See here for methodology. I am excluding books of which less than 50%, as far as I can tell, is actually set in Morocco. (It doesn’t help that Morocco is illegally occupying the country immediately to its south.)
| Title | Author | Goodreads raters | LibraryThing owners |
| The Sheltering Sky | Paul Bowles | 29,499 | 4,508 |
| The Time in Between | María Dueñas | 47,894 | 1,992 |
| Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail | Malika Oufkir | 24,265 | 2,103 |
| Destination Unknown | Agatha Christie | 16,297 | 2,394 |
| Tangerine | Christine Mangan | 33,388 | 935 |
| Who Is Maud Dixon? | Alexandra Andrews | 39,137 | 651 |
| Garment of Shadows | Laurie R. King | 10,259 | 1,039 |
| This Blinding Absence of Light | Tahar Ben Jelloun | 13,106 | 569 |
It’s interesting that the only two books on the list by Moroccan writers (Stolen Lives and This Blinding Absence of Light) are about being imprisoned in the same jail at the same time, though one is autobiography and the other fiction.
There are several of these that I’m not completely certain about, either because (eg The Sheltering Sky) it’s not 100% clear that the North African setting is Morocco, or because (eg The Time In Between) it’s not 100% clear to me that the Moroccan setting amounts to more than half of the book, but in those cases and a couple of others, I gave the one on the list the benefit of the doubt.
I excluded the top four books which came up in my calculations, and another two lower down. Top was Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, where it’s not clear that the desert setting is in Morocco; then Less by Andrew Sean Greer, which is about a man who goes around the world and visits Morocco; then Chanson Douce / The Perfect Nanny / Lullaby, by Leïla Slimani, set in Paris; then King of the Wind: The Story of the Godolphin Arabian, by Marguerite Henry, which is about a horse that actually (as far as I can see) spends most of its life outside Morocco.
The other two books that I disqualified ranked between Who Is Maud Dixon? and Garment of Shadows, both by Leïla Lamani (as opposed to Laila Slimani): The Other Americans and The Moor’s Account, both of which are set in the Americas.
Coming next: Angola, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Malaysia.
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