Book Week: Interactive celebrity guide to favourite books

The current best selling book in Ivory Coast is a political critique of the founding President, Felix Houphouet Boigny, who ruled from independence until his death in 1993.

The book, "Houphouet Boigny's Imaginary Plots" is an expose of the late President who, according to author Samba Diarra invented various political plots in order to deal with his opponents.

Diarra says the President committed widespread abuses of power which ranged from sacking people for the slightest suggestion of dissent to torturing his political opponents.

But it's a measure of the dominance of oral culture over the printed word both here and in the rest of Africa that Ivory Coast's leading book shop chain says it's only sold four thousand copies of Houphouet Boigny's Imaginary Plots.

The most widely read book in Ivory Coast is almost certainly the Christian bible. Religious belief here is an extremely powerful force and new churches seem to be able to fill up as soon as they're built.

There are believed to be more Muslims than Christians in Ivory Coast but Islam is dominant in the poorer north of the country so people there are less likely to buy a personal printed copy of their own religious guide - the Koran.