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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families	Philip Gourevitch	36,385	3,747
Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust	Immaculée Ilibagiza	47,158	2,003
Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda	Roméo Dallaire	13,713	1,823
Gorillas in the Mist	Dian Fossey	21,128	1,146
Baking Cakes in Kigali	Gaile Parkin	6,881	806
An Ordinary Man: An Autobiography	Paul Rusesabagina	6,762	788
Running the Rift	Naomi Benaron	7,210	598
A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali	Gil Courtemanche	4,522	770

As with some other countries, there is one dominant historical event in Rwanda: the genocide of 1994. Six of the above eight books are directly about it, the top two being non-fiction accounts: Philip Gourevitch’s prize-winning account, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, and Immaculée Ilibagiza’s first person story of how her faith helped to get her through those dreadful days, Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust.

Immaculée Ilibagiza is the top Rwandan writer on the list; Paul Rusesabagina is also Rwandan, though his autobiography was ghost-written by Tom Zoellner. The top fiction book set in Rwanda by a Rwandan writer is Our Lady of the Nile, by Scholastique Mukasonga.

It is easy to forget that other things have happened in Rwanda, but in fact it was also the location of Dian Fossey’s work, recounted in her own Gorillas in the Mist, later adapted as a film starring Sigourney Weaver. I should also add that Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin looks at the country having moved on, with the genocide in the background but receding.

I disqualified eight books this week. Collapse, by Jared M. Diamond, and A Problem from Hell, by Samantha Power, take Rwanda as a case study in their wider arguments. Say You’re One of Them (fiction), by Uwem Akpan, and The Shadow of the Sun (non-fiction), by Ryszard Kapuściński, look at Africa more broadly including sections set in Rwanda. The Girl Who Smiled Beads, by Clemantine Wamariya, and Pagan Babies, by Elmore Leonard (an author who I did not expect to be mentioning in this context), have substantial chunks of the narrative set in Rwanda but they seem to amount to less than half of each book. And finally, Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder, and Small Country, by Gaël Faye, are about Burundi rather than Rwanda.

Speaking of Burundi, it’s up next, followed by a step away from Africa to Bolivia, and then back again to Tunisia and South Sudan.

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Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador
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
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands
Oceania: Australia