The best known books set in each country: Serbia

Posted on 26 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Bulgaria

Posted on 19 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Paraguay

Posted on 12 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Nicaragua

Posted on 5 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Incorporating the StoryGraph numbers did not change the top eight.

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Hong Kong

Posted on 28 June 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Kyrgyzstan

Posted on 21 June 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

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

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

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on 14 June 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

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

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

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

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

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Turkmenistan

Posted on 7 June 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

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

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Laos

Posted on 31 May 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Belarus

Posted on 24 May 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Sierra Leone

Posted on 17 May 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Guatemala

Posted on 14 May 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books: the top 100 countries

Posted on 10 May 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few striking individual cases:

Continue reading →

The best known books set in each country: Switzerland

Posted on 10 May 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Austria

Posted on 3 May 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Hungary

Posted on 26 April 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Israel

Posted on 19 April 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Togo

Posted on 12 April 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Postponed from last week.

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Greece

Posted on 5 April 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

From the Heart of Europe

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Tag Archives: top books in each country

The best known books set in each country: Serbia

The best known books set in each country: Bulgaria

The best known books set in each country: Paraguay

The best known books set in each country: Nicaragua

The best known books set in each country: Hong Kong

The best known books set in each country: Kyrgyzstan

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

The best known books set in each country: Turkmenistan

The best known books set in each country: Laos

The best known books set in each country: Belarus

The best known books set in each country: Sierra Leone

The best known books set in each country: Guatemala

The best known books: the top 100 countries

The best known books set in each country: Switzerland

The best known books set in each country: Austria

The best known books set in each country: Hungary

The best known books set in each country: Israel

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