Books set in Azerbaijan

About the literature of Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan's literary heritage reaches back to Nizami of Ganja, the twelfth-century poet whose Khamsa, or Five Poems, includes Layla and Majnun. The Book of Dede Korkut, a collection of Oghuz Turkic tales, belongs to the same older world, as do the ashiqs, travelling bards who sing and play the saz, a long-necked lute. Twentieth-century writers lived through the Baku oil boom, the Russian Revolution and decades of Soviet rule, and Azerbaijani writing keeps returning to Baku and the Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict.

Start with Ali and Nino by Kurban Said, a love story between a Muslim Azerbaijani boy and a Georgian Christian girl in oil-boom Baku. Banine's Days in the Caucasus is a memoir of a Baku girlhood among oil-rich families through revolution. Akram Aylisli's Stone Dreams looks back at the violence between Armenians and Azerbaijanis and caused great controversy at home.