world: guatemala | From the Heart of Europe

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tag Archives: world: guatemala

The best known books set in each country: Guatemala