The best known books set in each country: South Africa

See here for methodology.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters
LibraryThing
owners
Born a Crime: Stories From
a South African Childhood
Trevor Noah723,7066,349
DisgraceJ.M. Coetzee109,05411,011
Cry, the Beloved CountryAlan Paton75,9759,603
Long Walk to FreedomNelson Mandela88,7524,980
The Power of OneBryce Courtenay90,3504,752
Life & Times of Michael KJ.M. Coetzee19,7892,858
The PromiseDamon Galgut44,8041,146
The CovenantJames A. Michener21,3052,062

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