Lebanon sits at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, with Syria to the east and north, and Israel to the south. It is an ancient centre of civilization and culture, and was part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries. It was established as a Christian-ruled protectorate in the nineteenth century and was then ruled by France from after the First World War until 1946. Its people mainly speak Arabic. It is believed that about a third of the population are respectively Shia, Sunni and various Christian denominations, with also an influential minority of the local Druze faith.

I have never been to Lebanon myself, though I love the food. It has a tragic recent history: a power-sharing arrangement between politicians of various Christian and Muslim traditions lasted until 1976, but proved unable to protect the country from internal instability and external attacks. The massive explosion at the docks in Beirut in 2020 (in which a friend of mine was injured) seemed indicative of the failure of the country’s governance.

See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in the current boundaries of Lebanon. 

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
An Unnecessary Woman	Rabih Alameddine	14,652	1,465	2,462
The Broken Wings	Kahlil Gibran	29,451	684	2,078
The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)	Rabih Alameddine	13,463	327	2,571
The Arsonists’ City	Hala Alyan	8,482	249	2,622
The Hakawati	Rabih Alameddine	4,660	1,008	701
The Gabriel Hounds	Mary Stewart	5,727	1,172	448
The Rock of Tanios	Amin Maalouf	8,446	684	353
A Game for Swallows: To Die, to Leave, to Return	Zeina Abirached	4,878	373	1,080

As sometimes happens, the three systems have three different winners. The LibraryThing winner, also this week’s overall winner, is An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine, about a widow in Beirut with few social contacts but a rich inner life. Alameddine was born in Jordan and partly grew up in Kuwait; but he identifies as Lebanese.

He has two other books in the table. The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), which came out only last year, is about growing up and living in Lebanon over the last sixty years. The Hakawati is about a Lebanese man returning from America to be at his father’s deathbed.

I disqualified two of Khalil Gibran’s best known books, The Prophet and The Madman, because neither is sufficiently moored in real-world geography for me to allow them as set in Lebanon. However, The Broken Wings, this week’s Goodreads winner, is definitely set in Beirut.

The Arsonists’ City, this week’s StoryGraph winner, is about a Lebanese family who try emigrating to the USA and find it doesn’t work. As far as I can tell the US sections amount to less than half of the book. It owes its place on the list to the StoryGraph numbers; otherwise it would have slipped off the end.

I was surprised to see Mary Stewart’s name pop up here. The Gabriel Hounds, set in the 1960s, is about two British cousins who visit their mysterious great-aunt in the Lebanese mountains. It sounds like a lot of fun.

Amin Malouf is probably the best known Lebanese writer, but few of his books are actually set there. I disqualified his Samarkand, Leo Africanus, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, and Ports of Call before ending up with The Rock of Tanios, a novel set in Lebanon in the 1880s.

A Game for Swallows: To Die, to Leave, to Return also owes its place on the list to strong StoryGraph numbers. It is a graphic novel about life in Beirut. Zeina Abirached is the top Lebanese woman writer on the list (Hala Alyan identifies as Palestinian, and Mary Stewart of course was British).

The two books which fell off the list due to insufficiently strong StoryGraph numbers were De Niro’s Game, by Rawi Hage, and The Disoriented by Amin Maalouf.

I have already noted a number of disqualifications. The only other one that I scratched my head about was From Beirut to Jerusalem, by Thomas Friedman, which is evenly split between Lebanon and Israel/Palestine – except that one of the Lebanon chapters is actually set in Syria, which must sink the strictly Lebanese part to below 50%.

The Middle East is not my area of expertise and I own few books with anything much about Lebanon. The one that I love is The Twenty-Two Letters by Clive King, about a boy who invents the alphabet in the city now known as Byblos on the Lebanese coast in about 1600 BC, though I don’t think it would qualify for my list even if it was better known, as much of the story concerns the journeys of the protagonist and his brothers elsewhere in the Levant. Clive King wrote it while working for the British Council in Beirut. His best known book is Stig of the Dump.

The other book almost entirely set in Lebanon that I used to own, but cannot now find on my shelves, is An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan, his account of being held hostage by Islamic Jihad from 1986 to 1990, and his friendship with fellow hostage John McCarthy. It won the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize.

Coming next are three more conflict-riven countries, Liberia, the Central African Republic and Palestine, followed by Oman.