world: tajikistan | From the Heart of Europe

See here for methodology, though NB that I’m now also using numbers from Storygraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Tajikistan.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviewers
Neanderthal	John Darnton	3,104	1,141	198
Hurramabad	Andrei Volos	88	39	11
A History of the Tajiks: Iranians of the East	Richard C. Foltz	39	17	8
The Disobedient Wife	Annika Milisic-Stanley	101	5	10
Huit monologues de femmes [8 монологов женщины] [Eight Women’s Monologues]	Barzou Abdourazzoqov	39	8	12
Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan	Artemy M. Kalinovsky	30	11	6
The City Where Dreams Come True	Gulsifat Shakhidi	42	3	11
The Birth of Tajikistan: National Identity and the Origins of the Republic	Paul Bergne	30	15	3

Poor Tajikistan! Most of the books that I found with that tag on LT and GR are about Central Asia in general, and Tajikistan is always the last of the five republics that people write about – more difficult to get to, very different language to the other four, devastated in the war of the 1990s which the rest of the world has forgotten.

The top book here (by a long way), Neanderthal by John Darnton, is actually a novel about discovering two lost tribes of Neanderthals in the mountains of Tajikistan. The Neanderthals have psychic powers, and one tribe is peaceful while the other is aggressive. It sounds like rubbish to be honest.

Hurramabad, this week’s runner-up, is about the Russian minority in Tajikistan after independence. Its author, Andrei Volos is an ethnic Russian from Tajikistan. The Disobedient Wife is about an expat western woman in Dushanbe and her maid.

The City Where Dreams Come True is about the civil war of the 1990s and its impact; Gulsifat Shakhidi is the top Tajik woman writer on my list. It made the list thanks to a better Storygraph rating, bumping Uncertain Light by South African writer Marion Molteno off the end.

I put a slight question mark against Huit monologues de femmes [Eight Women’s Monologues], which has not been translated into English (and I also could not find much by searching on its original title, 8 монологов женщины). One summary that I have seen says that it is set on the border with Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. However Barzu Abdurazzoqov is a Tajik writer (mainly for the theatre) so I’m assuming that the monologues are set on the Tajik side of the Uzbek and Afghan borders with his country.

A History of the Tajiks, Laboratory of Social Development and The Birth of Tajikistan are all self-explanatory. (I say that, and then someone will write to me to say that at least one of them is really a great work of post-Soviet magical realism.)

I disqualified, though again with question marks, two books about great Tajik cultural figures, because both seemed to me to be more set in Uzbekistan than Tajikistan. These were the autobiographical The Sands of Oxus, by Sadriddin Ayni, who spent much of his youth in Bokhara, and Возвращение в Панджруд [Return to Panjrud], by Andrei Volos, which is about the poet Rudaki; although his eponymous home, Rudak, is in Tajikistan, his career peaked under the Samanids who were based further west.

This was unusually enlightening and humbling – it turned out that I know much less about Tajikistan than I thought.

Next up is Papua New Guinea; then we’re into a run of European states, with Sweden, Czechia and Azerbaijan.

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Tag Archives: world: tajikistan

The best known books set in each country: Tajikistan