more.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Malawi.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope
William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer
31,842
2,808
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (for younger readers)
William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer
11,205
1,722
The Lower River
Paul Theroux
2,957
375
Galimoto
Karen Lynn Williams
332
880
The Heaven Shop
Deborah Ellis
1,233
234
Laugh with the Moon
Shana Burg
1,148
170
Venture to the Interior
Laurens van der Post
296
331
Jungle Lovers
Paul Theroux
210
110
This week’s winner, and second place, go to the inventor William Kamkwamba whose memoir in its original form is far ahead of its own YA version, which in turn is way ahead of everything else. Apparently it is set reading in a number of American educational institutions, which must help the numbers.
Apart from Kamkwamba, whose story is co-written with an American journalist, there is no Malawian writer in the above list. The top Malawian writer that I found is the poet Upile Chisala, but I’m afraid I disqualified her top book, soft magic, because it seems to be more about the diaspora experience, though I may be incorrect. Her other books, nectar and a fire like you seem to have more Malawian content but were just pipped by Paul Theroux’s Jungle Lovers.
Speaking of which, I had forgotten that American author Paul Theroux has a personal connection with Malawi. One of his sons was in the same year as me at the same Cambridge college. We did not know each other at all well – I think the one time we particularly interacted was just after our graduation, when I found myself moving into a college room that he was hastily vacating.
I disqualified eleven books for being clearly less than 50% set in Malawi. I have noted soft magic above; the others are Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, by Alexandra Fuller; Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town, by Paul Theroux (again); The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After, by Clemantine Wamariya; Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, by Alexandra Fuller; Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone, by Martin Dugard; Long Way Down, by Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman; In a Strange Room, by Damon Galgu; Thin Air: A Ghost Story, by Michelle Paver (which seems to be set entirely in the Himalayas); My Other Life, by Paul Theroux (yet again); and The Ukimwi Road: From Kenya to Zimbabwe, by Dervla Murphy.
Coming next: Zambia next door, then Chad, Kazakhstan and Chile.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Taiwan. I did reflect on whether or not Taiwan counts as a country, but I plan to include a few other contested cases as I get down the list, so here we go.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
The Astonishing Color of After
Emily X.R. Pan
33,411
1,306
Loveboat, Taipei
Abigail Hing Wen
20,283
415
Notes of a Crocodile
Qiu Miaojin
8,397
487
Taipei
Tao Lin
7,857
420
Bestiary
K-Ming Chang
3,973
342
The Membranes
Chi Ta-wei
7,086
188
Dumpling Days
Grace Lin
2,687
305
The Man with the Compound Eyes
Wu Ming-Yi
3,180
236
There were a couple of these that I was not certain about, but it’s clear that The Astonishing Color of After is mostly set in Taiwan, and that it’s ahead on Goodreads and way ahead on LibraryThing.
Despite its title, I wasn’t completely sure if more than 50% of Tao Lin’s Taipei is set on the island, and likewise Bestiary which seems to be the reminiscences of Taiwanese-American women, but mainly about Taiwan. I’ve given them the benefit of the doubt.
I did exclude half a dozen. Stay True by Hua Hsu, The Year of the Dog by Grace Lin, Fresh Off the Boat by Eddie Huang and Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho all seem to be entirely about the Taiwanese-American emigrant experience. Daughters of Shandong by Eve J. Chung is mainly set on the mainland. Peach Blossom Spring by Melissa Fu is set both on the mainland and in the USA.
You may quibble that The Fountains of Paradise is mostly set on a fictional island called Taprobane; but Taprobane is in almost exactly the same place as Sri Lanka in our world, and it’s pretty clear where the writer had in mind when he was writing the book. Also I love it.
It’s surprising for the top book on my metric to be only in second place on both Goodreads and LibraryThing. Indeed there is an unusual divide between the two systems here: Michael Ondaatje is relatively way more popular than usual on LT, while the women writers on the list are relatively way more popular than usual on GR.
I must say that the book I most want to read off this list is probably Wave, which sounds interesting but tough, as Huck Finn said about Pilgrim’s Progress. I am not completely sure if it passes my 50% test, but it seems more likely than not.
I disqualified only two books this time (see also China, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, Cameroon and Australia). They were both by Michael Ondaatje, who attracts “sri lanka” tags for obvious reasons. One was The English Patient, which actually outranked everything else by miles, but has no internal reference to Sri Lanka at all, and the other was The Cat’s Table, which would otherwise have been just below Anil’s Ghost and just above The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Burkina Faso.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
American Spy
Lauren Wilkinson
30,165
907
The Water Princess
Susan Verde
3,269
1,113
Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman
Malidoma Patrice Somé
1,733
382
The Weight of Sand: My 450 Days Held Hostage in the Sahara
Edith Blais
4409
48
Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle
Thomas Sankara
1,725
101
Ritual: Power, Healing and Community
Malidoma Patrice Somé
548
174
The Red Bicycle
Jude Isabella
429
165
Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution, 1983-87
Thomas Sankara
498
131
This was surprisingly easy to compile. The figure of the short-lived 1980s president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, looms over the country’s cultural footprint; two of his political texts are on this list, and the protagonist of this week’s winning novel fictionally seduces him while colluding in his overthrow. We also have two children’s books, two anthropological studies, and a real life hostage drama.
I disqualified only three books this week. I don’t know why anyone tagged Flowers from the Storm, by Laura Kinsale, as being relevant to Burkina Faso; it seems to be set in England and Wales. (Possibly the person using the tag acquired or read their copy of the book while travelling there.) Two other books cover Burkina Faso along with other African countries: Empire of Cotton: A Global History, by Sven Beckert, and White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa, by Susan Williams.
Coming next: Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Malawi and Zambia.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Mali.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Sahara
Clive Cussler
60,005
4,040
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts
Joshua Hammer
12,095
1,721
Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali
(anonymous)
2,889
748
Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years With a Midwife in Mali
Kris Holloway
4,958
399
Segu
Maryse Condé
1,973
641
The Black Pages
Nnedi Okorafor
4,215
90
I Lost My Tooth In Africa
Penda Diakité
517
629
The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu: The Quest for This Storied City and the Race to Save its Treasures
Charlie English
1,010
252
After a couple of countries which were harder work, I was glad that Mali turned out to be fairly straightforward – the city of Timbuktu gives it a certain brand recognition. I wasn’t completely sure about this week’s winner at first, a typically convoluted Cussler tale which climaxes with an absurd revelation about the fate of Abraham Lincoln, but a speedy page count revealed that it does indeed appear to be more than 50% set in Mali, so it qualifies. Glad to see the traditional Malian epic Sundiata doing well also.
I did disqualify ten books. With a particularly heavy heart, I ruled out Scales of Gold by Dorothy Dunnett, because although more than half of it is set in West Africa, I think less than half is set in what’s now Mali. Tremendous book though.
Similarly, I was not quite sure about Masquerade, by O.O. Sangoyomi, but I think that more than half of it is set in the fictional city of Ṣàngótẹ̀ and I’m pretty sure that’s meant to be in what’s now Nigeria. The Bitter Side of Sweet, by Tara Sullivan, is set in Côte d’Ivoire. The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill, is set in Canada. Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law, by Haben Girma, is set in the USA and the protagonist is Eritrean by origin, so I don’t know why people connect it with Mali. The Green Road, by Anne Enright, is mostly set in Ireland.
The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński, Leo Africanus, by Amin Maalouf, Sahara, by Michael Palin and China’s Second Continent, by Howard W. French, all cover numerous countries, with much less than half of each book set in Mali.
Coming next: Burkina Faso, Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Malawi.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Syria.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow
Zoulfa Katouh
91,116
890
Sea Prayer
Khaled Hosseini
59,241
818
L’Arabe du futur 2
Riad Sattouf
11,251
430
Come, Tell Me How You Live
Agatha Christie Mallowan
4,918
965
Death Is Hard Work
Khaled Khalifa
4,548
291
Only five this time. As with Niger a few weeks ago, I had to disqualify a lot of books (sixteen in this case) which are (at least in part) about Syria, but not actually set there, most of which dealt with the experience of Syria refugees trying to make their way to and in other countries during the recent war. My rule is that if I have had to disqualify a large number of books before I reach the fifth that is actually set in the country, I leave it there. Normally I would list the top eight books.
I’m glad to see a novel by a Syrian woman actually topping the chart this week, though it does way better on Goodreads. You may be surprised to see Agatha Christie making an appearance; this is a non-fiction account of her experiences observing her husband’s archaeological digging, and it is the top book set in Syria on LibraryThing, though much further behind on Goodreads.
I ruled out the first volume of the graphic novel series L’Arabe du future, which is set in several different countries. However the second volume does seem to be mainly set in Syria, so it’s on the list. Both are on my list of BDs to buy.
The top book on Goodreads with ‘Syria’ tags was Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers, and the top on LibraryThing was The Golem and the Jinni, by Helene Wecker, both of which are about the experience of Syrian immigrants in the USA; one non-fiction, the other fantasy. There were a few other non-fiction books looking at the region as a whole. I won’t list them all.
Coming next: Mali, Burkina Faso, Sri Lanka and (edge case, but it’s listed as a separate country in most lists) Taiwan.
