See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Haiti.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
| Title | Author | Goodreads raters | LibraryThing owners |
| Island Beneath the Sea | Isabel Allende | 46,230 | 2,717 |
| Breath, Eyes, Memory | Edwidge Danticat | 31,110 | 3,114 |
| The Comedians | Graham Greene | 10,038 | 2,893 |
| An Untamed State | Roxane Gay | 19,695 | 1,053 |
| Libertie | Kaitlyn Greenidge | 15,751 | 857 |
| Krik? Krak! | Edwidge Danticat | 9,653 | 1,326 |
| The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution | C.L.R. James | 7,433 | 1,676 |
| The Kingdom of This World | Alejo Carpentier | 8,185 | 1,355 |
Quite a close result at the top, with Isabelle Allende’s tale of slavery in Saint-Domingue in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Island Beneath the Sea, sufficiently in the lead on Goodreads to beat Edwidge Danticat’s best known novel, the coming of age story Breath, Eyes, Memory, which however had the lead on LibraryThing. I was not quite sure about Breath, Eyes, Memory, part of which is set in New York, but as far as I could tell the majority of it is on Danticat’s native island. Danticat has two books on this week’s list; Krik? Krak! is a short story collection.
I disqualified five books. Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder, is a biography of the doctor Paul Farmer, who worked also in Peru and Rwanda. Deadeye Dick, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., is told in flashback from the narrator’s later life in Haiti, but the setting of the majority of it is the USA. The Black Count, by Tom Reiss, is about the father of Alexandre Dumas, who was born in Saint-Domingue but moved to Paris as a teenager. American Street, by Ibi Zoboi, is about the immigrant experience in the USA. And The Farming of Bones, by Edwidge Danticat again, is set across the border in the Dominican Republic.
This was one of the easier countries to rank – on the whole, users of LibraryThing and Goodreads are in agreement about which books are relevant to Haiti.
I’ll end the year next week with my adopted home country, Belgium, and will start 2026 with Jordan; followed by Haiti’s neighbour, the Dominican Republic, and then the United Arab Emirates.
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
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic
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
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium
Oceania: Australia