See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Jordan under today’s boundaries.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
| Title | Author | Goodreads raters | LibraryThing owners |
| Appointment with Death | Agatha Christie | 68,580 | 4,513 |
| Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life | Queen Noor | 10,227 | 1,459 |
| Mrs. Pollifax, Innocent Tourist | Dorothy Gilman | 4,792 | 859 |
| Married to a Bedouin | Marguerite van Geldermalsen | 3,786 | 261 |
| Forbidden Love / Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day Jordan | Norma Khouri | 1,688 | 313 |
| Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril | Abdullah II of Jordan | 935 | 169 |
| Fencing with the King | Diana Abu-Jaber | 1,088 | 83 |
| Pillars of Salt | Fadia Faqir | 710 | 110 |
Starting the year with a colonial adventure, in which Poirot is summoned to the rose-red city of Petra to solve the murder of a tourist. Agatha Christie also featured on the lists for Syria, Morocco and Iraq (twice), and topped the Egypt chart, though I disqualified her from Zimbabwe.
It is striking how many books on the list are about foreign women encountering Jordan. Queen Noor is an American who married a Jordanian in 1978, Marguerite van Geldermalsen is a New Zealander who also married a (less prominent) Jordanian in 1978, Norma Khouri is another American (and her supposedly factual book was exposed as a hoax), and Diana Abu-Jaber was also born and brought up in America to a Jordanian family. The fictional Mrs Pollifax is an American secret agent pretending to be a tourist.
The top author on the list who is actually from Jordan is King Abdullah II, and the top woman author from Jordan (given my caveats about the others) is Fadia Faqir.
If I have counted correctly, this is the seventh country where seven out of eight books are by women, following on from Côte d’Ivoire, Canada, South Korea, Kenya, the United Kingdom and Iran.
I disqualified all of Robert Jordan’s books, which are frequently tagged “jordan” by Goodreads and LibraryThing users. I also disqualified Six Days of War, by Michael Oren, because most of the then Jordanian territory where the 1967 war was fought is no longer regarded as Jordanian, including by the Jordanian government. There is additionally some confusion about other Middle Eastern countries, with books set in Syria and Lebanon (and possibly Saudi Arabia) popping up too.
Three of the next four countries will be Caribbean: we head to the Dominican Republic next week, then back to the Middle East for the U.A.E., then back over again for Honduras and Cuba.
Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan | UAE | Tajikistan
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras | Cuba
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea