Nicaragua is the largest country by area in Central America, though with a smaller population than Guatemala and Honduras. It shares its northern border with Honduras and its southern with El Salvador. Most of it was under Spanish rule from the sixteenth century until 1821, and like the other Central American countries it became fully independent in 1838. The Atlantic coast was under British rule as the Mosquito Coast until 1860.
Nicaragua’s history features a lot of, well, involvement, to choose a term, by the United States. An American mercenary seized power in 1857, only to be overthrown the following year. There was a full scale US military occupation from 1909 to 1933. Both the Somoza family, who ruled from 1937 to 1979, and the Sandinistas who overthrew them, owed their rise to US influence. The lefty Sandinistas then were attacked by ‘Contra’ guerrillas, illegally funded by the Reagan administration with money raised by arms sales to Iran. When I was a student at Cambridge, there was an active Nicaraguan Solidarity Campaign, and we would drink the bitter Nicaraguan coffee as a kind of penance for the sins of the West.
The Sandinistas lost power in the 1990 election, but their leader Daniel Ortega won again in 2006 and has been president ever since, with his wife appointed co-president last year, and increasing pressure on civil society and the political opposition. The democratic opening of twenty to thirty years ago has been lost.
One of the fascinating might-have-beens of history is the prospect that the Panama Canal could have been pre-empted by a canal through Nicaragua. Although the length of the route is longer, less engineering would have been needed, as the natural waterways and geology are much more favourable. It’s also considerably further north, which makes a big difference to shipping times. If it had not been for French lobbying – their Panama scheme had collapsed and they were keen to dump the assets for any price they could get – we’d be looking at a very different economic geography of Central America.
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 Nicaragua.
| Title | Author | GR raters | LT owners | SG reviews |
| The Inhabited Woman | Gioconda Belli | 7,975 | 597 | 646 |
| The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey | Salman Rushdie | 2,649 | 790 | 296 |
| The Country Under My Skin: A Memoir of Love and War | Gioconda Belli | 3,523 | 385 | 353 |
| Azul… | Rubén Darío | 3,487 | 340 | 175 |
| El país de las mujeres | Gioconda Belli | 3,159 | 78 | 256 |
| The Stars at Noon | Denis Johnson | 1,300 | 275 | 174 |
| Sofía de los presagios | Gioconda Belli | 1,254 | 117 | 61 |
| Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua | Stephen Kinzer | 713 | 126 | 73 |
The political divide dominates everything in Nicaragua, and Gioconda Belli, who wrote four of this week’s eight books, was a fervent Sandinista for most of her career, though in 2018 she fell out with Ortega to the extent that he revoked her Nicaraguan citizenship in 2023. (Her brother Humberto, meanwhile, was on the other side and served as Minister of Education in 1991-1998. Ortega revoked his Nicaraguan citizenship too.)
Gioconda Belli’s The Inhabited Woman, this week’s overall winner and the top book on Goodreads and StoryGraph, is a semi-autobiographical magical realist novel, linking feminism, the struggles of indigenous people, and the twentieth-century conflict, in the fictional country of Faguas which everyone will understand to be Nicaragua. The Country Under My Skin is a purely autobiographical work, with no fictional pretensions.
Her other two books on this week’s list don’t appear to have been translated into English yet. El país de las mujeres (“The Country of Women”, in French and German translation “The Republic of Women”) takes us back to the fictional country of Faguas (which again is clearly meant to be Nicaragua) where woman have taken over politically and face violent resistance. Sofía de los presagios (literally “Sofia of the Omens”, translated into Dutch and German as “Daughter of the Volcano”) is about an abandoned Roma girl, adopted by a rich landowner, and finding her personal liberation. It’s impressive that both books score well on the normally unforgivingly Anglophone metrics of the three sites.
This week’s LibraryThing winner is The Jaguar Smile, a factual account by Salman Rushdie of visiting Nicaragua in 1986 during the height of the Sandinistas’ first time in power.
I am not completely certain about Azul… (literally “Blue”, but usually retaining its original Spanish title when translated). It is a collection of essays and poetry by Nicaragua’s great nineteenth century poet Rubén Darío. I am assuming, but have not checked, that at least half of them relate to his own country.
The Stars at Noon is a novel about an American woman in Nicaragua in 1984, disaffected with both the Sandinistas and the CIA.
Blood of Brothers tells the story of what led up to the 1979 revolution and its aftermath, by the New York Times’ then Managua correspondent.
Incorporating the StoryGraph numbers did not change the top eight.
I disqualified a bunch of books about either Latin America in general or U.S. imperialism in general, or both.
I thought long and hard about Barbara Kingsolver’s second novel, Animal Dreams, but in the end less than half of it is set in Nicaragua. Likewise Clive Cussler’s Trojan Odyssey, which I have not read.
Looking further down the list, StoryGraph has some odd blind spots – its users own very few of the many books by Sergio Ramírez, once Ortega’s vice-president, now another of those who were stripped of their citizenship in 2023. He was not strongly represented enough among LT and GR users to have scored anyway, but the SG gap is unusual and surprising.
Staying in Latin America next week for Paraguay; then back to Europe for Bulgaria and Serbia, and then down south for the Republic of Congo (Congo-Brazzaville).
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 | Tajikistan | Israel | Laos | Turkmenistan | Kyrgyzstan | Hong Kong
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Chile | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras | Cuba | Nicaragua
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 | Togo | Sierra Leone | Libya
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium | Sweden | Czechia | Azerbaijan | Portugal | Greece | Hungary | Austria | Switzerland | Belarus
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea