The best known books set in each country: Spain

See here for methodology; I am excluding books not actually set in Spain.

TitleAuthorGR
raters
LT
owners
The Shadow of the WindCarlos Ruiz Zafón663,27828,569
The Sun Also RisesErnest Hemingway460,04623,524
Don Quixote (I, II)Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra282,65831,679
For Whom the Bell TollsErnest Hemingway301,42419,550
OriginDan Brown335,5716,462
The Angel’s GameCarlos Ruiz Zafón169,8269,016
The Story of FerdinandMunro Leaf93,0369,719
Homage to CataloniaGeorge Orwell64,1886,403

I happily disqualified The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho, because apart from being rubbish, only the very first part is set in Spain. But that was the only one – the majority of The Sun Also Rises is set in Spain rather than France. Sadly, Arturo Pérez-Reverte didn’t quite make the cut (with The Dumas Club).

When I did this exercise in 2015, the top four books were the same in the same order, though The Shadow of the Wind was then top on LibraryThing (after The Alchemist) and second to The Sun Also Rises on Goodreads; now it is the other way round.

I’m glad that Homage to Catalonia features; it is one of my favourite non-fiction books and I retrospectively made it my Book of the Year for 2014. I was talking to a Catalan friend a few weeks ago who told me that he had not even heard of it until he found it on the shelves of a friend he was staying with in Ireland, at the age of 20; now of course he is as big a fan as I am.

Next up: Algeria. The top book set there will not be a big surprise.

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