See here for methodology; I am excluding books if less than half of them is actually set in Algeria.
| Title | Author | GR raters | LT owners |
| The Stranger | Albert Camus | 1,184,111 | 36,629 |
| The Plague | Albert Camus | 279,420 | 19.033 |
| The Sheltering Sky | Paul Bowles | 29,135 | 4,430 |
| The Eight | Katherine Neville | 44,106 | 1,963 |
| Exile and the Kingdom | Albert Camus | 13,950 | 2,899 |
| The First Man | Albert Camus | 10,639 | 2,478 |
| The Meursault Investigation | Kamel Daoud | 8,582 | 920 |
| The Rabbi’s Cat #1-#3 | Joann Sfar | 7,140 | 888 |
Not a big surprise for the top spot here. There is a myth that Albert Camus was goalkeeper for the Algerian national football team. This is not true; there was no Algerian national football team until the war of independence, and while it’s true that the teenage Camus was goalkeeper in the 1930s for the junior team of Algeria’s top club, Racing Universitaire d’Alger, he had to give it up when he contracted tuberculosis at 18. Football clearly had a lasting effect on him though.
Quite a lot of books had to be excluded here because, despite their authors’ Algerian origins, the books themselves are largely or entirely set elsewhere, if anywhere at all. The Confessions of St Augustine are more in modern Tunisia (and Italy). Camus’ The Fall is set in France and the Netherlands, and his The Myth of Sisyphus is a non-fiction piece with no specific geographical setting. So is Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. The Roman-era author Apuleius was born in Madaurus in the province of Numidia, but his best known work, The Golden Ass, is set in what is now modern Greece.
And Yasmina Khadra’s two top books, Swallows of Kabul and The Attack, are set in Afghanistan and Israel respectively. Khadra’s What the Day Owes the Night, which is set in Algeria, just missed the cut and is ninth on the ranking.
I’m allowing The Eight by Katherine Neville, although it sounds like a very silly book. Apparently the more modern of the two timelines is firmly moored in Algeria. I am not tempted to find out for myself. And five of the six short stories in Camus’ Exile and the Kingdom are definitely set in Algeria, so that’s good enough for me. And the first two of the three stories in the initial Rabbi’s Cat album are in Algiers.
The numbers here did show a big cultural difference for one writer in particular: Ahlam Mosteghanemi, whose two top books Memory in the Flesh and Chaos of the Senses have been ranked by a massive 25,290 and 19,812 Goodreads users respectively, in fifth and sixth place by GR stats, but they are owned by only 92 and 41 LibraryThing users, so they fell some way below my cutoff when I multiplied the two together. She sounds like a really interesting writer.
Next up: Iraq, Argentina, Afghanistan and Yemen.
India | China | USA | Indonesia | Pakistan | Nigeria | Brazil (revisited) | Bangladesh (revisited) | Russia | Mexico | Japan | Philippines (revisited) | Ethiopia (revisited) | Egypt | DR Congo | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Germany | France | Thailand | UK | Tanzania | South Africa | Italy | Myanmar | Kenya | Colombia | South Korea | Sudan | Uganda | Spain | Algeria | Iraq | Argentina | Afghanistan