See here for methodology.
Title | Author | Goodreads raters | LibraryThing owners |
State of Wonder | Ann Patchett | 188,992 | 6,211 |
The Lost City of Z | David Grann | 95,865 | 4,924 |
You would think that there was only ever one writer from Brazil… And yet I have ruthlessly excluded all of the Paulo Coelho books above because none of them is set in Brazil. The Alchemist is set in Spain and Egypt, Veronika Decides to Die in Slovenia, Eleven Minutes in Switzerland, and both By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept and The Devil and Miss Prym are set in France. (Judging by The Alchemist, the only one I have read, none of them can be very good either.)
With a bit more reluctance, I’m disqualifying John Grisham’s The Testament as well. By the unscientific method of flipping through the chapters in a paper copy, I counted 25 that appear to be set in Brazil and 27 in the USA, so unfortunately that’s less than my 50% criterion.
However, Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder does seem to qualify, with nine of the eleven (long) chapters set in Brazil. It’s a novel about a miracle cure found in the rain forest. The Lost City of Z is also about a quest in the rain forest, this time the non-fictional search for the lost British explorer Henry Fawcett.
The top fiction book by a Brazilian and set in Brazil is in twelfth place on my list: The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, aka Epitaph of a Small Winner, by the great nineteenth century writer Machado de Assis.
Next: Bangladesh.
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