The best known books set in each country: Syria

Posted on 29 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow	Zoulfa Katouh	91,116	890
Sea Prayer	Khaled Hosseini	59,241	818
L’Arabe du futur 2	Riad Sattouf	11,251	430
Come, Tell Me How You Live	Agatha Christie Mallowan	4,918	965
Death Is Hard Work	Khaled Khalifa	4,548	291

Only five this time. As with Niger a few weeks ago, I had to disqualify a lot of books (sixteen in this case) which are (at least in part) about Syria, but not actually set there, most of which dealt with the experience of Syria refugees trying to make their way to and in other countries during the recent war. My rule is that if I have had to disqualify a large number of books before I reach the fifth that is actually set in the country, I leave it there. Normally I would list the top eight books.

I’m glad to see a novel by a Syrian woman actually topping the chart this week, though it does way better on Goodreads. You may be surprised to see Agatha Christie making an appearance; this is a non-fiction account of her experiences observing her husband’s archaeological digging, and it is the top book set in Syria on LibraryThing, though much further behind on Goodreads.

I ruled out the first volume of the graphic novel series L’Arabe du future, which is set in several different countries. However the second volume does seem to be mainly set in Syria, so it’s on the list. Both are on my list of BDs to buy.

The top book on Goodreads with ‘Syria’ tags was Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers, and the top on LibraryThing was The Golem and the Jinni, by Helene Wecker, both of which are about the experience of Syrian immigrants in the USA; one non-fiction, the other fantasy. There were a few other non-fiction books looking at the region as a whole. I won’t list them all.

Coming next: Mali, Burkina Faso, Sri Lanka and (edge case, but it’s listed as a separate country in most lists) Taiwan.

The best known books set in each country: North Korea

Posted on 22 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
The Orphan Master’s Son	Adam Johnson	101,483	4,036
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea	Barbara Demick	90,343	3,318
Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West	Blaine Harden	68,964	1,854
The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea	Axie Oh	75,437	1,291
The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story	Hyeonseo Lee	93,135	1,031
In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom	Yeonmi Park	90,747	993
A River in Darkness: One Man’s Escape from North Korea	Masaji Ishikawa	58,730	924
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War	David Halberstam	8,945	1,873

This is one I prepared earlier, in a sense, in that I crunched the numbers for both parts of Korea back in November, and I imagine that they have not changed much since. There’s a pretty consistent theme here, whether the writers are Korean or not; the only one I’m not sure about is The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea, but my research indicates that it’s set in what is now the North rather than the South. It and this week’s winner, The Orphan Master’s Son, are the only two books on the list which are presented as fiction. Also I’m allowing The Coldest Winter as set on both sides of the line.

As noted previously, I disqualified the top two books tagged ‘Korea’ on LibraryThing and Goodreads; they were Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, which is mainly set in Japan, and Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner, mainly set in the USA. Further down the table, The Name Jar, by Yangsook Choi, is also set in the USA.

Next: Syria, Mali, Burkina Faso and Sri Lanka.

The best known books set in each country: Australia

Posted on 15 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

(Scheduling this to go live quite early, to catch the Australians.)

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Big Little Lies	Liane Moriarty	1,076,575	7,890
The Rosie Project	Graeme Simsion	580,241	8,169
The Husband’s Secret	Liane Moriarty	707,897	6,692
The Light Between Oceans	M. L. Stedman	470,982	7,908
The Thorn Birds	Colleen McCullough	359,464	7,901
What Alice Forgot	Liane Moriarty	498,692	4,987
Nine Perfect Strangers	Liane Moriarty	461,968	4,160
I Am the Messenger / The Messenger	Markus Zusak	166,742	6,958

I confess that I had not heard of Liane Moriarty, but she clearly scores very well here, with Big Little Lies far ahead on Goodreads and fourth in a close race on LibraryThing. Sorry to those who were hoping to see Nevil Shute (On the Beach was 21st in my ranking and A Town Like Alice 23rd) or Peter Carey (True History of the Kelly Gang was 30th, Oscar and Lucinda 31st) on the list.

I disqualified only two books. I was puzzled to see The Book Thief (which won in Germany) topping the overall poll, but I had forgotten that Markus Zusak is actually Australian. And more than half of The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton is set in England.

Next: North Korea, Syria, Mali and Burkina Faso.

The best known books set in each country: Niger

Posted on 8 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Shadow Speaker	Nnedi Okorafor	2,696	448
In Sorcery’s Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger	Paul Stoller	278	76
Don’t Spill the Milk!	Stephen Davies	226	54
Harmattan	Gavin Weston	242	26
Nomads of Niger	Carol Beckwith and Marion van Offelen	31	83

This was a very difficult tabulation. There are a lot of books about West Africa, or just Africa in general. There’s a certain amount of confusion between Niger and Nigeria. There are books about travelling to Timbuktu (which is in Mali), or the Songhay Empire (which was also mainly in Mali), or following Mungo Park (who did the whole river Niger). I excluded 28 books before I got to the fifth one actually set in Niger, and for once I’m not going to list them all; some of them have very spurious Nigerien connections indeed.

The winner – for the second time, see also Sudan – is Nnedi Okorafor, who very clearly sets Shadow Speaker in a future Niger.

The top book set in Niger by a Nigerien author that I was able to identify is Sarraounia : Le drame de la reine magicienne, by Abdoulaye Mamani.

Incidentally, Niger has the second lowest median age of any country in the world, ahead of only the Central African Republic.

Next up: Australia, North Korea, Syria and indeed Mali.

The best known books set in each country: Venezuela

Posted on 1 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Dragons in the Waters	Madeleine L’Engle	4,810	1,393
Green Mansions	William Henry Hudson	3,251	1,811
Doña Bárbara	Rómulo Gallegos	5,804	517
It Would Be Night in Caracas	Karina Sainz Borgo	7,368	241
The Sun and the Void	Gabriela Romero Lacruz	3,699	408
In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon	Redmond O’Hanlon	1,558	638
Ya̦nomamö: The Fierce People	Napoleon A. Chagnon	1,327	705
The Caiman	Maria Eugenia Manrique	2,393	120

This table sees one of the biggest variations between LibraryThing and Goodreads that I have yet seen. The top-ranked book on LibraryThing is fifth on Goodreads; the top-ranked book on Goodreads is seventh on LibraryThing; the winner on aggregate is second on one system and third on the other. Even bigger divergences would have appeared if I had gone further down the table.

And of all my childhood favourites, I did not expect to see Madeleine L’Engle, of A Wrinkle in Time fame, winning this week’s prize. But indeed, Dragons in the Waters is about a kid going to Venezuela to take over his inheritance, both natural and supernatural.

Venezuelan writers pick up half of the spots this week. Surprisingly, only It Would Be Night in Caracas is directly about the current political situation.

Of the others, The Sun and the Void is set in a fantasy country that as far as I can tell the author wants us to read as Venezuela. The Ya̦nomamö live in both Venezuela and Brazil, but Venezuela has adopted Chagnon’s book, so I’m happy to go along with that.

I disqualified seven books. A Long Petal of the Sea, by Isabel Allende, is mainly set in Spain and Chile, and only in Venezuela at the end. The General in His Labyrinth, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is about the end of the life of Simon Bolivar, in what is now Colombia. Open Veins of Latin America, by Eduardo Galeano, is about the entire continent. Bruchko, by Bruce Olson, unpleasantly straddles the border with Colombia but seems to be more on the other side. When Time Stopped, by Ariana Neumann, is about a Venezuelan discovering her family’s experiences during the Holocaust. Bolívar: American Liberator, by Marie Arana, covers Simon Bolivar’s life and career all over the region. And Dancing Hands: How Teresa Carreño Played the Piano for President Lincoln, by Margarita Engle, sounds very sweet but is set mainly in the USA.

Coming next: Niger, Australia, North Korea and Syria.

The best known books set in each country: Nepal

Posted on 25 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster	Jon Krakauer	543,638	14,827
The Snow Leopard	Peter Matthiessen	19,544	2,844
Little Princes: One Man’s Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal	Conor Grennan	23,134	1,102
The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest	Anatoli Boukreev	17,718	1,189
Breathless	Amy McCulloch	25,286	563
Annapurna, First Conquest of an 8000-Meter Peak: (26,493 Feet)	Maurice Herzog	10,203	1,078
Touching My Father’s Soul: A Sherpa’s Journey to the Top of Everest	Jamling Tenzing Norgay	2,703	372
Annapurna: A Woman’s Place	Arlene Blum	2,941	256

Into Thin Air is the most popular book on either LT or GR on any of these individual national lists since Night by Elie Wiesel, thirteen countries ago.

Only two of these eight books are fiction. I have not been tracking systematically, but that seems low.

Despite that fact that it has a population of over 30 million, there is only one activity in Nepal that is of interest to most writers. Three of these eight books are about Everest (including the only one by an actual Nepalese writer), two about Annapurna, and one (Breathless) about a fictional mountain peak.

I wasn’t completely sure about We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies, which begins in Tibet and ends in Canada, but as far as I can tell the sections about being a Tibetan refugee in Nepal amount to more than half of the book. (Just to make it crystal clear: Tibet is an “Autonomous Region” of the People’s Republic of China, but Nepal is an independent state.)

I excluded nine books for being insufficiently Nepalese in setting, and in most cases they are very firmly set elsewhere, but close enough for readers to get confused. The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai, is mostly set in India. So is Sold, by Patricia McCormick. The protagonist of Peak, by Roland Smith, climbs Everest from the Tibetan side. Tintin in Tibet, by Hergé, speaks for itself. Himalaya, by Michael Palin, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, by John Wood, and Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East, by Pico Iyer, all cover numerous countries including Nepal. Colin Thubron starts in Nepal but leaves just before the half-way point of To a Mountain in Tibet.

Coming next: Venezuela, Niger, Australia and North Korea.

The best known books set in each country: Cameroon

Posted on 18 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
How Beautiful We Were	Imbolo Mbue	18,281	726
The Informationist	Taylor Stevens	11,303	950
A Zoo in My Luggage	Gerald Durrell	5,281	959
The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut	Nigel Barley	3,375	623
The Bafut Beagles	Gerald Durrell	2,022	709
Les impatientes	Djaïli Amadou Amal	8,714	105
Houseboy	Ferdinand Oyono	2,295	372
The Overloaded Ark	Gerald Durrell	1,418	472

This was one of the easiest runs I have had for a while. Gerald Durrell does well, and I remember reading those books when I was 13 and loving them; and I also remember really enjoying The Innocent Anthropologist when I was a bit older. But I’m glad that the top spot goes to a Cameroonian woman writer, and I’m interested that a novel by another Cameroonian woman writer, that hasn’t even been translated into English, also makes the top eight. I must add also that The Informationist sounds like great fun.

I’m used to a certain fluctuation between the popularity of books on both systems, but the relative LibraryThing invisibility of Les impatientes by Djaïli Amadou Amal is remarkable. It’s the third most widely owned of these books on Goodreads, and not even in the top fifteen on LT.

I disqualified two books, neither of which was a difficult decision. Behold the Dreamers, also by Imbolo Mbue, is about Cameroonian immigrants in New York, and seems to be set entirely in the USA. The Marco Effect, by Jussi Adler-Olsen, is a Danish crime novel with a subplot set in Cameroon, but it’s much less than half of the book as far as I can tell.

Other countries where I only disqualified two books: China, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa.
Countries where I only disqualified one book: India, the USA, Nigeria, Russia, Iran, the UK, Spain, Iraq.
Countries where I have not disqualified any books: Japan, Egypt, DRC, Vietnam, Colombia.

Coming next: Nepal, Venezuela, Niger and then Australia.

The best known books set in each country: Côte d’Ivoire

Posted on 11 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Côte d’Ivoire, also known in English as Ivory Coast (personally I take the position that you call people and countries by the names they wish to be known by).

I have not been to Côte d’Ivoire myself, though I have advised its government on a couple of occasions.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Aya	Marguerite Abouet	6,986	664
The Bitter Side of Sweet	Tara Sullivan	3,646	277
Aya of Yop City	Marguerite Abouet	2,421	260
Too Small to Ignore: Why Children Are the Next Big Thing	Wess Stafford	1,142	505
Nine Hills to Nambonkaha: Two Years in the Heart of an African Village	Sarah Erdman	1,784	312
Aya: Life in Yop City (Aya #1-3)	Marguerite Abouet	1,683	166
Aya: The Secrets Come Out	Marguerite Abouet	1,331	154
Aya: Love in Yop City (Aya #4-6)	Marguerite Abouet	885	127

So, I confess I had not heard of the popular graphic novel sequence by Marguerite Abouet about her heroine Aya, set in Côte d’Ivoire in the 1970s, but I’ll have to look out for them now. It’s also nice to see a success for the bande dessinée genre.

If I count correctly, this is the sixth country where seven of the top eight books are by women, joining Canada, South Korea, Kenya, the United Kingdom and Iran.

I disqualified eleven books. For about half of them, this was because they were set in or about a number of countries including Côte d’Ivoire, but much less than half set there. This knocked out Empire of Cotton by Sven Beckert, The Fortunes of Africa by Martin Meredith, Dictatorland by Paul Kenyon, Ebola: The Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus by David Quammen, and Africa Is Not a Country by Margy Burns Knight.

I really hesitated with The Suns of Independence by Ahmadou Kourouma, which is set between two fictional countries, the Socialist Republic of Nikinai and Ebony Coast. Kourouma himself was firmly Ivoirian, but in the end I feel he deliberately set the book in a fictional place which is as closely related to Côte d’Ivoire as, say, the Shire is to England.

There were a couple with very little Ivoirian material, and I fear that people tagging them on LT / GR get mixed up between West African countries. Tété-Michel Kpomassie, author of An African in Greenland, is from Togo. Allah Is Not Obliged, by Ahmadou Kourouma, does start in Côte d’Ivoire but is mostly set in Liberia. The Dragons, the Giant, the Women by Wayétu Moore is set in Liberia and the USA. Standing Heavy, by Gauz, is set among Ivoirians in Paris. Arab Jazz, by Karim Miské, is set among Arabs in Paris; Miské was born in Côte d’Ivoire, but identifies as Mauritanian-French.

Next up are Cameroon, Nepal, Venezuela and Niger.

The best known books set in each country: Madagascar

Posted on 4 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Hot Ice	Nora Roberts	17,304	1,468
Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia	David Graeber	2,145	297
Red Island House	Andrea Lee	2,894	206
Ghost of Chance	William S. Burroughs	1,168	357
The Aye-Aye and I	Gerald Durrell	1,286	284
Return to the Enchanted Island	Johary Ravaloson	830	131
Thea Stilton and the Madagascar Madness	Thea Stilton [Elisabetta Dami]	723	146
The Pirate’s Son	Geraldine McCaughrean	247	240

There are a couple of authors I didn’t expect to see here, including in particular Nora Roberts; I checked, and yes, more than half of Hot ice is actually set on Madagascar, so it qualifies for my top spot this week. It sounds like rather a laugh; even diehard Nora Roberts fans seem to be a bit embarrassed by it. I am not 100% sure about Return to the Enchanted Island, a substantial part of which is set in France, but it was the only book by a Malagasy author that scored at all well.

The Pirate Enlightenment book sounds really interesting too, about the intersection of Enlightenment ideology with the real life Malagasy pirates of the eighteenth century.

I disqualified seven books. Six of them are set in various countries with Madagascar occupying less than 50% of the text, sometimes much less; those were Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond; Last Chance to See, by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine; Lost Empire, by Clive Cussler; Flashman’s Lady, by George MacDonald Fraser (this surprised me; all the memorable bits of the book are set on Madagascar, but Flashman doesn’t actually get there until almost two thirds of the way through); A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth, by Samantha Weinberg (also surprised me, but the author ranges all over the Western Indian Ocean); and In Bibi’s Kitchen: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers from the Eight African Countries That Touch the Indian Ocean, by Hawa Hassan. I also disqualified The Flanders Route, by Claude Simon, which has nothing to do with Madagascar except that the author was born there.

Next up: Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Nepal and Venezuela.

The best known books set in each country: Saudi Arabia

Posted on 27 April 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
The Quran		70,996	2,398
Princess	Jean Sasson	38,703	2,106
A Hologram for the King	Dave Eggers	29,290	1,771
Girls of Riyadh	Rajaa Alsanea	20,667	1,262
Finding Nouf	Zoë Ferraris	9,822	1,050
Princess Sultana’s Daughters	Jean Sasson	12,463	794
In the Land of Invisible Women	Qanta A. Ahmed	7,760	755
Princess Sultana’s Circle	Jean Sasson	8,739	551

I’m allowing the winner even though it is short on geographical detail, because there is absolutely no doubt as to which country it is written about, and many of the individual suras are tagged as being written in Medina or Mecca. Incidentally I had to add together a bunch of different LibraryThing editions which had not been combined, presumably for good reason; the real LT number must be much higher.

Apart from Dave Eggers, the other books are all by women, though only one (Girls of Riyadh) by a Saudi woman.

I disqualified half a dozen. I was a bit surprised to see The Power, by Naomi Alderman, topping the list – very little of the book is set in Saudi. I Am Pilgrim, by Terry Hayes, Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright, all cover many countries, with less than half of any of them being set in the Kingdom.

I was a bit surprised to find myself then excluding Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by T.E. Lawrence, and Arabian Sands, by Wilfred Thesiger; but in fact the former is largely set on the territory of what is now Jordan (and when I get there I’ll do a strict page count to see if it’s over 50%) and the latter spends a lot of time in Oman and what are now the UAE, the core visits to the Rub’ al Khali taking up less than a hundred of the 320 pages of text.

Next up are Madagascar, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon and to my surprise Nepal, whose population is around the 30 million mark.

The best known books set in each country: Peru

Posted on 20 April 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Bel Canto	Ann Patchett	305,834	13,723
The Celestine Prophecy: An Adventure	James Redfield	118,809	7,100
The Bridge of San Luis Rey	Thornton Wilder	37,164	5,058
Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man’s Miraculous Survival	Joe Simpson	62,315	2,763
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter	Mario Vargas Llosa	22,064	2,788
The Time of the Hero	Mario Vargas Llosa	25,982	1,910
Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time	Mark Adams	20,164	1,172
Conversation in the Cathedral	Mario Vargas Llosa	10,654	1,341

These are pretty solid numbers, after a few countries which scored less well.

Slightly controversially, perhaps, I’m allowing the top spot to Bel Canto. Even though it is not explicitly set in Peru, everyone agrees that it’s based on the 1996-97 hostage crisis at the Japanese embassy in Lima, so I think it qualifies. I was a bit surprised to find that the book in second spot, The Celestine Prophecy, is also set in Peru – I don’t feel the slightest inclination to read it – but apparently that’s the case. The others are much less surprising, with the recently departed Mario Vargas Llosa filling a lot of the spots as you go down the table.

I disqualified the following:

Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, by Tracy Kidder – only two of its five parts is set in Peru
The Feast of the Goat, by Mario Vargas Llosa – set in the Dominican Republic
The Bad Girl, by Mario Vargas Llosa – set in various countries
Inés of My Soul, by Isabel Allende – only one part set in Peru
The War of the End of the World, by Mario Vargas Llosa – set in Brazil

People seem to have a tendency to slap the ‘Peru’ tag onto books by Mario Vargas Llosa, whether or not his country is represented in the actual content.

Incidentally, RTÉ recently ran a piece about how my great-great-great-grandfather became deputy governor of Huanta province in Peru, back in the 1770s. I have never been to any part of Latin America myself.

Coming next: Saudi Arabia, Madagascar, Côte d’Ivoire and Cameroon.

The best known books set in each country: Ghana

Posted on 13 April 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them (as far as I can tell) is set in Ghana.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Homegoing	Yaa Gyasi	375,929	6,269
Anansi the Spider	Gerald McDermott	7,253	3,410
His Only Wife	Peace Adzo Medie	31,662	496
Remote Control	Nnedi Okorafor	18,205	755
Ghana Must Go	Taiye Selasi	12,122	834
Solo	Kwame Alexander	13,405	707
Emmanuel’s Dream	Laurie Ann Thompson	3,216	764
The Door of No Return	Kwame Alexander	6,828	332

Homegoing has a commanding lead here, especially on Goodreads, and it’s good to see Ghanaian authors penetrating the two systems.

I disqualified eight books, in some cases because they are mainly about the Ghanaian migrant experience and in others because they are actually about the process of migrating from Ghana. They were Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi; Maame, by Jessica George; Open Water, by Caleb Azumah Nelson; The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński; Pigeon English, by Stephen Kelman; Illegal, by Eoin Colfer; The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi, by Arthur Japin; and North to Paradise by Ousman Umar.

Next up: Peru, Saudi Arabia, Madagascar and Côte d’Ivoire.

The best known books set in each country: Mozambique

Posted on 6 April 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
A Girl Named Disaster	Nancy Farmer	5,117	1,735
A Time to Die	Wilbur Smith	6,220	807
Sleepwalking Land	Mia Couto	5,775	466
A Treacherous Paradise	Henning Mankell	3,533	562
Chronicler of the Winds	Henning Mankell	2,775	708
Confession of the Lioness	Mia Couto	3,533	266
The Tuner of Silences	Mia Couto	2,615	213
Secrets in the Fire	Henning Mankell	2,060	253

This week’s winner is a Newbery-awarded novel about a girl trying to flee from Mozambique to Zimbabwe; as far as I can tell it takes more than half of the book for her to get across the border, so it qualifies.

I had no idea that Swedish writer Henning Mankell has a close personal link with Mozambique and lived there off and on for many years. I also had not heard of the great Mozambican writer Mia (short for Emilio) Couto, which is definitely my bad.

I disqualified a lot of books which are just generally set in southern Africa, or more specifically in a different country entirely. At the top was Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller, set in Zimbabwe, followed by The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town by Paul Theroux, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After, by Clemantine Wamariya, Half a Life, by V.S. Naipaul, Kennedy’s Brain by Henning Mankell again, Scribbling the Cat by Alexandra Fuller again and A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn.

As we go down the list, I am increasingly finding that GR and LT users are tagging them into books which have little or nothing to do with the country in question. I may have to adapt my methodology in response.

Next up: Ghana, Peru, Saudi Arabia and Madagascar.

The best known books set in each country: Malaysia

Posted on 30 March 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
The Night Tiger	Yangsze Choo	63,990	1,437
The Ghost Bride	Yangsze Choo	35,794	1,708
The Garden of Evening Mists	Tan Twan Eng	28,145	1,730
The Gift of Rain	Tan Twan Eng	17,211	1,215
Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World	Tom Wright and Bradley Hope	36,267	547
The House of Doors	Tan Twan Eng	18,160	539
The Storm We Made	Vanessa Chan	19,635	354
Black Water Sister	Zen Cho	10,481	647

I have not actually been to Malaysia, but it is where my father was born, so I was interested to see where this analysis brought me. In fact there are an unusually high number of Malaysian writers on the list – better yet, three of them are fantasy novels, including this week’s winner, The Night Tiger. And I am very glad to see Zen Cho make an appearance.

I disqualified nine books, all for the usual reason but all in different ways. In some of these cases I guess that GR and LT users are using the tag ‘malaysia’ because of the origin of the author rather than the setting of the book, in others it must simply be geographical confusion. Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan, is mostly set in Singapore. The island in Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad, is clearly in what’s now Indonesia (as discussed). Daughter of the Moon Goddess, by Sue Lynn Tan, is set in a fantasy China. A Town Like Alice, by Nevil Shute, has many memorable sections in Malaysia, but in the end it is about Australia. The Glass Palace, by Amitav Ghosh, is set all over the region. Nothing But Blackened Teeth, by Cassandra Khaw, is set in Japan. Old Filth, by Jane Gardam, is set in England and India more than Malaysia. What My Bones Know, by Stephanie Foo, is set in the USA. And Sorcerer to the Crown, again by Zen Cho, is set in a fantasy UK.

Next up: Mozambique, Ghana, Peru and Saudi Arabia.

The best known books set in each country: Uzbekistan

Posted on 23 March 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Earlier posts this week because I am travelling in Asia.

See here for methodology. This has been an unusual case, the first time (but probably not not the last) that I have closed the list at five, rather than my usual eight, because I have disqualified ten books for being less than 50% set in the target country and I don’t have time or energy to keep going.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Cancer Ward	Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn	17,294	3,750
Samarkand	Amin Maalouf	30,077	1,533
Moon Over Samarkand	Muḥammad al-Mansī Qandīl	13,933	33
The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor	Zahir ud-Din Muhammad Babur	746	476
Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia	Tom Bissell	707	239

The winner is one of the great Soviet-era novels, and I wonder to what extent the Tashkent setting comes through.

I confess that I am not 100% certain about Amin Maalouf’s Samarkand, but what I’ve seen online gives me a reasonable case to include it.

The usual ratios between Goodreads and LibraryThing users barely apply here. Moon Over Samarkand, a great Arabic novel which is partly set in Egypt but mostly (as far as I can tell) in Samarkand, has more than 400 times as many readers on GR as on LT.

On the other hand, the Memoirs of Babur, founder of the Mughal dynasty, have more than 60% as many LT readers as GR readers, which I think is a record. It doesn’t actually include all that much about his conquest of India, and concentrates on his early career in the future Uzbekistan.

There are many many books about Central Asia, but Chasing the Sea seems to be unusually Uzbekistan-heavy for that sub-genre.

The books I disqualified, in order, were:

The Silk Roads, by Peter Frankopan
Bones of the Hills, by Conn Iggulden
The Great Game, by Peter Hopkirk
Imperium, by Ryszard Kapuściński
The Possessed, by Elif Batuman
Shadow of the Silk Road, by Colin Thubron
The Blackbird Girls, by Anne Blankman
Sovietistan, by Erika Fatland
The Lost Heart of Asia, by Colin Thubron
Foreign Devils on the Silk Road, by Peter Hopkirk
Tamerlane, by Justin Marozzi

Next up: Malaysia, Mozambique, Ghana and Peru.

The best known books set in each country: Ukraine

Posted on 16 March 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. My rule is to exclude books of which less than 50%, as far as I can tell, is actually set in the target country, but for Ukraine this is trickier than in some cases, so I may have made a couple of wrong calls here.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Everything is Illuminated	Jonathan Safran Foer	181,991	14,539
The Mitten	Jan Brett	93,416	10,761
The Diamond Eye	Kate Quinn	170,157	1,425
Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster	Adam Higginbotham	57,625	2,324
Death and the Penguin	Andrey Kurkov	20,056	2,116
The Last Green Valley	Mark T. Sullivan	65,498	431
The Fixer	Bernard Malamud	11,675	2,374
The White Guard	Mikhail Bulgakov	15,452	1,528

Shamefully, I have not read any of these. When I looked at this less systematically back in 2015, I got the same answer, Everything is Illuminated way out in front, followed by Jan Brett’s version of The Mitten.

I excluded The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, which is definitely set in Russia; Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol, which is generally understood to be set in Russia; A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, by Marina Lewycka, which is set in England; Voices from Chernobyl, by Svetlana Alexievich, which is about the impact of Chernobyl in Belarus; and Bloodlands, by Timothy Snyder, which as far as I can tell concentrates on Poland.

I’m not 100% sure about The Last Green Valley, which is about Volksdeutsche fleeing Ukraine at the end of the Second World War, but it seems from online sources that it takes them a long time to get out, so I’ve counted it in.

The top Ukrainian writers on the list are Andrey Kurkov and Mikhail Bulgakov.

The Diamond Eye and The Last Green Valley both have strikingly impressive Goodreads ratings compared to their LibraryThing standing. Usually books have around ten times more readers on GR than LT, give or take; these two score over a hundred times higher on GR. My interpretation is that they (successfully) marketed themselves to Goodreads users.

Coming next: Uzbekistan, Malaysia, Mozambique and Ghana.

The Best Known Books Set in Each Country: Angola

Posted on 9 March 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. I am excluding books of which less than 50%, as far as I can tell, is actually set in Angola.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
A General Theory of Oblivion	José Eduardo Agualusa	8,003	475
Nzingha: Warrior Queen of Matamba, Angola, Africa, 1595	Patricia C. McKissack	3,641	988
Another Day of Life	Ryszard Kapuściński	5,650	581
The Book of Chameleons	José Eduardo Agualusa	4,820	513
The Land at the End of the World	António Lobo Antunes	3,076	450
Mayombe	Pepetela	2,393	134
Transparent City	Ondjaki	1,398	113
The Society of Reluctant Dreamers	José Eduardo Agualusa	1,316	116

The top books for Angola are the least well known of any country so far that I have covered. Bangladesh is in the same ball-park, but clearly ahead of Angola. Three of the books on my list, including the winner, are by José Eduardo Agualusa, who sounds like a very interesting writer.

I disqualified only three books. The Last Train to Zona Verde, by Paul Theroux, is set in South Afrtica and Namibia as well as Angola, and reaches Angola a few pages after the half-way point, so just misses my 50% criterion. O Filho de Mil Homens, by Valter hugo mãe (which doesn’t seem to have been translated into English; note the author’s unorthodox capitalisation) appears to be set entirely in Portugal, though the author is originally from Angola. The Return, by Dulce Maria Cardoso, is about the experience of the Portuguese settlers who evacuated in 1975, so most of it is in Portugal, though Angola flavours the whole book.

Coming next: Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Malaysia and Mozambique.

The best known books set in each country: Morocco

Posted on 2 March 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. I am excluding books of which less than 50%, as far as I can tell, is actually set in Morocco. (It doesn’t help that Morocco is illegally occupying the country immediately to its south.)

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
The Sheltering Sky	Paul Bowles	29,499	4,508
The Time in Between	María Dueñas	47,894	1,992
Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail	Malika Oufkir	24,265	2,103
Destination Unknown	Agatha Christie	16,297	2,394
Tangerine	Christine Mangan	33,388	935
Who Is Maud Dixon?	Alexandra Andrews	39,137	651
Garment of Shadows	Laurie R. King	10,259	1,039
This Blinding Absence of Light	Tahar Ben Jelloun	13,106	569

It’s interesting that the only two books on the list by Moroccan writers (Stolen Lives and This Blinding Absence of Light) are about being imprisoned in the same jail at the same time, though one is autobiography and the other fiction.

There are several of these that I’m not completely certain about, either because (eg The Sheltering Sky) it’s not 100% clear that the North African setting is Morocco, or because (eg The Time In Between) it’s not 100% clear to me that the Moroccan setting amounts to more than half of the book, but in those cases and a couple of others, I gave the one on the list the benefit of the doubt.

I excluded the top four books which came up in my calculations, and another two lower down. Top was Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, where it’s not clear that the desert setting is in Morocco; then Less by Andrew Sean Greer, which is about a man who goes around the world and visits Morocco; then Chanson Douce / The Perfect Nanny / Lullaby, by Leïla Slimani, set in Paris; then King of the Wind: The Story of the Godolphin Arabian, by Marguerite Henry, which is about a horse that actually (as far as I can see) spends most of its life outside Morocco.

The other two books that I disqualified ranked between Who Is Maud Dixon? and Garment of Shadows, both by Leïla Lamani (as opposed to Laila Slimani): The Other Americans and The Moor’s Account, both of which are set in the Americas.

Coming next: Angola, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Malaysia.

The best known books set in each country: Poland

Posted on 23 February 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. I am excluding books of which less than 50% is actually set in today’s Poland. This is a case where you would think that only one thing had ever happened in the country’s history…

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Night	Elie Wiesel	1,301,250	28,893
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas	John Boyne	893,261	15,839
The Tattooist of Auschwitz	Heather Morris	1,063,084	7,136
Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History	Art Spiegelman	352,319	11,169
The Complete Maus	Art Spiegelman	236,184	9,215
Schindler’s List	Thomas Keneally	162,837	8,261
Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began	Art Spiegelman	153,093	7,736
Salt to the Sea	Ruta Sepetys	232,282	3,802

Art Spiegelman (deservedly) does well here, if not quite as dominant as Marjane Satrapi was for Iran. But it’s clear that the winning place goes to Elie Wiesel’s Night. All eight of these books are about Nazi Germany and the Second World War, and seven of them are about the Holocaust.

I wasn’t quite sure about Salt to the Sea, which centers around the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, but apparently the characters spend a lot of the book getting to and then hanging around in what is now Gdynia (then Gotenhafen), so I’m allowing it on the list.

I disqualified several books which have Polish authors, and so are tagged “Poland” by LT and GR users, but are not actually set in Poland. These were Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, in which the words “Poland” and “Polish” do not even appear; The Last Wish and Blood of Elves from the Witcher series by Andrzej Sapkowski, which may have roots in Slavic mythology but are clearly set in a fantasy world; Lilac Girls, by Martha Hall Kelly, which seems to be more set in Germany than anywhere else; and The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss, which is mainly set in the USA.

Well, that was grim. Next up, Morocco, then Angola and Ukraine.

The best known books set in each country: Canada

Posted on 9 February 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. I am excluding books of which less than 50% is actually set in Canada, as explained further below. This is a case where the winner is way ahead of the field, and also where the winner is really not in the least surprising.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Anne of Green Gables	L.M. Montgomery	1,043,519	31,851
Hatchet	Gary Paulsen	421,242	18,861
Station Eleven	Emily St. John Mandel	563,790	12,703
Anne of Avonlea	L.M. Montgomery	211,412	13,333
The Blind Assassin	Margaret Atwood	159,389	16,932
Anne of the Island	L.M. Montgomery	183,090	11,460
The Shipping News	E. Annie Proulx	148,866	13,786
Still Life	Louise Penny	266,070	7,059

L.M. Montgomery does pretty well here. I was looking back to see if we have had any other countries so far with seven out of eight books by women writers, and to my surprise the answer is yes, there have been four of the previous 38: South Korea, Kenya, the United Kingdom and Iran. Which might not be the four you would have guessed.

The top two books tagged “Canada” by LT and GR users by score were The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, and Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, neither of which is set in Canada at all as far as I remember. The setting of Room, by Emma Donoghue, is not specified geographically as far as I can tell, and I thought quite carefully about whether to qualify it or not; but it’s based on events in Austria, and although the film was made in Canada, it is explicitly set in Ohio. On the other hand, my memory of Station Eleven is that most of it is set on what is now the Canadian side of the lakes, so I let it through.

Two more Margaret Atwood novels, Oryx and Crake and The Testaments, are set or mostly set in what is currently the United States, but who knows where we may be in a few weeks’ time? That still leaves her The Blind Assassin, which is explicitly set in Ontario. Alias Grace missed the cut by a hair’s breadth.

Next up: Poland, then Morocco, Angola and Ukraine. But I’m going to skip next week as I’ll be at Gallifrey One.

The best known books set in each country: Yemen

Posted on 2 February 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. I am excluding books of which less than 50% is actually set in Yemen, as explained further below.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced	Nujood Ali	23,627	1,231
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen	Paul Torday	16,461	1,631
The Panther	Nelson DeMille	23,158	1,125
The Monk of Mokha	Dave Eggers	20,958	754
Sold	Zana Muhsen	7,759	464
Henna House	Nomi Eve	4,266	215
Motoring with Mohammed	Eric Hansen	1,611	343
The Woman Who Fell from the Sky	Jennifer Steil	1,432	153

Yemen has not been well served in the literature available in the West. Two of the above are about child slavery and sexual abuse (I Am Nujood and Sold) and the rest are all by foreigners (Jennifer Steil’s memoir of teaching journalism sounds particularly dire).

I excluded a lot of books which cover Yemen along with other places. Three of these were fiction: Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese (mainly set in Ethiopia), The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty, which is set all over the Indian Ocean (but with Oman rather than Yemen as the heroine’s home base), and Black Mamba Boy, by Nadifa Mohamed, which starts in Yemen but is mostly set in East Africa.

The rest were non-fiction; War on Terror punditry (The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright; Dirty Wars, by Jeremy Scahill), regional travelogues (Arabian Sands, by Wilfred Thesiger; Baghdad Without a Map, by Tony Horwitz), and general reporting (Our Women on the Ground, ed. Zahra Hankir). I am also sad to have to disqualify Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition of 1761-1767, by Thorkild Hansen, which looks fascinating, but only 90 pages out of 370 are actually set in Yemen.

One case of huge divergence between Goodreads and LibraryThing: The Handsome Jew, by Yemeni writer Ali al-Muqri, has 2,955 raters on GR, but only 8 owners on LibraryThing, which clearly has failed to penetrate the Yemeni market. The more traditional travel books score comparatively better on LT.

Next up: Canada. This will not be at all surprising.

The best known books set in each country: Afghanistan

Posted on 26 January 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. I am excluding books not actually set in the current borders of Afghanistan, but there were only two of these (I think).

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
The Kite Runner	Khaled Hossaini	3,297,437	54,360
A Thousand Splendid Suns	Khaled Hossaini	1,618,317	31,331
And the Mountains Echoed	Khaled Hosseini	386,010	7,583
Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10	Marcus Luttrell	97,029	3,293
The Bookseller of Kabul	Åsne Seierstad	54,928	5,751
The Breadwinner	Deborah Ellis	29,895	3,002
Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman	Jon Krakauer	41,000	2,038
The Pearl That Broke Its Shell	Nadia Hashimi	49,195	1,106

This week’s winner is not at all surprising. The Kite Runner‘s 3.3 million Goodreads raters beats any book I have looked at so far in this sequence, apart from Angels and Demons by Dan Brown (Italy), and the top books set in the UK and USA. On LibraryThing, its 54,000 owners beat all books other than Romeo and Juliet (also Italy), and again, the top books set in the UK and USA. It really is quite a phenomenon.

As noted, I excluded two books: Greg Mortensen’s Three Cups of Tea, which qualified previously under Pakistan, and Laurence Wright’s The Looming Tower, which covers many places besides Afghanistan.

I’m relieved that there are only two US military stories on the list, and one of those (by Jon Krakauer) is distinctly dissident. But one feels that, were it not for Khaled Hossaini, the literature available to Goodreads and LibraryThing users would almost exclusively portray Afghanistan as a place where white people go and do things which may or may not involve dead locals. Flashman was not much further down the list.

Next is Yemen, which I am surprised to learn has a bigger population than Canada or Poland.

The best known books set in each country: Argentina

Posted on 19 January 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. I am back to running through countries in population order, after diverting to right past wrongs for the last four weeks. I generally exclude books not actually set in the specific country, this time Argentina, but I’ve bent that a bit here.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners
Tender Is the Flesh	Agustina Bazterrica	266,053	2,493
The Tunnel	Ernesto Sabato	80,875	2,332
In Patagonia	Bruce Chatwin	17,632	3,361
Fever Dream	Samanta Schweblin	43,560	1,329
Things We Lost in the Fire	Mariana Enríquez	47,865	1,038
Kiss of the Spider Woman	Manuel Puig	19,769	2,311
Our Share of Night	Mariana Enríquez	44,504	905
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed	Mariana Enríquez	49,004	732

To my dismay, I have nonetheless excluded all of the Jorge Luis Borges short story collections, Ficciones, Labyrinths, the Collected Fiction and The Aleph and Other Stories, because a lot less than 50% of each of them is not clearly set in Argentina, and around half of each of them are in fact clearly set elsewhere.

The majority of Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar, is set in Paris although there’s a substantial chunk in Argentina at the end. And The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares, is set on a fictional island which is clearly distinguished from Argentina. Most of these were far far ahead of the rest on LibraryThing, apart from The Invention of Morel (though even that has 2,654 LibraryThing owners).

My winning novel, Tender Is the Flesh, has as many raters on Goodreads as the next four put together but is only second on LibraryThing. It is not explicitly set in Argentina, but none of its many reviewers seem to think that it is set anywhere else, so I am allowing it the top spot. I note with great interest that another Argentinian woman writer, Mariana Enriquez, also shows a big imbalance between the two website, with around fifty times more raters on Goodreads than owners on LibraryThing. (The normal ratio is more like 20:1.) The two Enriquez books that I have not read also appear to be short story collections, but unlike Borges most of them appear to be set in Argentina.

Next up are Afghanistan and Yemen. I don’t think Afghanistan is going to surprise me.

The best known books set in each country: Ethiopia revisited

Posted on 12 January 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

I have switched now to a system where I disqualify the relevant books before constructing my league table. This is particularly important for Ethiopia, where on my first pass I only found two of the top eight books actually set there – and I was wrong about one of them! So the below table is comprehensively revised from the first round; the only thing that hasn’t changed, in fact, is the book at the top of the list.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Cutting for Stone	Abraham Verghese	404,368	9,853
The Shadow King	Maaza Mengiste	14,188	769
The Emperor: Downfall of An Autocrat	Ryszard Kapuściński	8,590	1,095
The Quest	Nelson DeMille	10,305	713
The Sign and the Seal	Graham Hancock	2,767	1,038
Beneath the Lion’s Gaze	Maaza Mengiste	3,429	467
There Is No Me Without You	Melissa Fay Greene	3,404	426
Black Dove White Raven	Elizabeth Wein	3,095	381

I’m glad that Ethiopian writer Maaza Mengiste does get two entries on the list. I’m surprised (though perhaps I shouldn’t be) to see Elizabeth Wein, who I had a great dinner with in Glasgow in 2005, in eighth place.

I disqualified no less than twelve books to get to Elizabeth Wein, and there are a couple on the list that I’m still not sure of. As I noted previously, What is the What, by Dave Eggers, is about South Sudan. The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese, is set in India. Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is about Somalia. A Long Walk to Water, by Linda Sue Park, is also about South Sudan. Say You’re One of Them, by Uwem Akpan, is a short story collection of which only one story is set in Ethiopia.

The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński, which I incorrectly included in my table last time, covers a number of African countries including Ethiopia. Yes, Chef, by Marcus Samuelsson, is mainly set in Sweden. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, by Dinaw Mengestu, is set in the USA. Sweetness in the Belly, by Camilla Gibb, is set in several countries. All Our Names, again by Dinaw Mengestu, is set partly in the USA and partly in Uganda as well as in Ethiopia. How to Read the Air, yet again by Dinaw Mengestu, is set in the USA. And Refugee Boy, by Benjamin Zephaniah, is set in Eritrea and the UK as well as Ethiopia.

I made a couple of judgement calls. The Sign and the Seal looks like it is total rubbish, but it is nonetheless about the concealment of the Ark of the Covenant in Ethiopia, so I ruled it in. On the other hand, to my surprise, very few Goodreads or LibraryThing users think that Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop is about Ethiopia, although I always had that impression. So I ruled it out, on the basis of popular perception.

The top book that I have read which is set in Ethiopia is In Ethiopia with a Mule, by Dervla Murphy, which is a bit further down the table.

Going back to my usual order of running through countries in descending rank of population, so Argentina is next, followed by Afghanistan and Yemen.

The best known books set in each country: The Philippines revisited

Posted on 5 January 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Ghost Soldiers	Hampton Sides	37,671	2,839
Trash	Andy Mulligan	14,321	1,080
Patron Saints of Nothing	Randy Ribay	18,192	667
In the Presence of my Enemies	Gracia Burnham	7,873	1,365
The Tesseract	Alex Garland	6,891	1,259
Noli Me Tángere	José Rizal	8,268	724
We Band of Angels	Elizabeth M. Norman	4,555	567
El Filibusterismo	José Rizal	6,288	376

I disqualified eight books, which is a lot, though not as many as with Bangladesh last week. A lot of GR and LT users use the “philippines” tag for books that are about Filipino migrants to the USA or elsewhere, or about the Second World War in the Pacific, or about US colonial policy more generally.

Specifically, the top book most often tagged “Philippines” on both Goodreads and LibraryThing is Neal Stephenson’s epic Cryptonomicon. I am of course disqualifying it as considerably less than half of the 900+ pages are set in the country. Arsenic and Adobo, by Mia P. Manansala, and The Farm, by Joanne Ramos, are set in the USA. American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, by William Manchester, covers the man’s entire career. How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, by Daniel Immerwahr, includes the Philippines as the most egregious case of US colonialism.

Avenue of Mysteries, by John Irving, takes its protagonist to the Philippines, though for less than half of the book. The same appears to be true for the protagonists of Falling Together, by Marisa de los Santos. Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, by Jose Antonio Vargas, is precisely about the immigrant experience in the USA. The Imperial Cruise, by James Bradley, is set on the SS Manchuria in 1905, and while it did visit the Philippines, that was just one of the stops.

So, of those I have allowed onto the list, three are about Americans being held prisoner in the Philippines, including the overall winner, Ghost Soldiers (the other two are In the Presence of my Enemies and We Band of Angels). Trash isn’t explicitly set in Manila, but everyone assumes that it is. Patron Saints of Nothing starts in the USA but I get the impression that more than half of it is set in the Philippines. The Tesseract is very definitely set in today’s Manila, and Noli Me Tángere and El Filibusterismo are nineteenth century classics of Filipino literature.

Next in this sequence I will revisit Ethiopia, and then back to my regular sequence with Argentina.

The best known books set in each country: Bangladesh revisited

Posted on 29 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

When I first did this list in June, the writer of the leading book actually set in Bangladesh was on bail following a politically motivated conviction for labor law violations, and facing a six month prison sentence. Now, at the age of 84, he is literally running the country as Chief Advisor to the Government (Chief Adviser is the Bangladeshi term for the leader of a civilian government that has not come to power through elections).

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty	Muhammad Yunus	10,230	1,303
The Newlyweds	Nell Freudenberger	9,430	567
A Golden Age	Tahmima Anam	5,561	718
The Love & Lies of Rukhsana Ali	Sabina Khan	9,034	399
Lajja: Shame	Taslima Nasrin	5,452	421
Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism	Muhammad Yunus	3,180	602
Rickshaw Girl	Mitali Perkins	1,934	804
The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide	Gary J. Bass	2,384	322

Much more so than any other country I have looked at, the literature that Goodreads and LibraryThing users identify with Bangladesh is largely about the emigrant experience, or about the Indian side of the Bengali-speaking zone. I have never had to exclude so many books to reach a total of eight that are actually set in the country I am considering, and even then I am not completely sure about three of the eight. I’m giving The Newlyweds and The Love & Lies of Rukhsana Ali passes because it sounds like a bit more than half of them are actually set in Bangladesh, though both have substantial chunks set in America; and The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide, by Gary K. Bass, describes the American government involvement with the Liberation War, but I’m giving it a pass because it is at least about Bangladesh.

I excluded no less than thirteen books which had been frequently given the tag “Bangladesh” by Goodreads and LibraryThing users. White Teeth, by Zadie Smith, Brick Lane and Love Marriage, by Monica Ali, and Bitter Sweets, by Roopa Farooki, are all set in London. Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie, is mainly set in India, though with a memorable section in Bangladesh. The Hungry Tide, by Amitav Ghosh, is set in the Sundarban islands, but mainly on the Indian side. The Henna Wars and Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating, by Adiba Jaigirdar, are both set in Dublin. The Shadow Lines, by Amitav Ghosh again, is about the consequences of the creation of Bangladesh, but mainly told from Calcutta and London. Himalaya, by Michael Palin, looks at all of South Asia. In the Light of What We Know, by Zia Haider Rahman, is set in many different countries. The Startup Wife, by Tahmima Anam, and Ask Me No Questions, by Marina Budhos, are set in the USA.

I should say that these all sound like excellent books, and I’ll keep an eye out for them.

(Sorry not to see Sultana’s Dream scoring well; surprised not to see Tagore, but I guess he is not in the bestseller category.)

This exercise has also exposed some huge differences between LibraryThing and Goodreads, where a couple of authors have massively more fans on GR than on LT. (I’m giving the titles of the published English translations, rather than the English translations of the Bengali titles, if you see what I mean.) I’ve had this with a couple of other indigenous authors in other countries, but I don’t recall any previous case where visibility on Goodreads was around 200 times the LibraryThing score.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
জোছনা ও জননীর গল্প / Liberation	Humayun Ahmed	4,476	17
নন্দিত নরকে / In Blissful Hell	Humayun Ahmed	3,799	20
একাত্তরের দিনগুলি / Of Blood and Fire	Jahanara Imam	2,823	13

If these three books had LT owners in the same ratio to GR raters as most of the others, they would easily have made it into my top eight. জোছনা ও জননীর গল্প / Liberation and একাত্তরের দিনগুলি / Of Blood and Fire are both set during the Liberation War. নন্দিত নরকে / In Blissful Hell was written in 1970, so the war hadn’t happened yet; it is described in one review as a work of magical realism.

Next up: return to the Philippines.

The best known books set in each country: Brazil revisited

Posted on 22 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. Back when I started this project, I was simply recording the top eight books tagged as being in each country by users of on Goodreads and LibraryThing, and then recording which didn’t really qualify. I have switched now to a system where I disqualify the relevant books before constructing my league table, but that still leaves four countries from before I changed the system where I have recorded fewer than five books actually set in that country: Brazil, Bangladesh, the Philippines and Ethiopia. So to make redress, I’m revisiting these earlier posts with an updated table.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
State of Wonder	Ann Patchett	193,493	6,374
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon	David Grann	101,244	5,139
The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey	Candice Millard	70,908	3,669
The Seven Sisters	Lucinda Riley	152,628	1,360
Pedagogy of the Oppressed	Paulo Freire	36,064	4,436
The Hour of the Star	Clarice Lispector	40,261	2,202
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas	Machado de Assis	33,496	2,582
My Sweet-Orange Tree	José Mauro de Vasconcelos	73,341	1,013

As noted in my previous entry, I am disqualifying a bunch of Paolo Coelho books: The Alchemist is set in Spain and Egypt, Veronika Decides to Die in Slovenia, Eleven Minutes in Switzerland, and both By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept and The Devil and Miss Prym are set in France. (Judging by The Alchemist, the only one I have read, none of them can be very good either.) Also John Grisham’s The Testament seems to be more than 50% set in America from an unscientific survey.

As also previously noted, nine of the eleven (long) chapters of Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder are set in Brazil. It’s a novel about a miracle cure found in the rain forest. The Lost City of Z is also about a quest in the rain forest, this time the non-fictional search for the lost British explorer Henry Fawcett. The River of Doubt is also about a journey through the rain forest. A bit of a theme here…

I did not disqualify any others than those mentioned before. The next six books on the table all seemed to be reasonably set in Brazil. The one edge case is Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which is a teacher training textbook, but it very explicitly draws on his experience of teaching in Brazil so I’m inclined to let it through. Freire is the top Brazilian writer on the list; the top novel by a Brazilian is nineteenth century classic The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas aka Epitaph of a Small Winner by Machado de Assis.

Next in reparation: Bangladesh.

The best known books set in each country: Iraq

Posted on 15 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. I am excluding books not actually set in the current borders of Iraq, but there was only one of these this time.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners
The Epic of Gilgamesh	(Anonymous)	109,102	10,282
American Sniper	Chris Kyle	135,061	3,557
Murder in Mesopotamia	Agatha Christie	62,876	4,129
They Came to Baghdad	Agatha Christie	22,814	2,852
The Yellow Birds	Kevin Powers	26,163	1,880
Pride of Baghdad	Brian K. Vaughan	25,132	1,704
Redeployment	Phil Klay	24,641	1,510
Generation Kill	Evan Wright	19,330	1,626

Well, I was worried that this list would be completely dominated by war porn, telling the story of people who know Iraq only through having been been sent there in a brutal and illegal invasion, but in fact I am delighted that a real indigenous epic, possibly the earliest known work in the sff genre, wins this week; also amusing to have two Agatha Christies in the top four.

I disqualified Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain, because although it is about the recent Iraq war, it is mostly set in Texas, as is the film.

The top book on my list by an Iraqi writer is Frankenstein in Baghdad, by Ahmed Saadawi, which sounds rather good. (Gilgamesh was probably written by a local, but millennia before the concept of ‘Iraqi’ had any meaning.)

Next up: Argentina, Afghanistan and Yemen. (Yep, despite everything, Yemen has a bigger population than Canada or Poland.)

The best known books set in each country: Algeria

Posted on 8 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology; I am excluding books if less than half of them is actually set in Algeria.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners
The Stranger	Albert Camus	1,184,111	36,629
The Plague	Albert Camus	279,420	19.033
The Sheltering Sky	Paul Bowles	29,135	4,430
*The Eight*	Katherine Neville	44,106	1,963
Exile and the Kingdom	Albert Camus	13,950	2,899
The First Man	Albert Camus	10,639	2,478
The Meursault Investigation	Kamel Daoud	8,582	920
The Rabbi’s Cat #1-#3	Joann Sfar	7,140	888

Not a big surprise for the top spot here. There is a myth that Albert Camus was goalkeeper for the Algerian national football team. This is not true; there was no Algerian national football team until the war of independence, and while it’s true that the teenage Camus was goalkeeper in the 1930s for the junior team of Algeria’s top club, Racing Universitaire d’Alger, he had to give it up when he contracted tuberculosis at 18. Football clearly had a lasting effect on him though.

Quite a lot of books had to be excluded here because, despite their authors’ Algerian origins, the books themselves are largely or entirely set elsewhere, if anywhere at all. The Confessions of St Augustine are more in modern Tunisia (and Italy). Camus’ The Fall is set in France and the Netherlands, and his The Myth of Sisyphus is a non-fiction piece with no specific geographical setting. So is Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. The Roman-era author Apuleius was born in Madaurus in the province of Numidia, but his best known work, The Golden Ass, is set in what is now modern Greece.

And Yasmina Khadra’s two top books, Swallows of Kabul and The Attack, are set in Afghanistan and Israel respectively. Khadra’s What the Day Owes the Night, which is set in Algeria, just missed the cut and is ninth on the ranking.

I’m allowing The Eight by Katherine Neville, although it sounds like a very silly book. Apparently the more modern of the two timelines is firmly moored in Algeria. I am not tempted to find out for myself. And five of the six short stories in Camus’ Exile and the Kingdom are definitely set in Algeria, so that’s good enough for me. And the first two of the three stories in the initial Rabbi’s Cat album are in Algiers.

The numbers here did show a big cultural difference for one writer in particular: Ahlam Mosteghanemi, whose two top books Memory in the Flesh and Chaos of the Senses have been ranked by a massive 25,290 and 19,812 Goodreads users respectively, in fifth and sixth place by GR stats, but they are owned by only 92 and 41 LibraryThing users, so they fell some way below my cutoff when I multiplied the two together. She sounds like a really interesting writer.

Next up: Iraq, Argentina, Afghanistan and Yemen.

The best known books set in each country: Spain

Posted on 1 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology; I am excluding books not actually set in Spain.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners
The Shadow of the Wind	Carlos Ruiz Zafón	663,278	28,569
The Sun Also Rises	Ernest Hemingway	460,046	23,524
Don Quixote (I, II)	Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra	282,658	31,679
For Whom the Bell Tolls	Ernest Hemingway	301,424	19,550
Origin	Dan Brown	335,571	6,462
The Angel’s Game	Carlos Ruiz Zafón	169,826	9,016
The Story of Ferdinand	Munro Leaf	93,036	9,719
Homage to Catalonia	George Orwell	64,188	6,403

I happily disqualified The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho, because apart from being rubbish, only the very first part is set in Spain. But that was the only one – the majority of The Sun Also Rises is set in Spain rather than France. Sadly, Arturo Pérez-Reverte didn’t quite make the cut (with The Dumas Club).

When I did this exercise in 2015, the top four books were the same in the same order, though The Shadow of the Wind was then top on LibraryThing (after The Alchemist) and second to The Sun Also Rises on Goodreads; now it is the other way round.

I’m glad that Homage to Catalonia features; it is one of my favourite non-fiction books and I retrospectively made it my Book of the Year for 2014. I was talking to a Catalan friend a few weeks ago who told me that he had not even heard of it until he found it on the shelves of a friend he was staying with in Ireland, at the age of 20; now of course he is as big a fan as I am.

Next up: Algeria. The top book set there will not be a big surprise.

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Tag Archives: top books in each country

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The best known books set in each country: Ethiopia revisited

The best known books set in each country: The Philippines revisited

The best known books set in each country: Bangladesh revisited

The best known books set in each country: Brazil revisited

The best known books set in each country: Iraq

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The best known books set in each country: Spain