world: kazakhstan | From the Heart of Europe

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.

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Tag Archives: world: kazakhstan

The best known books set in each country: Kazakhstan