The best known books set in each country: the Netherlands

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in the Netherlands.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
The Diary of a Young Girl	Anne Frank	4,099,132	40,263
Girl with a Pearl Earring	Tracy Chevalier	771,655	17,980
The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom	Corrie ten Boom	350,199	11,617
The Dinner	Herman Koch	173,306	5,406
The Miniaturist	Jessie Burton	151,062	4,466
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister	Gregory Maguire	62,023	9,067
Girl in Hyacinth Blue	Susan Vreeland	40,849	3,270
Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family	Miep Gies	66,423	1,600

The winner here is not at all surprising, and in fact we’ve only had two countries where the winner had a higher ranking on both Goodreads and LibraryThing – the USA and the UK; and only another three where the winner had a higher ranking on LibraryThing but not Goodreads – Russia, Kazakhstan and Afghanistan. This week’s winner also won when I did this exercise in 2015.

In the improbable case that you don’t know, The Diary of a Young Girl is the journal of a Jewish teenager hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam during the Second World War, with her own family, another family and a random dentist taking refuge in an hidden annex to her father’s office. The diary ends abruptly, because they were all arrested in August 1944 and deported to a series of concentration camps, where all of them except Anne Frank’s father died. I’m personally fascinated by the story, and have written about the translation and about Anne’s writing here and here, and also about the dentist who she shared her room with.

Goodreads combines the numbers for all three editions of The Diary of a Young Girl currently on the market, while LibraryThing separates them out (and I have combined them above), but it would have been the winner anyway. Also worth noting perhaps that the eighth book is also about Anne Frank.

I disqualified six books this time. Less than half of The Fault in Our Stars by John Green is set in the Netherlands (though I believe that it too has a lot of Anne Frank in it). The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt is set in New York. Amsterdam by Ian McEwan, despite the title, is mainly set in London. Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali is set in many countries, though she does end up in the Netherlands. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell is actually set in Japan. And Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman is global in scope.

That’s it from Europe for a while; next are Ecuador, Cambodia, Zimbabwe and Guinea-Conakry.

From the Heart of Europe

Books, politics, languages and life

The best known books set in each country: the Netherlands

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