See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Chile. 

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

There’s a very clear winner here, and equally clear domination of the list by a single author – and that doesn’t include the books by Isabel Allende that I disqualified because as far as I could tell there was not sufficient Chile-based content; they were Daughter of Fortune, Eva Luna, Paula, A Long Petal of the Sea, Portrait in Sepia, City of the Beasts, The Stories of Eva Luna, In the Midst of Winter and The Infinite Plan.

I disqualified another six, which I think all have Chilean authors but are not set there. Roberto Bolaño may be Chilean, but his two best known books, 2666 and The Savage Detectives, are set in Mexico. When We Cease to Understand the World, by Benjamín Labatut, is about scientists globally. I credited In Patagonia, by Bruce Chatwin, to Argentina a while back. Luis Sepúlveda’s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories is explicitly set in Ecuador, and his The Story of a Seagull and the Cat Who Taught Her to Fly sounds like it could be set anywhere with seagulls.

I admit I’ve stretched a point with a couple of those that I allowed onto the list: I suspect that Neruda’s poetry is not full of explicit geographical references, but it can hardly be set anywhere other than Chile; and I gave Maya’s Notebook the benefit of the doubt as the framing narrative is definitely in Chile even if most of the book is flashbacks.

That was unexpectedly tough, and I think they will get tougher as I go on. Next up are Somalia, Senegal, Romania and Guatemala.

Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan | UAE
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium
Oceania: Australia