See here for methodology.
Title | Author | Goodreads raters | LibraryThing owners |
Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood | Trevor Noah | 723,706 | 6,349 |
Disgrace | J.M. Coetzee | 109,054 | 11,011 |
Cry, the Beloved Country | Alan Paton | 75,975 | 9,603 |
Long Walk to Freedom | Nelson Mandela | 88,752 | 4,980 |
The Power of One | Bryce Courtenay | 90,350 | 4,752 |
Life & Times of Michael K | J.M. Coetzee | 19,789 | 2,858 |
The Promise | Damon Galgut | 44,804 | 1,146 |
The Covenant | James A. Michener | 21,305 | 2,062 |
Trevor Noah has clearly made a big hit with Goodreads users, and somewhat less so with LibraryThing where his book is only third, behind two more traditional classics. There’s only one foreigner (Michener) on the list; unfortunately however it is an all-male list, with Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing just missing the cutoff.
I disqualified two other books – Waiting for the Barbarians, by J.M. Coetzee, which is set in an unnamed colonial outpost which doesn’t sound very much like South Africa, and The White Lioness by Henning Mankel, which is mainly set in Sweden.
Net up is Italy.
India | China | USA | Indonesia | Pakistan | Nigeria | Brazil (revisited) | Bangladesh (revisited) | Russia | Mexico | Japan | Philippines (revisited) | Ethiopia (revisited) | Egypt | DR Congo | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Germany | France | Thailand | UK | Tanzania | South Africa | Italy | Myanmar | Kenya | Colombia | South Korea | Sudan | Uganda | Spain | Algeria | Iraq | Argentina | Afghanistan