See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
| Title | Author | Goodreads raters | LibraryThing owners |
| The Orphan Master’s Son | Adam Johnson | 101,483 | 4,036 |
| Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea | Barbara Demick | 90,343 | 3,318 |
| Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West | Blaine Harden | 68,964 | 1,854 |
| The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea | Axie Oh | 75,437 | 1,291 |
| The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story | Hyeonseo Lee | 93,135 | 1,031 |
| In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom | Yeonmi Park | 90,747 | 993 |
| A River in Darkness: One Man’s Escape from North Korea | Masaji Ishikawa | 58,730 | 924 |
| The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War | David Halberstam | 8,945 | 1,873 |
This is one I prepared earlier, in a sense, in that I crunched the numbers for both parts of Korea back in November, and I imagine that they have not changed much since. There’s a pretty consistent theme here, whether the writers are Korean or not; the only one I’m not sure about is The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea, but my research indicates that it’s set in what is now the North rather than the South. It and this week’s winner, The Orphan Master’s Son, are the only two books on the list which are presented as fiction. Also I’m allowing The Coldest Winter as set on both sides of the line.
As noted previously, I disqualified the top two books tagged ‘Korea’ on LibraryThing and Goodreads; they were Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, which is mainly set in Japan, and Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner, mainly set in the USA. Further down the table, The Name Jar, by Yangsook Choi, is also set in the USA.
Next: Syria, Mali, Burkina Faso and Sri Lanka.
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
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela
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
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine
Oceania: Australia