Books set in Kyrgyzstan

About the literature of Kyrgyzstan

Kyrgyzstan's great literary monument is Manas, an oral epic about a hero of the Kyrgyz people, recited by bards known as manaschi. It belongs to a tradition of spoken performance that long predates printed books. In the Soviet period writers worked in both Kyrgyz and Russian, and Chingiz Aitmatov, the country's most celebrated author, used both. Much of his fiction draws on herding life in the mountains and the upheavals of Soviet rule.

Aitmatov's Jamilia is a wartime village story of a young woman who defies tradition. In The White Ship, a boy in an isolated forest lodge in the mountains clings to a local legend. Farewell, Gulsary! has an old herdsman and his horse looking back over Soviet collectivisation. John Anderson's Kyrgyzstan: Central Asia's Island of Democracy? is a history of the first post-Soviet decade, covering the Akayev government.