world: senegal | From the Heart of Europe

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.

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Tag Archives: world: senegal

The best known books set in each country: Senegal