See here for methodology; to the best of my ability, I am excluding books not actually set in the current Republic of Korea, as noted below.
| Title | Author | Goodreads raters | LibraryThing owners |
| The Vegetarian | Han Kang | 184,841 | 3,735 |
| The Island of Sea Women | Lisa See | 133,653 | 1,768 |
| A Single Shard | Linda Sue Park | 41,101 | 5,149 |
| 82년생 김지영 / Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 | Cho Nam-Joo | 159,227 | 1,193 |
| Almond | Sohn Won-Pyung | 132,757 | 547 |
| Please Look After Mom | Shin Kyung-Sook | 43,760 | 1,577 |
| If I Had Your Face | Frances Cha | 54,291 | 738 |
| The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War | David Halberstam | 8,945 | 1873 |
Shamefully, I have not read any of these, though it is nice to see this year’s Nobel Prize winner for Literature topping the list.
I had to disqualify the top two books tagged as 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.
I have made an exceptional judgement call with Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter and I’m going to be listing it under both South Korea and North Korea, as I think both sides share evenly in the narrative.
The consensus from sources seems to be that the next four countries are Sudan, Uganda, Spain and Algeria, so I’ll take them in that order.