world: sierra leone | From the Heart of Europe

Now that I am into the second hundred countries, I will start including brief geographical and historical notes about each. Sierra Leone is in West Africa, bordering Guinea to the north, Liberia to the southeast and the Atlantic Ocean to the southwest. It was a British colony from roughly 1808 to 1961, and then had an awful civil war from 1991 to 2002. One of the leaders in that period was Valentine Strasser, born on the same day as me, who seized power three days after his/my/our 25th birthday. Weirdly enough the man who overthrew him in 1996, Julius Maada Bio, is now president again, though this time through winning elections in 2018 and 2023, having spent time in exile in the USA in between.

See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I’m now also using numbers from Storygraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Sierra Leone. I’m stretching a point here, as discussed below.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviewers
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier	Ishmael Beah	195,447	8,011	14,240
The Gilded Ones	Namina Forna	56,520	2,246	20,033
The Heart of the Matter	Graham Greene	31,146	5,537	2,085
The Merciless Ones	Namina Forna	13,002	587	4,699
The Memory of Love	Aminatta Forna	5,249	750	656
The Eternal Ones	Namina Forna	4,843	212	1,979
Radiance of Tomorrow	Ishmael Beah	4,731	477	691
The Bite of the Mango	Mariatu Kamara	4,307	363	440

The winner this week is a memoir of a boy soldier in the Sierra Leone civil war, though I see from Wikipedia that its veracity on points of detail has been challenged. One of the same author’s novels also features on the list.

The Deathless trilogy (The Gilded Ones, The Merciless Ones and The Eternal Ones) by Amina Forma is set in a fantasy West African country, but the author is pretty clear that it is firmly based on her childhood experiences in Sierra Leone, so I am allowing it to qualify.

Graham Greene’s classic anguished novel The Heart of the Matter and two women actually from Sierra Leone, Aminatta Forna and Mariatu Kamara, make up the rest of the list.

Including StoryGraph didn’t change the top eight but did increase the margin by which Catch Me A Colobus by Gerald Durrell missed the cut.

I had to disqualify a number of books, and hesitated most over The Laughing Monsters, a thriller by Denis Johnson, which is set partly in Sierra Leone but also in Uganda and Congo, and my limited investigations indicated that the Sierra Leone sections amount to less than half of the book.

Next week back to Europe for Belarus; then Laos, Turkmenistan and Libya.

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The best known books set in each country: Sierra Leone