See here for methodology. I am excluding books of which less than 50% is actually set in Yemen, as explained further below.
Title | Author | Goodreads raters | LibraryThing owners |
I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced | Nujood Ali | 23,627 | 1,231 |
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen | Paul Torday | 16,461 | 1,631 |
The Panther | Nelson DeMille | 23,158 | 1,125 |
The Monk of Mokha | Dave Eggers | 20,958 | 754 |
Sold | Zana Muhsen | 7,759 | 464 |
Henna House | Nomi Eve | 4,266 | 215 |
Motoring with Mohammed | Eric Hansen | 1,611 | 343 |
The Woman Who Fell from the Sky | Jennifer Steil | 1,432 | 153 |
Yemen has not been well served in the literature available in the West. Two of the above are about child slavery and sexual abuse (I Am Nujood and Sold) and the rest are all by foreigners (Jennifer Steil’s memoir of teaching journalism sounds particularly dire).
I excluded a lot of books which cover Yemen along with other places. Three of these were fiction: Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese (mainly set in Ethiopia), The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty, which is set all over the Indian Ocean (but with Oman rather than Yemen as the heroine’s home base), and Black Mamba Boy, by Nadifa Mohamed, which starts in Yemen but is mostly set in East Africa.
The rest were non-fiction; War on Terror punditry (The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright; Dirty Wars, by Jeremy Scahill), regional travelogues (Arabian Sands, by Wilfred Thesiger; Baghdad Without a Map, by Tony Horwitz), and general reporting (Our Women on the Ground, ed. Zahra Hankir). I am also sad to have to disqualify Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition of 1761-1767, by Thorkild Hansen, which looks fascinating, but only 90 pages out of 370 are actually set in Yemen.
One case of huge divergence between Goodreads and LibraryThing: The Handsome Jew, by Yemeni writer Ali al-Muqri, has 2,955 raters on GR, but only 8 owners on LibraryThing, which clearly has failed to penetrate the Yemeni market. The more traditional travel books score comparatively better on LT.
Next up: Canada. This will not be at all surprising.