See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Madagascar.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
| Title | Author | Goodreads raters | LibraryThing owners |
| Hot Ice | Nora Roberts | 17,304 | 1,468 |
| Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia | David Graeber | 2,145 | 297 |
| Red Island House | Andrea Lee | 2,894 | 206 |
| Ghost of Chance | William S. Burroughs | 1,168 | 357 |
| The Aye-Aye and I | Gerald Durrell | 1,286 | 284 |
| Return to the Enchanted Island | Johary Ravaloson | 830 | 131 |
| Thea Stilton and the Madagascar Madness | Thea Stilton [Elisabetta Dami] | 723 | 146 |
| The Pirate’s Son | Geraldine McCaughrean | 247 | 240 |
There are a couple of authors I didn’t expect to see here, including in particular Nora Roberts; I checked, and yes, more than half of Hot ice is actually set on Madagascar, so it qualifies for my top spot this week. It sounds like ratehr a laugh; even diehard Nora Roberts fans seem to be a bit embarrassed by it. I am not 100% sure about Return to the Enchanted Island, a substantial part of which is set in France, but it was the only book by a Malagasy author that scored at all well.
The Pirate Enlightenment book sounds really interesting too, about the intersection of Enlightenment ideology with the real life Malagasy pirates of the eighteenth century.
I disqualified seven books. Six of them are set in various countries with Madagascar occupying less than 50% of the text, sometimes much less; those were Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond; Last Chance to See, by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine; Lost Empire, by Clive Cussler; Flashman’s Lady, by George MacDonald Fraser (this surprised me; all the memorable bits of the book are set on Madagascar, but Flashman doesn’t actually get there until almost two thirds of the way through); A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth, by Samantha Weinberg (also surprised me, but the author ranges all over the Western Indian Ocean); and In Bibi’s Kitchen: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers from the Eight African Countries That Touch the Indian Ocean, by Hawa Hassan. I also disqualified The Flanders Route, by Claude Simon, which has nothing to do with Madagascar except that the author was born there.
Next up: Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Nepal and Venezuela.
India | China | USA | Indonesia | Pakistan | Nigeria | Brazil (revised) | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Mexico | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Ethiopia (revised) | 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 | Yemen | Canada | Poland | Morocco | Angola | Ukraine | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Mozambique | Ghana | Peru | Saudi Arabia | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire