See here for methodology. I am excluding books of which less than 50% is actually set in Canada, as explained further below. This is a case where the winner is way ahead of the field, and also where the winner is really not in the least surprising.
| Title | Author | Goodreads raters | LibraryThing owners |
| Anne of Green Gables | L.M. Montgomery | 1,043,519 | 31,851 |
| Hatchet | Gary Paulsen | 421,242 | 18,861 |
| Station Eleven | Emily St. John Mandel | 563,790 | 12,703 |
| Anne of Avonlea | L.M. Montgomery | 211,412 | 13,333 |
| The Blind Assassin | Margaret Atwood | 159,389 | 16,932 |
| Anne of the Island | L.M. Montgomery | 183,090 | 11,460 |
| The Shipping News | E. Annie Proulx | 148,866 | 13,786 |
| Still Life | Louise Penny | 266,070 | 7,059 |
L.M. Montgomery does pretty well here. I was looking back to see if we have had any other countries so far with seven out of eight books by women writers, and to my surprise the answer is yes, there have been four of the previous 38: South Korea, Kenya, the United Kingdom and Iran. Which might not be the four you would have guessed.
The top two books tagged “Canada” by LT and GR users by score were The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, and Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, neither of which is set in Canada at all as far as I remember. The setting of Room, by Emma Donoghue, is not specified geographically as far as I can tell, and I thought quite carefully about whether to qualify it or not; but it’s based on events in Austria, and although the film was made in Canada, it is explicitly set in Ohio. On the other hand, my memory of Station Eleven is that most of it is set on what is now the Canadian side of the lakes, so I let it through.
Two more Margaret Atwood novels, Oryx and Crake and The Testaments, are set or mostly set in what is currently the United States, but who knows where we may be in a few weeks’ time? That still leaves her The Blind Assassin, which is explicitly set in Ontario. Alias Grace missed the cut by a hair’s breadth.
Next up: Poland, then Morocco, Angola and Ukraine. But I’m going to skip next week as I’ll be at Gallifrey One.
India | China | USA | Indonesia | Pakistan | Nigeria | Brazil (revised) | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Mexico | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Germany | France | Thailand | UK | Tanzania | South Africa | Italy | Myanmar | Kenya | Colombia | South Korea | Sudan | Uganda | Spain | Algeria | Iraq | Argentina | Afghanistan | Yemen | Canada | Poland | Morocco | Angola | Ukraine