See here for methodology, though now I am restricting the table to books actually set in the Vietnam.

I excluded the following because less than half of the book (as far as I can tell) is set in Vietnam: A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving; The Women, by Kristin Hannah; The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen; Inside Out & Back Again, by Thanhhà Lại; and In the Lake of the Woods, by Tim O’Brien.

That still leaves a better list than I had expected. I feared that it would be dominated by American experiences of the war, and indeed four of the top eight books are in that category. But two of them are actually about the West’s encounter with Vietnam before the war with the USA (and it’s interesting to see Graham Greene make my list for the second week running).

I’m not 100% confident that On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous passes my 50% test, but The Best We Could Do certainly does, and it’s also the first graphic novel to feature here.

However, the US perspective remains dominant, even if not quite as dominant as I had feared, and the top book for Vietnam is Tim O’Brien’s The Things they Carried – not the first short story collection to feature in these posts, but the first to win.

Next up: Iran.

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