See here for methodology, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Portugal. 

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
Blindness	José Saramago	343,703	14,451	28,534
The Book of Disquiet	Fernando Pessoa	38,290	6,060	3,355
Night Train to Lisbon	Pascal Mercier	28,219	3,368	2,142
Seeing	José Saramago	32,209	3,108	2,341
Baltasar and Blimunda	José Saramago	26449	2,747	2,821
All the Names	José Saramago	24,470	3,240	1,917
Pereira Maintains	Antonio Tabucchi	36,726	2,492	2,770
The Double	José Saramago	25,571	2,720	2,038

The list this week is dominated by a single, Nobel Prize-winning writer, and one of his books far outstrips all competition. It is about life in a city and society where everyone wakes up blind one day, and has been filmed starring Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore. The location is rather ambiguous, but I side with those who think it must be in Portugal because of one character’s fondness for chouriço. Seeing is a sequel to Blindness with some characters in common, so I’m taking it as having the same setting.

When I did this exercise in 2015, I had the same result – Blindness first, The Book of Disquiet second.

I disqualified two Saramago books. Death with Interruptions is also set in an anonymous country, but it is explicitly landlocked, which rules Portugal out. And The Gospel According to Jesus Christ is set in the Holy Land, not surprisingly.

The list is all-male, as previously with Russia, South Africa, Colombia (a special case), Spain and perhaps surprisingly Sweden. The top book by a woman that turned up in my searches was The Librarian Spy, by Madeline Martin, but it seems to fail my location criterion, with significant chunks set in France and the USA. I am much more certain of Alentejo Blue, a collection of short stories set in the Alentejo region, by Monica Ali. The top book by a Portuguese woman with a majority of the action set in Portugal is The Return, by Dulce Maria Cardoso, which I disqualified from Angola but happily acknowledge here.

After four European countries in a row, we’ll be skipping back and forth over the next few weeks, with Togo, then Greece, then Israel, then Hungary.

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 | Sweden | Czechia
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea