The best known books set in each country: Mozambique

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

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
A Girl Named Disaster	Nancy Farmer	5,117	1,735
A Time to Die	Wilbur Smith	6,220	807
Sleepwalking Land	Mia Couto	5,775	466
A Treacherous Paradise	Henning Mankell	3,533	562
Chronicler of the Winds	Henning Mankell	2,775	708
Confession of the Lioness	Mia Couto	3,533	266
The Tuner of Silences	Mia Couto	2,615	213
Secrets in the Fire	Henning Mankell	2,060	253

This week’s winner is a Newbery-awarded novel about a girl trying to flee from Mozambique to Zimbabwe; as far as I can tell it takes more than half of the book for her to get across the border, so it qualifies.

I had no idea that Swedish writer Henning Mankell has a close personal link with Mozambique and lived there off and on for many years. I also had not heard of the great Mozambican writer Mia (short for Emilio) Couto, which is definitely my bad.

I disqualified a lot of books which are just generally set in southern Africa, or more specifically in a different country entirely. At the top was Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller, set in Zimbabwe, followed by The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town by Paul Theroux, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After, by Clemantine Wamariya, Half a Life, by V.S. Naipaul, Kennedy’s Brain by Henning Mankell again, Scribbling the Cat by Alexandra Fuller again and A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn.

As we go down the list, I am increasingly finding that GR and LT users are tagging them into books which have little or nothing to do with the country in question. I may have to adapt my methodology in response.

Next up: Ghana, Peru, Saudi Arabia and Madagascar.

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The best known books set in each country: Mozambique

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