See here for methodology, though NB that I’m now also using numbers from Storygraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Switzerland. 

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviewers
Heidi	Johanna Spyri	212,815	14,145	16,290
The Sanatorium	Sarah Pearse	205,740	2,418	29,120
The Magic Mountain	Thomas Mann	63,457	11,051	4,251
The Other Einstein	Marie Benedict	88,207	1,757	7,882
The Physicists	Friedrich Dürrenmatt	44,556	2,126	5,881
The Enigma of Room 622	Joël Dicker	76,499	1,019	5,884
The Visit	Friedrich Dürrenmatt	39,324	2,078	5,166
The English Assassin	Daniel Silva	45,379	2,413	2,200

When I did this survey less systematically back in 2015, I awarded the prize to Frankenstein; but I have checked, and in fact considerably less than half of the book is set in Switzerland. So I have had to disqualify it here.

I declared Heidi the runner up in 2015, and I declare her the winner this time. In case you don’t know, it’s a wholesome tale of an orphan girl, brought up by her grumpy grandfather, bringing hope and healing. Johanna Spyri, the author, lived in Switzerland all her life. (Incidentally the bridge over the Rhine near Maienfeld, the town where most of Heidi is set, is called the Tardis Bridge. Yes, really.)

The Sanatorium was only published in 2020, so would not have been on my 2015 list, but it has clearly done very well, rivaling Heidi on Goodreads and actually beating her on StoryGraph. It’s a murder mystery set in, er, a sanatorium. The Magic Mountain a classic novel which came third in my 2015 survey, comes third again; it too is set in a sanatorium.

The Other Einstein is about Albert’s first wife, Mileva, and her unhappy life with him in Zürich. She was an ethnic Serb from what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now Vojvodina, and was also a talented scientist to the point that she may deserve credit for some of the work published under Albert’s name.

I am not completely sure about The Physicists, a play about three physicists in, yes, a sanatorium. But it was originally written in German, and the name of the sanatorium, Les Cerisiers, is French, and Dürrenmatt is in general a very Swiss writer, so I think it counts.

The Enigma of Room 622 is a mystery novel by French-speaking Swiss writer Joël Dicker. All his previous books were set in America, but this one is in a somewhat fictionalized Geneva.

The Visit, like The Physicists, is a play by Dürrenmatt which is not explicitly set in Switzerland, but the protagonist’s real name turns out to be Kläri, which is very Swiss.

Again I wasn’t completely sure about The English Assassin, a baroque tale of wartime looting of Jewish property coming home to roost decades later, but I think enough of it happens in and around Zürich to count for my purposes.

Thanks to StoryGraph we gained The Enigma of Room 622, which scored relatively poorly on the less Francophone LibraryThing, and lost Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Jung. Hotel du Lac, by Anita Brookner, was in a very close ninth place both with and without StoryGraph numbers.

I disqualified a lot of other books without needing to think too hard. Only one apart from Frankenstein caused me any head-scratching – Daisy Miller by Henry James. However the action switches to Italy from Switzerland just before the half-way point in the book.

The next four countries are very different from each other – Sierra Leone, followed by Belarus, then Laos and then Turkmenistan.

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
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium | Sweden | Czechia | Azerbaijan | Portugal | Greece | Hungary | Austria | Switzerland
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea