The best known books set in each country: Tunisia

Posted on 7 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Bolivia

Posted on 30 November 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Burundi

Posted on 23 November 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Rwanda

Posted on 16 November 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Benin

Posted on 9 November 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on 2 November 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on 26 October 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Zambia

Posted on 19 October 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Cambodia

Posted on 12 October 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Ecuador

Posted on 5 October 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: the Netherlands

Posted on 28 September 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Romania

Posted on 14 September 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Senegal

Posted on 7 September 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best known books set in each country: Somalia

Posted on 31 August 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Somalia (including Somaliland).

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War	Mark Bowden	68,067	4,798
A House in the Sky	Amanda Lindhout	70,898	1,187
Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth	Warsan Shire	21,170	513
In the Company of Heroes: The Personal Story Behind Black Hawk Down	Michael J. Durant	5,877	533
Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head	Warsan Shire	9,123	239
Desert Dawn	Waris Dirie	4,340	468
Call Me American: A Memoir	Abdi Nor Iftin	4,561	233
The Orchard of Lost Souls	Nadifa Mohamed	1,822	216

I’m going to start providing summaries of the winning books (should probably have done that much sooner). Black Hawk Down, published in 1999, is about the unsuccessful 1993 US military raid in Mogadishu to try and capture a local warlord. It was later adapted into a film directed by Ridley Scott.

It’s a bit unfortunate that three of the top four books, including the top two, are about violent foreign experiences of Somalia rather than giving voice to the people themselves, and I also freely admit that I’ve stretched a point with Warsan Shire’s two poetry collections – on a quick scan, they did seem to be well grounded in Somalia as a location, but I did not go through and tally pages. The Orchard of Lost Souls represents Somaliland here; hopefully some day we’ll be able to tally it separately.

I disqualified ten books. Ayaan Hirsi Ali leaves Somalia early in her autobiography, Infidel, and does not return; the second volume of her autobiography, Nomad has her travelling further afield. Desert Flower, Waris Dine’s better known book, is mostly set in the UK. When Stars Are Scattered, by Victoria Jamieson, and City of Thorns, by Ben Rawlence, are mostly in Kenya. Don’t Tell Me You’re Afraid, by Giuseppe Catozzella, is about the refugee experience en route to Europe. Djibouti, by Elmore Leonard, is mostly set in, er, Djibouti. Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men is mainly set in the UK, and her Black Mamba Boy is mostly in Yemen. Ilhan Omar’s This Is What America Looks Like is more about her life in the USA than her life before.

Next up: Senegal, Romania, Guatemala and the Netherlands.

The best known books set in each country: Chile

Posted on 24 August 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
The House of the Spirits	Isabel Allende	305,449	14,895
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair	Pablo Neruda	79,849	4,108
Violeta	Isabel Allende	101,789	1,330
Of Love and Shadows	Isabel Allende	36,211	3,327
Inés of My Soul	Isabel Allende	32,358	2,778
Maya’s Notebook	Isabel Allende	32,002	1,246
My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile	Isabel Allende	11,999	2,589
100 Love Sonnets	Pablo Neruda	18,311	1,695

There’s a very clear winner here, and equally clear domination of the list by a single author – and that doesn’t include the books by Isabel Allende that I disqualified because as far as I could tell there was not sufficient Chile-based content; they were Daughter of Fortune, Eva Luna, Paula, A Long Petal of the Sea, Portrait in Sepia, City of the Beasts, The Stories of Eva Luna, In the Midst of Winter and The Infinite Plan.

I disqualified another six, which I think all have Chilean authors but are not set there. Roberto Bolaño may be Chilean, but his two best known books, 2666 and The Savage Detectives, are set in Mexico. When We Cease to Understand the World, by Benjamín Labatut, is about scientists globally. I credited In Patagonia, by Bruce Chatwin, to Argentina a while back. Luis Sepúlveda’s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories is explicitly set in Ecuador, and his The Story of a Seagull and the Cat Who Taught Her to Fly sounds like it could be set anywhere with seagulls.

I admit I’ve stretched a point with a couple of those that I allowed onto the list: I suspect that Neruda’s poetry is not full of explicit geographical references, but it can hardly be set anywhere other than Chile; and I gave Maya’s Notebook the benefit of the doubt as the framing narrative is definitely in Chile even if most of the book is flashbacks.

That was unexpectedly tough, and I think they will get tougher as I go on. Next up are Somalia, Senegal, Romania and Guatemala.

The best known books set in each country: Kazakhstan

Posted on 17 August 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich	Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn	122,253	138,542
The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years	Chingiz Aitmatov	7,918	594
How I Learned Geography	Uri Shulevitz	5389	739
Half a World Away	Cynthia Kadohata	2,089	260
Apples Are from Kazakhstan: The Land that Disappeared	Christopher Robbins	1,309	264
A Shadow Intelligence	Oliver Harris	1,821	84
The Dead Lake	Hamid Ismailov	959	112
The Faculty of Useless Knowledge	Yury Dombrovsky	376	186

I was a bit surprised by the winner this time, but it is indeed firmly set in Kazakhstan, so it matches my criterion. It’s really unusual for such a well-known book to have more LibraryThing owners than Goodreads raters – the ratio is usually more like 10 or 20 to 1 in favour of GR. It’s also getting increasingly rare that I have read the top book in the list – the last one was Sri Lanka a month ago, the one before that was Saudi Arabia in April.

There is a distinct lack of Kazakh writers on this list. Chingiz Aitmatoc is Kyrgyz, and Hamis Ismailov is Uzbek (though born in what is now Kyrgyzstan). The top Kazakh writer from my survey was some way below my threshold; it is Mukhamet Shayakhmetov, whose best known book is The Silent Steppe.

I’m a little uncertain about a couple of these. Half a World Away starts in the USA, and A Shadow Intelligence in the UK. But my assessment from what I could fins about them online is that probably more than 50% is set in Kazakhstan in both cases.

I disqualified ten books this time. The top book that I disqualified just has one character from Kazakhstan, and as far as I can tell isn’t set there at all; it is The Zahir by Paulo Coelho. Most of the others cover Kazakhstan as part of Central Asia, of the old Mongol Empire, or indeed the whole post-Soviet region. They were The Silk Roads, by Peter Frankopan; Bones of the Hills, by Conn Iggulden; The New Silk Roads, by Peter Frankopan; Sovietistan, by Erika Fatland; The Lost Heart of Asia, by Colin Thubron (which I have read); The Border, by Erika Flatland; On the Trail of Genghis Khan, by Tim Cope; The Catch Me if You Can, by Jessica Nabongo; and

The Tombs by Clive Cussler and The Good Angel of Death, by Andreï Kourkov, both have their protagonists on odysseys that end up in Kazakhstan, much more than half way through the book. Jamilia, by Chingiz Aitmatov, is set in Kyrgyzstan, but I think some taggers are confused about the difference. (I don’t think any of Ken MacLeod’s books qualifies either, and anyway GR and LT users have not tagged them.)

Coming next: Chile, Somalia, Senegal and then our first European country for a while, Romania.

The best known books set in each country: Chad

Posted on 10 August 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
The Roots of Heaven	Romain Gary	2,653	526
Rain School	James Rumford	803	472
Told by Starlight in Chad	Joseph Brahim Seid	160	36
African Rice Heart	Emily Star Wilkens	72	10
To Catch a Dictator: The Pursuit and Trial of Hissène Habré	Reed Brody	55	10
The Trial of Hissène Habré: How the People of Chad Brought a Tyrant to Justice	Celeste Hicks	18	6
France’s Wars in Chad: Military Intervention and Decolonization in Africa	Nathaniel K. Powell	7	5
The Plagues of Friendship	Sem Miantoloum Beasnael	4	4

This was unusually tough. Several users of both Goodreads and LibraryThing have used the “chad” tag for a lot of their books which have absolutely nothing to do with the country, and it must therefore refer to something else. Several political analyses had a handful of owners on LibraryThing, but none on Goodreads. This is the first time that I’ve had to go down to single figures on either system. I’m not going to list the disqualified books because there are too many of them and most of them are completely irrelevant.

Today’s winner was famously adapted into a 1958 film starring Errol Flynn, and it sounds interesting enough to track down. Two Chadian writers appear in today’s list. As well as the non-fiction, there’s also a high-scoring children’s book and a missionary testimony. But I think that all in all, Chad is the most literarily obscure country I have yet covered. I am sure that there will be more.

Next up: Kazakhstan, Chile, Somalia and Senegal.

The best known books set in each country: Malawi

Posted on 3 August 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope	William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer	31,842	2,808
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (for younger readers)	William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer	11,205	1,722
The Lower River	Paul Theroux	2,957	375
Galimoto	Karen Lynn Williams	332	880
The Heaven Shop	Deborah Ellis	1,233	234
Laugh with the Moon	Shana Burg	1,148	170
Venture to the Interior	Laurens van der Post	296	331
Jungle Lovers	Paul Theroux	210	110

This week’s winner, and second place, go to the inventor William Kamkwamba whose memoir in its original form is far ahead of its own YA version, which in turn is way ahead of everything else. Apparently it is set reading in a number of American educational institutions, which must help the numbers.

Apart from Kamkwamba, whose story is co-written with an American journalist, there is no Malawian writer in the above list. The top Malawian writer that I found is the poet Upile Chisala, but I’m afraid I disqualified her top book, soft magic, because it seems to be more about the diaspora experience, though I may be incorrect. Her other books, nectar and a fire like you seem to have more Malawian content but were just pipped by Paul Theroux’s Jungle Lovers.

Speaking of which, I had forgotten that American author Paul Theroux has a personal connection with Malawi. One of his sons was in the same year as me at the same Cambridge college. We did not know each other at all well – I think the one time we particularly interacted was just after our graduation, when I found myself moving into a college room that he was hastily vacating.

I disqualified eleven books for being clearly less than 50% set in Malawi. I have noted soft magic above; the others are Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, by Alexandra Fuller; Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town, by Paul Theroux (again); The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After, by Clemantine Wamariya; Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, by Alexandra Fuller; Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone, by Martin Dugard; Long Way Down, by Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman; In a Strange Room, by Damon Galgu; Thin Air: A Ghost Story, by Michelle Paver (which seems to be set entirely in the Himalayas); My Other Life, by Paul Theroux (yet again); and The Ukimwi Road: From Kenya to Zimbabwe, by Dervla Murphy.

Coming next: Zambia next door, then Chad, Kazakhstan and Chile.

The best known books set in each country: Taiwan

Posted on 27 July 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Taiwan. I did reflect on whether or not Taiwan counts as a country, but I plan to include a few other contested cases as I get down the list, so here we go.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
The Astonishing Color of After	Emily X.R. Pan	33,411	1,306
Loveboat, Taipei	Abigail Hing Wen	20,283	415
Notes of a Crocodile	Qiu Miaojin	8,397	487
Taipei	Tao Lin	7,857	420
Bestiary	K-Ming Chang	3,973	342
The Membranes	Chi Ta-wei	7,086	188
Dumpling Days	Grace Lin	2,687	305
The Man with the Compound Eyes	Wu Ming-Yi	3,180	236

There were a couple of these that I was not certain about, but it’s clear that The Astonishing Color of After is mostly set in Taiwan, and that it’s ahead on Goodreads and way ahead on LibraryThing.

Despite its title, I wasn’t completely sure if more than 50% of Tao Lin’s Taipei is set on the island, and likewise Bestiary which seems to be the reminiscences of Taiwanese-American women, but mainly about Taiwan. I’ve given them the benefit of the doubt.

I did exclude half a dozen. Stay True by Hua Hsu, The Year of the Dog by Grace Lin, Fresh Off the Boat by Eddie Huang and Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho all seem to be entirely about the Taiwanese-American emigrant experience. Daughters of Shandong by Eve J. Chung is mainly set on the mainland. Peach Blossom Spring by Melissa Fu is set both on the mainland and in the USA.

Next up: Malawi, Zambia, Chad and Kazakhstan.

The best known books set in each country: Sri Lanka

Posted on 20 July 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
The Fountains of Paradise	Arthur C. Clarke	31,256	3,686
Anil’s Ghost	Michael Ondaatje	18,593	4,118
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida	Shehan Karunatilaka	54,665	1,257
Wave	Sonali Deraniyagala	22,405	939
Running in the Family	Michael Ondaatje	9,699	1,781
The Tea Planter’s Wife	Dinah Jefferies	21,637	608
You’re Invited	Amanda Jayatissa	24,448	457
Funny Boy	Shyam Selvadurai	8,648	887

You may quibble that The Fountains of Paradise is mostly set on a fictional island called Taprobane; but Taprobane is in almost exactly the same place as Sri Lanka in our world, and it’s pretty clear where the writer had in mind when he was writing the book. Also I love it.

It’s surprising for the top book on my metric to be only in second place on both Goodreads and LibraryThing. Indeed there is an unusual divide between the two systems here: Michael Ondaatje is relatively way more popular than usual on LT, while the women writers on the list are relatively way more popular than usual on GR.

I must say that the book I most want to read off this list is probably Wave, which sounds interesting but tough, as Huck Finn said about Pilgrim’s Progress. I am not completely sure if it passes my 50% test, but it seems more likely than not.

I disqualified only two books this time (see also China, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, Cameroon and Australia). They were both by Michael Ondaatje, who attracts “sri lanka” tags for obvious reasons. One was The English Patient, which actually outranked everything else by miles, but has no internal reference to Sri Lanka at all, and the other was The Cat’s Table, which would otherwise have been just below Anil’s Ghost and just above The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

Coming next: Taiwan, Malawi, Zambia and Chad.

The best known books set in each country: Burkina Faso

Posted on 13 July 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
American Spy	Lauren Wilkinson	30,165	907
The Water Princess	Susan Verde	3,269	1,113
Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman	Malidoma Patrice Somé	1,733	382
The Weight of Sand: My 450 Days Held Hostage in the Sahara	Edith Blais	4409	48
Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle	Thomas Sankara	1,725	101
Ritual: Power, Healing and Community	Malidoma Patrice Somé	548	174
The Red Bicycle	Jude Isabella	429	165
Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution, 1983-87	Thomas Sankara	498	131

This was surprisingly easy to compile. The figure of the short-lived 1980s president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, looms over the country’s cultural footprint; two of his political texts are on this list, and the protagonist of this week’s winning novel fictionally seduces him while colluding in his overthrow. We also have two children’s books, two anthropological studies, and a real life hostage drama.

I disqualified only three books this week. I don’t know why anyone tagged Flowers from the Storm, by Laura Kinsale, as being relevant to Burkina Faso; it seems to be set in England and Wales. (Possibly the person using the tag acquired or read their copy of the book while travelling there.) Two other books cover Burkina Faso along with other African countries: Empire of Cotton: A Global History, by Sven Beckert, and White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa, by Susan Williams.

Coming next: Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Malawi and Zambia.

The best known books set in each country: Mali

Posted on 6 July 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Sahara	Clive Cussler	60,005	4,040
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts	Joshua Hammer	12,095	1,721
Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali	(anonymous)	2,889	748
Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years With a Midwife in Mali	Kris Holloway	4,958	399
Segu	Maryse Condé	1,973	641
The Black Pages	Nnedi Okorafor	4,215	90
I Lost My Tooth In Africa	Penda Diakité	517	629
The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu: The Quest for This Storied City and the Race to Save its Treasures	Charlie English	1,010	252

After a couple of countries which were harder work, I was glad that Mali turned out to be fairly straightforward – the city of Timbuktu gives it a certain brand recognition. I wasn’t completely sure about this week’s winner at first, a typically convoluted Cussler tale which climaxes with an absurd revelation about the fate of Abraham Lincoln, but a speedy page count revealed that it does indeed appear to be more than 50% set in Mali, so it qualifies. Glad to see the traditional Malian epic Sundiata doing well also.

I did disqualify ten books. With a particularly heavy heart, I ruled out Scales of Gold by Dorothy Dunnett, because although more than half of it is set in West Africa, I think less than half is set in what’s now Mali. Tremendous book though.

Similarly, I was not quite sure about Masquerade, by O.O. Sangoyomi, but I think that more than half of it is set in the fictional city of Ṣàngótẹ̀ and I’m pretty sure that’s meant to be in what’s now Nigeria. The Bitter Side of Sweet, by Tara Sullivan, is set in Côte d’Ivoire. The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill, is set in Canada. Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law, by Haben Girma, is set in the USA and the protagonist is Eritrean by origin, so I don’t know why people connect it with Mali. The Green Road, by Anne Enright, is mostly set in Ireland.

The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński, Leo Africanus, by Amin Maalouf, Sahara, by Michael Palin and China’s Second Continent, by Howard W. French, all cover numerous countries, with much less than half of each book set in Mali.

Coming next: Burkina Faso, Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Malawi.

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.

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Tag Archives: top books in each country

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The best known books set in each country: Niger

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The best known books set in each country: Nepal

The best known books set in each country: Cameroon

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