Earlier posts this week because I am travelling in Asia.

See here for methodology. This has been an unusual case, the first time (but probably not not the last) that I have closed the list at five, rather than my usual eight, because I have disqualified ten books for being less than 50% set in the target country and I don’t have time or energy to keep going.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Cancer Ward	Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn	17,294	3,750
Samarkand	Amin Maalouf	30,077	1,533
Moon Over Samarkand	Muḥammad al-Mansī Qandīl	13,933	33
The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor	Zahir ud-Din Muhammad Babur	746	476
Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia	Tom Bissell	707	239

The winner is one of the great Soviet-era novels, and I wonder to what extent the Tashkent setting comes through.

I confess that I am not 100% certain about Amin Maalouf’s Samarkand, but what I’ve seen online gives me a reasonable case to include it.

The usual ratios between Goodreads and LibraryThing users barely apply here. Moon Over Samarkand, a great Arabic novel which is partly set in Egypt but mostly (as far as I can tell) in Samarkand, has more than 400 times as many readers on GR as on LT.

On the other hand, the Memoirs of Babur, founder of the Mughal dynasty, have more than 60% as many LT readers as GR readers, which I think is a record. It doesn’t actually include all that much about his conquest of India, and concentrates on his early career in the future Uzbekistan.

There are many many books about Central Asia, but Chasing the Sea seems to be unusually Uzbekistan-heavy for that sub-genre.

The books I disqualified, in order, were:

• The Silk Roads, by Peter Frankopan
• Bones of the Hills, by Conn Iggulden
• The Great Game, by Peter Hopkirk
• Imperium, by Ryszard Kapuściński
• The Possessed, by Elif Batuman
• Shadow of the Silk Road, by Colin Thubron
• The Blackbird Girls, by Anne Blankman
• Sovietistan, by Erika Fatland
• The Lost Heart of Asia, by Colin Thubron
• Foreign Devils on the Silk Road, by Peter Hopkirk
• Tamerlane, by Justin Marozzi

Next up: Malaysia, Mozambique, Ghana and Peru.

Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium
Oceania: Australia