Serbia is at the heart of the Balkans; south of Hungary, north of North Macedonia, east of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, northeast of Montenegro and Kosovo, west of Romania and Bulgaria. It became autonomous from the Ottoman Empire in 1804 and gradually expanded in territory and upgraded in status to the point that it became the spark for the First World War in 1914.

The war was pretty disastrous for Serbia – around 20-25% of its entire population is thought to have died during the 1914-18 period. But after the war it became the centre of the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, incorporating large chunks of what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the neighbouring state of Montenegro. Renamed Yugoslavia, this state was broken up during the second world war, but reassembled under the leadership of Marshal Tito, and lasted another 45 years after that.

There is no space to go into detail here about the break-up of Yugoslavia, which involved another three and a half wars (Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo and the ten days of conflict in Slovenia) and also two peaceful separations (Macedonia and Montenegro). By the end, Serbia was back down to almost its 1914 borders with the addition of the Vojvodina north of Belgrade. Slobodan Milošević, who had become the Serbian leader in the late stages of Communism, remained in power until 2001. Since 2014 it has been under the increasingly authoritarian rule of President Aleksandar Vučić and the Serbian Progressive Party.

I have been to Serbia many times, starting in 1998, and have many friends in and from there. My former assistant R from my Bosnia days now lives in Belgrade and has an Instagram travel blog called “Price iz kofera“, “Stories from a Suitcase”. Going back a lot further, my grandfather was given a Serbian military decoration, the Order of the White Eagle, for his part in the unsuccessful defence of the front line in Macedonia in 1915. I always enjoy going back. (Here’s Sirmium.)

Serbian is a Slavic language, mutually intelligible with Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, not quite as close to Slovenian in one direction and Macedonian and Bulgarian in the other. I am slightly above casual tourist level.

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 Serbia. 

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
Fatherland – A Family History	Nina Bunjevac	1,700	135	352
The Library	Zoran Živković	3,042	139	158
The Inner Side of the Wind, or The Novel of Hero and Leander	Milorad Pavić	1,461	197	112
With Their Backs to the World: Portraits from Serbia	Åsne Seierstad	1,029	282	92
Miss Ex-Yugoslavia: A Memoir	Sofija Stefanovic	1,177	46	247
At The Lucky Hand	Goran Petrović	2,482	40	130
Götz and Meyer	David Albahari	614	214	91
The Use of Man	Aleksandar Tišma	886	180	49

This was unusually difficult to tally. Many books are tagged “serbia” on LibraryThing and Goodreads even if they are mostly set in Bosnia (or sometimes Kosovo). On the other hand, Serbian writers like Danilo Kiš, Zoran Živković and Milorad Pavić love setting their writing in an anonymous Eastern European location, which sometimes might be Serbia and sometimes might not. Indeed, when I did this analysis in 2015 I awarded the top spot to The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Olbreht, but having read it since then, I don’t think it is sufficiently explicit that the setting is Serbia for it to qualify. I have done my best with the list above.

This week’s winner, Fatherland, by Nina Bunjevac, also the StoryGraph winner, is a graphic novel about a girl whose mother moves the family back home to Serbia from Canada, to get away from the Serbian nationalist father who eventually accidentally blows himself up in Toronto. I have not been able to check in detail but it sounds similar to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, though maybe not such a classic.

I’m glad to see that this week’s Goodreads winner, The Library, is by the great Serbian magical realist writer Zoran Živković, who I actually met two decades ago. I’m aware that this requires some special pleading, in that the locations of the stories are not specified, but I thin most of the stories can be taken as set in the writer’s home of Belgrade – though admittedly the fourth story of the six is set in Hell and the fifth in a city where there are bookstalls under the Great Bridge, which I don’t think is the case in Belgrade.

The Inner Side of the Wind is a time travel romance set in Belgrade between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.

With Their Backs to the Wind, this week’s LibraryThing winner, is reportage about life under Milošević.

Miss Ex-Yugoslavia is also non-fiction, about a girl growing up between Serbia and Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. It sounds like more of it is set in Serbia than Australia so I have allowed it on the list.

At The Lucky Hand is more magical realism set in Belgrade.

Götz and Meyer is about a Serbian teacher today obsessed with two SS men committing genocide in and around Belgrade in the second world war.

The Use of Man is about four people from Novi Sad, the capital of the autonomous province of Vojvodina, and their experiences in the second world war.

I excluded Srdja Popović’s Blueprint for Revolution which draws on the real-life lessons of the author’s involvement with the anti-Milošević Otpor movement, because when I checked I found that he had also drawn on a lot of other countries’ experiences of civil resistance.

I also excluded Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kiš, because on a page count it became clear to me that more than half of it is set in Hungary rather than Serbia.

Both Nina Bunjevac and Sofija Stefanovic found their muses by emigrating. The top Serbian woman writer by my metrics who is still in the country is Mirjana Novaković, best known for her Fear and His Servant.

Using the StoryGraph numbers gained us Miss Ex-Yugoslavia at the expense of Hourglass, by Danilo Kiš, who unfortunately ends up unrepresented here as a result.

Serbia is well represented on my own bookshelves, particularly in books which cover the whole former Yugoslavia or the wider Balkans such as Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West, The Balkans by Mark Mazower, The Fall of Yugoslavia by Misha Glenny and Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation by Laura Silber and Allan Little.

Some Serbia-specific books that I own which are not listed above include The Serbs by Tim Judah; White Eagles over Serbia by Laurence Durrell; Esprit de Corps, also by Lawrence Durrell; Impossible Stories by Zoran Živković, which includes the stories originally published as The Library; The Politics of Serbia in the 1990s by Robert Thomas; Serbian Folktales, ed. J.K. Jackson; The Banovina, by Donka Stančić and Miško Lazović; and Yugoslavia’s Implosion: The Fatal Attraction of Serbian Nationalism, by Sonja Biserko.

The next four countries are in four different continents: the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), El Salvador, Denmark and Singapore.

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 | Paraguay
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 | Bulgaria
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea