world: guinea | From the Heart of Europe

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.

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