Libya should need little introduction. On the southern side of the Mediterranean, between Tunisia and Algeria on the one side and Egypt on the other, it was part of the Roman Empire, then of the Ottoman Empire, and then under Italian influence in the mid twentieth century before becoming independent in 1951. The independent kingdom lasted only 18 years, and in 1969 was overthrown by army officer Muammar Gaddafi, not yet thirty years old, who ruled for 42 years until he was in turn overthrown in 2011. He established a personality cult and was notorious as a funder and supporter of terrorism in Western Europe in the 1980s, though reputedly changed his ways later in his time in power.
I myself had a close encounter with Gaddafi in July 2010, at the African Union summit in Uganda which I attended as part of the delegation of Southern Sudan (yes, really). We were milling around the buffet tables beside Lake Victoria finding our lunch, when we became aware of a biggish crowd, focussed on a single individual, approaching us from the main meeting tent. It was not difficult to see who was at the centre of this group, and I got a couple of pictures as he came towards where we were standing, before he swept past us.
It was the Colonel himself, in green, surrounded by bodyguards. He was deep in conversation with President Ahmed Abdallah Mohamed Sambi of the Comoros (in green and white headscarf). The Libyan regime had put up a lot of the funding for the summit, with large billboards all over Kampala and Entebbe expressing the continent’s gratitude to him in return. (I was using my much-loathed Android HTC Desire for photos at the time, so my photos are rather crappy.)
Less than a year after I saw him by the lake, Gaddafi was overthrown, and a few months later he was captured hiding in a sewer and brutally killed. Since his overthrow, there has been an ongoing political and human security crisis in the country, with different factions in control of different regions, and everyone interested in getting hold of the oil.
In one notorious incident in September 2012, militants attacked the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, resulting in the deaths of the U.S. Ambassador and three other Americans. This awful event was shamefully weaponised by Republicans in the U.S. Congress as part of their campaign against the then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, and the Obama administration. We’ll come back to it.
See here for the methodology of these posts, 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 Libya.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
| Title | Author | GR raters | LT owners | SG reviews |
| 13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened In Benghazi | Mitchell Zuckoff | 25,968 | 1,010 | 1,388 |
| The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between | Hisham Matar | 16,390 | 873 | 1,909 |
| In the Country of Men | Hisham Matar | 7,872 | 1,396 | 888 |
| My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route | Sally Hayden | 1,978 | 118 | 485 |
| Gold Dust | Ibrahim al-Koni | 2,240 | 108 | 170 |
| Gaddafi’s Harem: The Story of a Young Woman and the Abuses of Power in Libya | Annick Cojean | 3,102 | 117 | 86 |
| The Dictator’s Last Night | Yasmina Khadra | 1,577 | 106 | 170 |
| The Bleeding of the Stone | Ibrahim al-Koni | 1,657 | 94 | 129 |
As occasionally happens, the three systems have served up three different winners. This week’s Goodreads winner, and the overall winner, is 13 Hours, an account of the 2012 Benghazi attack which draws extensively on the recollections of the security contractors who were charged with defending the American compound. (It was later adapted into an unsuccessful film.)
This week’s StoryGraph and LibraryThing winners are both by Hisham Matar, who identifies as a Libyan writer; though he was born in New York, his family is Libyan and the country informs his writing. Like 13 Hours, The Return is also set in 2012 and is Matar’s non-fiction memoir of searching for his father, who disappeared in 1990 and was never found, presumably murdered by the Gaddafi regime. In the Company of Men, his first book, is about a young boy growing up in Tripoli under the Gaddafi regime.
My Fourth Time, We Drowned, by an Irish journalist, turns to a later political crisis, documenting irregular migration through Libya in the words of migrants in the camps there.
Ibrahim al-Koni now lives in Switzerland but was born and brought up in Libya. Gold Dust and The Bleeding of the Stone are both novels about nomads in the Libyan desert.
Gaddafi’s Harem and The Dictator’s Last Night are both non-fiction accounts of different unpleasant aspects of the Gaddafi regime.
Integrating the StoryGraph numbers resulted in Gaddafi’s own Green Book losing out to The Bleeding of the Stone for eighth place. There were some other quirks. Mohammed Alnaas’ graphic novel خبزعلى طاولة الخال ميلاد (“Bread on Uncle Milad’s Table“, not yet translated into English, though available in French) did very well on Goodreads and badly on the other two; and several books, most notably the YA fantasy adventure Hunt for the Devil’s Dragon, by Mariane Hering and Wayne Thomas Batson, did well on LibraryThing and badly on the other two.
I had to disqualify a lot of books that were just about North Africa or the Arab world in general, and also a couple more by Hisham Matar that are simply set elsewhere. None of those calls was difficult to make.
The top work that I found by a Libyan woman and set in Libya was The Slave Yards by Najwa bin Shatwan (or Najwa Binshatwan). It looks worth checking out.
I don’t have much on my own shelves about Libya; most notably the passage in Terre des Hommes where Antoine de Saint-Exupéry writes about his plane crashing in the desert, and a memorable chapter by Kate Adie in her autobiography.
Coming next: Kyrgyzstan, then Hong Kong, Nicaragua and Paraguay.
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