The best known books set in each country: Mali

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Sahara	Clive Cussler	60,005	4,040
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts	Joshua Hammer	12,095	1,721
Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali	(anonymous)	2,889	748
Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years With a Midwife in Mali	Kris Holloway	4,958	399
Segu	Maryse Condé	1,973	641
The Black Pages	Nnedi Okorafor	4,215	90
I Lost My Tooth In Africa	Penda Diakité	517	629
The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu: The Quest for This Storied City and the Race to Save its Treasures	Charlie English	1,010	252

After a couple of countries which were harder work, I was glad that Mali turned out to be fairly straightforward – the city of Timbuktu gives it a certain brand recognition. I wasn’t completely sure about this week’s winner at first, a typically convoluted Cussler tale which climaxes with an absurd revelation about the fate of Abraham Lincoln, but a speedy page count revealed that it does indeed appear to be more than 50% set in Mali, so it qualifies. Glad to see the traditional Malian epic Sundiata doing well also.

I did disqualify ten books. With a particularly heavy heart, I ruled out Scales of Gold by Dorothy Dunnett, because although more than half of it is set in West Africa, I think less than half is set in what’s now Mali. Tremendous book though.

Similarly, I was not quite sure about Masquerade, by O.O. Sangoyomi, but I think that more than half of it is set in the fictional city of Ṣàngótẹ̀ and I’m pretty sure that’s meant to be in what’s now Nigeria. The Bitter Side of Sweet, by Tara Sullivan, is set in Côte d’Ivoire. The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill, is set in Canada. Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law, by Haben Girma, is set in the USA and the protagonist is Eritrean by origin, so I don’t know why people connect it with Mali. The Green Road, by Anne Enright, is mostly set in Ireland.

The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński, Leo Africanus, by Amin Maalouf, Sahara, by Michael Palin and China’s Second Continent, by Howard W. French, all cover numerous countries, with much less than half of each book set in Mali.

Coming next: Burkina Faso, Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Malawi.

From the Heart of Europe

Books, politics, languages and life

The best known books set in each country: Mali

Related

Share this:

Related