a staircase with books on shelves
Photograph ©2018 by Brian Cohen.

The Most Popular Settings For Books Around the World

A good novel — along with a vivid and willing imagination — can transport you anywhere: from the depths of the ocean to distant galaxies; or impossible worlds that could never exist. A good author can selectively use mere words in order to weave a universe around you and effortlessly carry you away…

The Most Popular Settings For Books Around the World

…but for many of your greatest literary trips, your feet will remain on Earth. Every country in the world is full of stories and inspiration for the novelist — and fiction is an excellent way to explore the history and potential of a real place in a way that reportage cannot quite manage.

A long list of 12,953 books — which were set in many countries around the world was created using book titles that were collected from Wikipedia. Next, information was collected on each book from Goodreads — including the author, user rating, number of ratings, number of reviews, and synopsis. User ratings were used as a measure of how readers evaluated the book; and number of ratings was used as a measure of book popularity — and an algorithm was created to calculate an aggregated score taking these two features into account.

The book with the highest score for each country was chosen. In some cases, the country in which a book was set in is not defined, and a number of allowances accounted for this. If a book is set in multiple countries, its setting was defined as the place where the majority of the novel takes place. If a book takes place in multiple countries and no single country could be considered the primary setting, it was removed from consideration.

A series of virtual bookshelves and maps showing the top-scoring book set in each country was ultimately created.

For some books, the primary setting is not explicitly stated. For example — in the Harry Potter series — the majority of the action takes place in Hogwarts. Although not directly stated in the books, there is enough evidence to suggest that the stories take place in Scotland, and so that is where the series has been placed. In all cases, every effort has been made to ensure that the books featured in this project take place in the countries to which they are assigned.

The information for this project was gathered in June 2020. If you want to see the full research, visit bit.ly/LiteraryWorldMap.

I have been given express written permission to use the images and the verbatim text from this article pertaining to the most popular settings for books around the world — which was written by Barbara Davidson for NetCredit — in this article by using graphics to compare the prices and by imparting interesting statistics. This information is general in nature only and does not constitute personal advice. While NetCredit has endeavored to ensure the information provided is accurate and current, it cannot guarantee it. Neither NetCredit nor The Gate accept liability for the information which is presented in this article.

Are you ready to take off your shoes, curl up on your favorite armchair, and go traveling?

Key Findings

a book shelf with many books
Click on the graphic for an enlarged view. Source: NetCredit.

North America

Kathryn Stockett’s The Help is the most popular book set in North America. The story takes place in Jackson, Mississippi, as told by three women living in white households: a Black maid, her best friend and a young white woman who wants to reveal the mistreatment that such maids faced in the 1960s.

Science-fiction gets a look-in, too. Michael Crichton’s novel of Jurassic Park is set mostly on Isla Nublar, a fictional, teardrop-shaped island of Costa Rica. The book maintains a healthy average rating of 4.03 and remains the most popular book set in Costa Rica thirty years after its publication (although readers still have mixed feelings about whether they’d like to visit Isla Nublar).

a screenshot of a computer
Click on the graphic for an enlarged view. Source: NetCredit.

South America

Kurt Vonnegut visited the Galápagos Islands of Ecuador, the inspiration for Darwin’s theory of evolution, four years before writing Galápagos. “Of course, I was fascinated by the island’s natural life,” Vonnegut told the New York Times. “I spent as much time there as Charles Darwin did – two weeks.” Vonnegut’s novel is about the reverse-evolution of humankind and is the most popular book set in Ecuador.

South America is known as for reality-bending literature, not least due to Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges. Borges’ The Aleph and Other Stories is the most popular fiction book in his home country, and is “[f]ull of philosophical puzzles and supernatural surprises,” according to Goodreads.

a screenshot of a computer
Click on the graphic for an enlarged view. Source: NetCredit.

Europe

The most popular book to be set in any particular country on Earth is John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. The book tells of a 16-year-old cancer patient, Hazel, who travels to Amsterdam, Netherlands, to meet the author of a mysterious book about a cancer patient just like Hazel.

My Cat Yugoslavia is the debut novel of Kosovo-born Finnish author Pajtim Statovci. It tells of the relationship between a mother in Kosovo and her refugee son in Finland. “Many things in my childhood and in my life, such as the war in Kosovo, did not make sense to me,” says Statovci. “I’ve always been drawn to works of fiction that make the unimaginable possible and the unbelievable understandable.”

a screenshot of a book
Click on the graphic for an enlarged view. Source: NetCredit.

Middle East & Central Asia

Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner spans decades of turmoil in Afghanistan’s modern history. The novel revolves around the relationship between a wealthy boy and the son and grandson of his father’s servant. The Kite Runner has 1,255,000 copies in print in the US and is the most popular novel set in the Middle East and Central Asia region.

Khawla Hamdi is an Arabic-language author, born in Tunisia. She wrote In My Heart A Jewish Girl, which is the most popular novel set in Lebanon. The novel is about an orphaned Muslim girl living with a Jewish family and is understandably contentious, but still maintains a Goodreads score of 4.0.

a book set in every country
Click on the graphic for an enlarged view. Source: NetCredit.

Rest of Asia & Oceania

Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha is the first-person story of a geisha working in Kyoto, Japan, around the time of World War II. The action unfolds in the real-life Hanamachi geisha district of Gion. Amblin Entertainment adapted the book in 2005 but filmed most of it on set in the States. The book is the most popular novel set in this region of Asia and Oceania.

Cho Nam-joo’s Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 “kick-started a nascent MeToo movement” in South Korea, according to Waterstones. The novel relates the misogyny and sexism a young mother experiences and her sense of futility as things never seem to change. It has an average Goodreads rating of 4.16.

a screenshot of a book set
Click on the graphic for an enlarged view. Source: NetCredit.

Africa

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho scores just below 4.0 on Goodreads but remains the most popular book set in Africa with 2,008,728 ratings and 77,076 reviews. The Brazilian author tells the allegorical tale of a young Spanish Andalusian shepherd who travels to the Egyptian pyramids in search of treasure. Much of the action takes place in Morocco, and the book is the most popular to be set in Morocco and Africa as a whole.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie set her novel Americanah in her homeland of Nigeria and adopted homeland of the US. There is an upcoming HBO adaptation starring Lupita Nyong’o, and the book has an average Goodreads rating of 4.31. If you’re stuck at home, why not do both?

a screenshot of a book set
Click on the graphic for an enlarged view. Source: NetCredit.

How Do the Most Popular Authors See Your Country?

Love, crime, laughter and adventure happen everywhere there’s people. But the flavor of every story changes according to local customs, culture and landscape. Sometimes it takes hundreds of pages of fiction to get a handle on a country — though you may find yourself longing to visit way before you reach The End.

Literature can also give new insights into your own home country or countries. Why not check out the table with our full stats below, and see what is the most popular book set in your homeland?

Final Boarding Call

Although I read a lot of other media, I never really was a reader of books…

…but some books which I read when I was a student did stimulate my imagination — including Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, which were both written by Ray Bradbury. Neither seemed to be featured in this article.

Were any of your favorite books — or any books whose setting is where you are based; where you were born; or where you were raised and grew up — featured in this article?

Photograph ©2018 by Brian Cohen.

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