The best known books set in each country: Ecuador

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Ecuador.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Galápagos	Kurt Vonnegut Jr.	87,317	8,121
Wish You Were Here	Jodi Picoult	281,521	2,100
Through Gates of Splendor	Elisabeth Elliot	31,697	3,556
The Old Man Who Read Love Stories	Luis Sepúlveda	29,251	1,780
Shipped	Angie Hockman	71,391	555
Shadow of the Almighty	Elisabeth Elliot	11,200	2,245
End of the Spear	Steve Saint	12,308	1,078
Natural Selection	Elin Hilderbrand	61,553	126

This week’s winner, Vonnegut’s Galápagos, is one of four books on the list which are set on or around the eponymous islands. Unlike Wish You Were Here, Shipped and Natural Selection, it is not a contemporary novel about relationships, but a gloomy post-apocalyptic reflection on the end of humanity. Wish You Were Here, which is far ahead on Goodreads but well behind on LibraryThing, is set during the pandemic and so has a certain post-apocalyptic element too. Notable that Shipped and Natural Selection score really well on Goodreads and much less well on LibraryThing.

Three of the other four books on the list are about the life and legacy of Jim Elliott, an American missionary who was killed by annoyed indigenous people in 1956. The two by his widow score particularly well on LibraryThing, less so on Goodreads. Luis Sepúlveda is from Chile, so unfortunately none of the top eight is by an Ecuadorean writer. The top book by an Ecuadorean author set in Ecuador is Jawbone, by Mónica Ojeda.

I disqualified four books. The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina, by Zoraida Córdova, gave me the most trouble, but in the end I concluded that more than half of it is set in the USA where Orquídea’s four children live. As we have seen previously, The Old Patagonian Express, by Paul Theroux, covers several countries. The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, is about the immigrant experience in the USA. Everything Here Is Beautiful, by Mira T. Lee, is set in the USA and Switzerland (one of the main characters has an Ecuadorean boyfriend).

Coming next: Cambodia, Zimbabwe, Guinea (Conakry) and Benin – we’ll be back in Africa for a bit.

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The best known books set in each country: Ecuador

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