See here for methodology; I am excluding books not actually set in Spain.
Title | Author | GR raters | LT owners |
The Shadow of the Wind | Carlos Ruiz Zafón | 663,278 | 28,569 |
The Sun Also Rises | Ernest Hemingway | 460,046 | 23,524 |
Don Quixote (I, II) | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra | 282,658 | 31,679 |
For Whom the Bell Tolls | Ernest Hemingway | 301,424 | 19,550 |
Origin | Dan Brown | 335,571 | 6,462 |
The Angel’s Game | Carlos Ruiz Zafón | 169,826 | 9,016 |
The Story of Ferdinand | Munro Leaf | 93,036 | 9,719 |
Homage to Catalonia | George Orwell | 64,188 | 6,403 |
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