See here for methodology (though NB I am now also taking Storygraph into account, as well as LibraryThing and goodreads). Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Papua New Guinea.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
This was one of the most fiendishly difficult of these lists to produce, because there are a lot of books set in western half of New Guinea, now part of Indonesia but formerly ruled by the Dutch, and to make matters more complicated the Indonesian part is also known as Papua (the names of the Indonesian provinces are Papua, Central Papua, Highland Papua, South Papua, Southwest Papua and West Papua).
Tell me if I have got any wrong, but I have done my best to keep to books which are set in the borders of what is now the state of Papua New Guinea, formerly ruled by Australia, Britain and Germany. This includes the troubled autonomous island of Bougainville, which despite a strong independence movement remains under Papua New Guinean sovereignty. One helpful point that I had not previously realised is that the majority of the WW2 fighting in New Guinea took place in the eastern half, so in general, books about those campaigns qualify by my criteria.
| Title | Author | GR raters | LT owners | SG reviews |
| Euphoria | Lily King | 102,510 | 3,010 | 14,134 |
| Mister Pip | Lloyd Jones | 24,136 | 3,644 | 2,400 |
| No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison | Behrouz Boochani | 9,095 | 495 | 1,274 |
| Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas | Christian Kracht | 4,412 | 384 | 516 |
| Kokoda | Peter FitzSimons | 1,922 | 315 | 92 |
| A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea | Don Kulick | 1,049 | 132 | 211 |
| The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea–The Forgotten War of the South Pacific | James Campbell | 1,327 | 290 | 57 |
| The White Mary | Kira Salak | 997 | 268 | 79 |
This week’s winner, Euphoria, is a novel about three anthropologists carrying out research in New Guinea in 1933, very much based on the real life of Margaret Mead. Anthropology pops up a lot in books about both parts of New Guinea.
This week’s LibraryThing winner, Mister Pip, is a novel about a schoolteacher and his class caught up in the conflict in Bougainville. I read it a few years ago and was very moved.
No Friend but the Mountains is an autobiographical account of being imprisoned in an Australian immigration detention camp on Manus Island, one of the off-shore islands of Papua New Guinea.
Imperium is based on the true story of August Engelhardt, who founded a German colony based on the principles of nudity and eating coconuts in the part of New Guinea under German rule at the start of the twentieth century.
Kokoda and The Ghost Mountain Boys are both about the Second World War fighting, the former about the Australians and the latter about the Americans, in both cases trying to secure safe routes across the island.
A Death in the Rainforest is an anthropologist’s account of the disappearance of a language and a culture in Papua New Guinea. The country is estimated to have over 800 languages, 12% of the world’s total, and this diversity is fragile. (This book’s relatively high Storygraph rating bumped another anthropology book, Throwim Way Leg: Tree-Kangaroos, Possums and Penis Gourds, by Tim Flannery, off the list.
The White Mary is about a journalist who goes in search of her missing mentor in the jungle and Learns Things. It starts in America but as far as I can tell, most of it is set in Papua New Guinea.
All of the above are about and by foreigners. Papuan writers are few and far between. The top book I found by a Papua New Guinea-born writer is The Shark Caller by Zillah Bethell, but her family background seems to be British. The top book by a writer who was born and still lives in the country is Maiba, a Papuan Novel, by Russell Soaba. The top writing by Papua New Guinean women (if we don’t count Bethell) is My Walk to Equality: Essays, Stories and Poetry by Papua New Guinean Women, edited by Rashmii Amoah Bell.
The top book that I excluded because it is mainly set in the western half of the island (then Netherlands New Guinea, now Indonesia) is Lost in Shangri-la: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II, by Mitchell Zuckoff. It would have ranked below Imperium but ahead of Kokoda.
We have a run of European countries coming now: Sweden, Czechia, Azerbaijan and Portugal; indeed nine of the next twelve countries are European. I might pause for breath when we get to Switzerland, which is the
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
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras | Cuba
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
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea