Laos is a landlocked country in south-east Asia, bordered by Vietnam to the East, Thailand to the west, Cambodia to the south and Myanmar and China to the north. I have not been there myself, but my wife visited with Oxfam in late 2019. A French colony, it became independent in 1953 but then was the scene of a brutal civil war from 1959 to 1975 between Royalists, backed by the Americans, and the Communists, who eventually won and are still in power, fifty years on. Reputedly it is the most bombed country in the world, with the Americans having dropped roughly a ton of explosives per person during the war.

See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in the current boundaries of Laos. 

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
The Coroner’s Lunch	Colin Cotterill	15,389	1,829	1,551
Thirty-Three Teeth	Colin Cotterill	6,470	910	630
Disco for the Departed	Colin Cotterill	4,919	681	504
Anarchy and Old Dogs	Colin Cotterill	4,326	633	452
Run Me to Earth	Paul Yoon	3,673	254	840
Curse of the Pogo Stick	Colin Cotterill	3,715	528	394
The Merry Misogynist	Colin Cotterill	3,433	456	350
Love Songs from a Shallow Grave	Colin Cotterill	3,165	389	328

Strong domination for the popular series of mystery novels about coroner Dr. Siri Paiboun, set immediately after the Communist takeover. I am not completely sure if Run Me to Earth, a story of three boys growing up in Laos and what happens to them after the war, fits my geographical criteria, but is seems more likely than now. It appears on the list thanks to StoryGraph numbers; otherwise the eighth enrty would have been the eighth Siri Paiboun book, Slash and Burn.

I disqualified a lot of books about Laotian refugees / migrants in the USA and Canada, and they were mostly by women: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman; How to Pronounce Knife, by Souvankham Thammavongsa; several by Kao Kalia Yang – I think the one about her mother, Where Rivers Part, probably would have matched my geographical criteria, but the numbers were a long way down. The top book set in Laos by a woman actually born in Laos was the children’s tale, Nine-In-One, Grr! Grr!, by Blia Xiong.

Turkmenistan next, then Libya, then Kyrgyzstan and then Hong Kong, which gets counted separately by Worldometer.

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 | Tajikistan | Israel
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Chile | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras | Cuba
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 | Togo | Sierra Leone
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium | Sweden | Czechia | Azerbaijan | Portugal | Greece | Hungary | Austria | Switzerland | Belarus
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea