world: south sudan | From the Heart of Europe

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in South Sudan.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
A Long Walk to Water	Linda Sue Park	101,897	4,876
They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan	Benson Deng, Alephonsion Deng, Benjamin Ajak and Judy A. Bernstein	10,305	817
Acts of Faith	Philip Caputo	1,865	626
Emma’s War	Deborah Scroggins	2,103	303
War Child: A Child Soldier’s Story	Emmanuel Jal	2,158	218
War Brothers: The Graphic Novel	Sharon E. McKay	1,596	168
Songs of a War Boy	Deng Thiak Adut	1,686	72
Nya’s Long Walk: A Step at a Time	Linda Sue Park	568	136

I mentioned under Sudan that I had excluded four books which scored highly on both LT and GR, but appeared to be set in what is now South Sudan: A Long Walk to Water, by Linda Sue Park; They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky, by Benson Deng, Alephonsion Deng, Benjamin Ajak and Judy A. Bernstein; Acts of Faith, by Philip Caputo; and Emma’s War, by Deborah Scroggins. I checked as far as I could, and all four of those seem to indeed be set mainly south of the line.

I note that there is a character in the novel Acts of Faith who is very obviously based on Emma McCune, the subject of the biography Emma’s War. I never met her myself, but I know many people who did, and she clearly left her mark. If she had lived, she would be turning 62 in a few weeks’ time, and she would have been all over the political processes of the last thirty years, probably for better rather than worse.

Five of the other six books are about the terrible experiences of the Lost Boys, child soldiers conscripted into the Sudanese war in the 1990s, who then managed to escape to other countries and rebuild their lives. This week’s winner, A Long Walk to Water, combines such a story with the story of a girl in a tribal village in South Sudan who must keep her family supplied with water; her story on its own is the eighth of the books listed here.

I disqualified loads of books, starting with What is the What by Dave Eggers, another book about one of the Lost Boys, but as far as I can tell mainly set after the protagonist gets out of his home country. Also, some people seem to confuse South Sudan with South Africa when tagging their book collections.

The top book by a South Sudanese woman is Hopeless Kingdom, by Kgshak Akec, but it is mainly about the emigration experience. A near miss in several respects is Ghost Country, by Fatin Abbas, which is set in a fictional version of the disputed Abyei and whose author is from Khartoum.

This is the last African country for a while, and the last African country on the list of the six that I have actually visited myself. We’ll leap across the Atlantic next to Haiti, then back this side for Belgium, then Jordan, then back over again to Haiti’s neighbour the Dominican Republic.

From the Heart of Europe

Books, politics, languages and life

Tag Archives: world: south sudan

The best known books set in each country: South Sudan