The best known books set in each country: Türkiye

See here for methodology, though now I am restricting the table to books actually set in the territory of today’s Türkiye. (And I follow the convention that you call people and countries by the name that they wish to be known by.)

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
The Iliad	Homer	464,049	28,539
My Name Is Red	Orhan Pamuk	57,375	7,088
Snow	Orhan Pamuk	47,051	7,086
The Bastard of Istanbul	Elif Shafak	55,991	1,894
The Museum of Innocence	Orhan Pamuk	33,523	2,269
Istanbul: Memories and the City	Orhan Pamuk	20,544	3,654
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World	Elif Shafak	65,748	999
Birds Without Wings	Louis de Bernières	15,291	2,672

The Iliad is very firmly set in and around the siege of Troy, today’s Hisarlık on the Ionian Sea coast. So I’m giving it this week’s prize. But it’s very encouraging that six of the other seven are by actual Turkish authors, even if there are only two different writers.

I disqualified the following books because less than half of them (much less, in a couple of cases) is set in Türkiye: Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides; The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova; Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr; The Forty Rules of Love, by Elif Shafak; The Idiot, by Elif Batuman; and The Island of Missing Trees, again by Elif Shafak. (I’m pretty sure that more than half of The Bastard of Istanbul is set in the city, but not 100%.)

When I did this exercise back in 2015, the same three books came out on top for Turkey (as it was then called).

Next up: Germany.

From the Heart of Europe

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The best known books set in each country: Türkiye

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