See here for methodology, 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 Austria.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
| Title | Author | GR raters | LT owners | SG reviews |
| The Wall | Marlen Haushofer | 38,561 | 1,827 | 8,299 |
| Letter from an Unknown Woman | Stefan Zweig | 73,922 | 754 | 3,892 |
| The World of Yesterday | Stefan Zweig | 30,654 | 3,084 | 2,068 |
| Love Virtually | Daniel Glattauer | 31,275 | 1,208 | 3,190 |
| Beware of Pity | Stefan Zweig | 22,742 | 2,039 | 2,577 |
| Dream Story | Arthur Schnitzler | 22,245 | 2,094 | 2,347 |
| The Piano Teacher | Elfriede Jelinek | 16,914 | 2,227 | 2,054 |
| A Whole Life | Robert Seethaler | 24,289 | 1,000 | 2,874 |
When I did this exercise in 2015, I declared the winner to be Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, by Marjane Satrapi. But closer examination reveals that it (just) fails my criteria; the protagonist spends only the first 91 pages of a 187-page book in Vienna. Otherwise it would have been far ahead of the field.
The three sites have again served up three different winners. I had not previously heard of Marlen Haushofer, or her dystopian novel The Wall, in which the protagonist finds herself and her Alpine cabin sealed off from the outside world by an invisible barrier. I see that there was a film in 2012. It is way ahead on StoryGraph, second on Goodreads and not so very far behind on LibraryThing.
Letter from an Unknown Woman is a 68-page novella which wins on Goodreads, is in second place on StoryGraph, but lags on LibraryThing. It is about a years-later tragic resolution of an upstairs-downstairs love affair. For some reason Goodreads logs it under the Turkish translation, Bilinmeyen Bir Kadının Mektubu, which makes me suspect that it is a popular text for students learning German.
Zweig’s autobiography, The World of Yesterday, is ahead on LibraryThing but only fourth on Goodreads and further behind on StoryGraph. It is the only one of these that I have read, and I enjoyed it a lot.
Love Virtually, originally Gut Gegen Nordwind, is an email romance story. As far as I can tell, the setting is not specified, but everyone assumes that the protagonists live in Vienna.
I thought long and hard about Zweig’s Beware of Pity, as mentioned last week. The setting is described as “eine kleine Garnison an der ungarischen Grenze”, a garrison on the Hungarian border, on the main train line from Vienna to Budapest and closer to Vienna. Although the protagonist’s love interest is the daughter of the local Hungarian aristocrat, it is clear that everyone is speaking German (he comments on her Hungarian accent). I reckon that this would be one of the towns that was historically in Hungary and then briefly in the Banate of Leitha before being incorporated into today’s Austrian state of Burgenland.
Dream Story and The Piano Teacher are both explicitly set in Vienna, and A Whole Life is set in the Austrian Alps.
Bringing in the StoryGraph numbers again helped the gender balance; we lost The Third Man, by Graham Greene, and The Radetzky March, by Joseph Roth and gained The Piano Teacher and A Whole Life. I am not sure if The Radetzky March would have qualified geographically anyway.
I disqualified a number of books which had been tagged “austria” on LibraryThing and Goodreads. I already awarded Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and The Trial to the Czech Republic. Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl is mainly set in German concentration camps, some of which are now in Poland. Carmilla, by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, is set in what is now Slovenia. The Only Woman in the Room, by “Marie Benedict” (Heather Terrell) is about Hedy Lamarr, who was born in Vienna but spent most of her life elsewhere. I already mentioned Persepolis 2. The Hare with the Amber Eyes jumps around too. There were many others.
Next up will be Switzerland; then a jump south to Sierra Leone; then back to Europe, for the last time in a while, for Belarus; then way off east for Laos.
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 | UAE | Tajikistan | Israel
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras | Cuba
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 | Togo
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium | Sweden | Czechia | Azerbaijan | Portugal | Greece | Hungary
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea