I was curious about which titles in the African Writers Series from Heinemann were most popular, but I couldn’t find a complete list on their web site with which to begin. So, merging the Wikipedia entry on the African Writers Series with the african-writers-series shelf on Goodreads, I kept every title for which Wikipedia had a volume number and every title that had an edition from Heinemann. That’s probably not perfect. Anyway, I took the log of the number of people rating the book at Goodreads and multiplied it by the cube of the rating expressed as a percentage to yield a “top 40” list below.

1. Naguib Mahfouz, Children of the Alley
2. Steve Biko, I Write What I Like: Selected Writings
3. Ayi Kwei Armah, Two Thousand Seasons
4. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
5. Ayi Kwei Armah, The Healers
6. Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North
7. Naguib Mahfouz, Midaq Alley
8. Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing
9. Buchi Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood
10. Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
11. Nelson Mandela, No Easy Walk to Freedom
12. Ousmane Sembène, God’s Bits of Wood
13. Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease
14. Kwame Nkrumah, Neo Colonialism: The Last Stage Of Imperialism
15. Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter
16. Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People
17. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood
18. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat
19. Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God
20. Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
21. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child
22. Elechi Amadi, The Concubine
23. Tawfiq Al-Hakim, Fate of a Cockroach: Four Plays
24. Pepetela, Mayombe
25. Tayeb Salih, The Wedding of Zein and Other Sudanese Stories
26. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross
27. Bessie Head, When Rain Clouds Gather
28. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, The River Between
29. Bessie Head, Serowe, Village of the Rain Wind
30. Ama Ata Aidoo, Changes: A Love Story
31. Bessie Head, Maru
32. Mia Couto, Every Man Is a Race
33. Dambudzo Marechera, The House of Hunger
34. Buchi Emecheta, Second Class Citizen
35. Okot p’Bitek, Song of Lawino & Song of Ocol
36. Bessie Head, A Question of Power
37. Ferdinand Oyono, Houseboy
38. Hama Tuma, The Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor and Other Stories
39. Flora Nwapa, Efuru
40. Luís Bernardo Honwana, We Killed Mangy-Dog and Other Stories