I realised to my dismay that I had skipped Zambia back in August, when it should have been between Malawi and Chad. I had done all the calculations, just failed to write the post and skipped from its neighbour to the more northern country. I’ll restore it to the correct order in my list of countries at the end of the post.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Zambia.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
| Title | Author | Goodreads raters | LibraryThing owners |
| Mrs. Pollifax on Safari | Dorothy Gilman | 8,096 | 939 |
| The Old Drift | Namwali Serpell | 7,413 | 767 |
| Scribbling the Cat | Alexandra Fuller | 5,124 | 750 |
| The Eye of the Leopard | Henning Mankell | 2,059 | 646 |
| The Eye of the Elephant: An Epic Adventure in the African Wilderness | Delia Owens | 3,249 | 221 |
| The Garden of Burning Sand | Corban Addison | 3,575 | 152 |
| Beautiful Blackbird | Ashley Bryan | 788 | 603 |
| The Africa House: The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream | Christina Lamb | 832 | 254 |
This week’s winner, Mrs Pollifax on Safari, is the fifth in a series of novels about a grandmother who gets recruited by the CIA for a series of unlikely missions, in this case preventing the assassination of the President of Zambia. (Who in real life died in 2021, aged 97, though he had given up power after losing elections thirty years earlier.) I read a couple of them when I was a teenager, but not this one.
The second placed book on my list, The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2020, and worthily so in my view. It is the top book set in Zambia by a Zambian writer.
I am not completely sure about Beautiful Blackbird, by Ashley Bryan, but it is heavily marketed as being based on a Zambian folk tale, so I have included it.
I disqualified a bunch of books. Several were by Alexandra Fuller, who has spent a lot of her life in Zambia; but looking through the summaries of her memoirs, as far as I can tell Scribbling the Cat is the only one where the majority of the book is set in the country, and I disqualified Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, Leaving Before the Rains Come and Travel Light, Move Fast. All great titles though.
Wilbur Smith’s When the Lion Feeds seems to be mainly set in South Africa, or at least as much there as Zambia. Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone by Martin Dugard includes the territory of what is now Zambia as part of the story, but I think less than half. The same – I think, but I have not checked fully – for Out of Darkness, Shining Light, by Petina Gappah, which is about the transportation of Livingstone’s remains to the coast, and I think is more in what’s now Tanzania.
A couple more covered more African countries than just Zambia, including Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa by Dambisa Moyo and China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa by Howard W. French.
Normal service will be resumed next week with Zimbabwe, followed by Guinea (Conakry), Benin and Rwanda.
Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands
Oceania: Australia