See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Saudi Arabia.
| Title | Author | Goodreads raters | LibraryThing owners |
| The Quran | 70,996 | 2,398 | |
| Princess | Jean Sasson | 38,703 | 2,106 |
| A Hologram for the King | Dave Eggers | 29,290 | 1,771 |
| Girls of Riyadh | Rajaa Alsanea | 20,667 | 1,262 |
| Finding Nouf | Zoë Ferraris | 9,822 | 1,050 |
| Princess Sultana’s Daughters | Jean Sasson | 12,463 | 794 |
| In the Land of Invisible Women | Qanta A. Ahmed | 7,760 | 755 |
| Princess Sultana’s Circle | Jean Sasson | 8,739 | 551 |
I’m allowing the winner even though it is short on geographical detail, because there is absolutely no doubt as to which country it is written about, and many of the individual suras are tagged as being written in Medina or Mecca. Incidentally I had to add together a bunch of different LibraryThing editions which had not been combined, presumably for good reason; the real LT number must be much higher.
Apart from Dave Eggers, the other books are all by women, though only one (Girls of Riyadh) by a Saudi woman.
I disqualified half a dozen. I was a bit surprised to see The Power, by Naomi Alderman, topping the list – very little of the book is set in Saudi. I Am Pilgrim, by Terry Hayes, Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright, all cover many countries, with less than half of any of them being set in the Kingdom.
I was a bit surprised to find myself then excluding Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by T.E. Lawrence, and Arabian Sands, by Wilfred Thesiger; but in fact the former is largely set on the territory of what is now Jordan (and when I get there I’ll do a strict page count to see if it’s over 50%) and the latter spends a lot of time in Oman and what are now the UAE, the core visits to the Rub’ al Khali taking up less than a hundred of the 320 pages of text.
Next up are Madagascar, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon and to my surprise Nepal, whose population is around the 30 million mark.
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 | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Mozambique | Ghana | Peru | Saudi Arabia | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire