Misleading Place Names in Book Titles

5th April 2026

Misleading place names in book titles.

Imagine the scenario, you are heading to Switzerland. As you dash through the airport book shop, you spot Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes. But once you get into it, you discover it is set in Vietnam. That might just prove to be a tad irritating.

And this is not the only title with a misleading place name on the cover. Recently I looked at books where the visual on the cover misrepresented the location of the books. Now she looks at titles where the words themselves are misleading as to the location that is being featured.

Adelaide by Genevieve Wheeler – set in LONDON

On an otherwise ordinary day, 26-year-old American expat Adelaide Williams walks into a London hospital and asks for help. Something’s not right. She doesn’t feel like herself any more.

For the past year, she’s been dating Rory Hughes, the charming man she met when she was least expecting to fall in love. Does he respond to texts? Honour his commitments? Make advance plans? Sometimes, rarely, and no, not at all. Despite everything, Adelaide is convinced he’s The One.

But when tragedy strikes unexpectedly, their relationship crumbles, and Adelaide realises she doesn’t want to live without him. Because how can you move on from a love that’s changed you forever?

An emotional, relatable debut from a fresh new voice that captures the timeless nature of what it’s like to be young and in love – with your friends, with your city, and with the one person who cannot, will not, love you back.

The Tokyo Suite by Giovana Madalosso – set in BRAZIL

A good nanny is hard to find. Fernanda, a busy executive whose marriage is foundering, has a room in her sprawling house redecorated in the style of a tiny luxury hotel room, the Tokyo Suite, to entice her maid Maju to stay.

Still, one morning, Maju walks out the door, slips past the army of nannies in the square, gets into a taxi, and vanishes. She also takes Fernanda’s daughter Cora with her.

Consumed by her own personal and professional crises Fernanda doesn’t realize at first that Cora is missing, and that Maju has kidnapped her, but when she does, she is violently pulled back into reality and the vagaries of her domestic life.

Meanwhile, Maju with Cora in tow, stops in cheap motels and abandoned locales as she makes her way across the Brazilian countryside, carrying out her plan, which will quickly and brutally veer out of control.

Madalosso sets in motion the lives of characters endlessly searching for something―affection, redemption, sex―to free them.  Cora’s disappearance puts the past and the present on a collision course, and ignites desires, resentments, and class tensions. The desperate quest that ensues is a settling of scores with life and the expectations we create for ourselves.

Prague by Arthur Phillips – set in BUDAPEST

A group of American expats en route to adventure, inspiration, or perhaps even history-in-the-making in Prague, somehow get sidetracked and settle instead for the enigmatic city of Budapest. Arriving in Hungary’s capital to pursue his elusive brother, journalist John Price finds himself drawn into the din of Budapest’s nightclubs, a romance with a secretive young diplomat, the table of an elderly cocktail pianist, and the moody company of a young man obsessed with nostalgia, all in a bid to forget the larger questions that arise in a city still pocked with bullet holes from war and crushed rebellion. With humour, intelligence and masterly prose, Phillips captures the character of his contemporaries and brilliantly renders a very weird ‘modern’ city.

Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes – set in VIETNAM

Base Matterhorn: a fortress carved into the jungle. Monsoon clouds swirl around the high summit, which is the hiding place of the marines from Bravo company. Close to Laos and North Vietnam, this is total isolation, skirmishes and battles mark the increasingly desperate war in Vietnam. Second Lieutenant Waino Mellas, 21 years old and just a few days into his 13-month tour, has barely arrived at Matterhorn before Bravo Company is ordered to abandon their mountain and sent deep in-country in pursuit of a North Vietnamese Army unit. Mellas faces disease, starvation, leeches, tigers and a virutally invisible enemy….

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hamnett – set in San Francisco

‘His name remains one of the most important and recognisable in the crime fiction genre. Hammett set the standard for much of the work that would follow’ Independent

Sam Spade is hired by the fragrant Miss Wonderley to track down her sister, who has eloped with a louse called Floyd Thursby. But Miss Wonderley is in fact the beautiful and treacherous Brigid O’Shaughnessy, and when Spade’s partner Miles Archer is shot while on Thursby’s trail, Spade finds himself both hunter and hunted: can he track down the jewel-encrusted bird, a treasure worth killing for, before the Fat Man finds him?

Looking for Alaska by John Green – set in Alabama

A vivid, passionate and intensely moving novel from prize-winning author John Green.

“In the dark beside me, she smelled of sweat and sunshine and vanilla and on that thin-mooned night I could see little more than her silhouette, but even in the dark, I could see her eyes – fierce emeralds. And not just beautiful, but hot too.”

BEFORE. Miles Halter’s whole life has been one big non-event until he starts at anything-but-boring Culver Creek Boarding School and meets Alaska Young. Gorgeous, clever, funny, sexy, screwed up and utterly fascinating she pulls Miles into her world, launches him into a new life, and steals his heart. But when tragedy strikes, and Miles comes face-to-face with death he discovers the value of living and loving unconditionally.

AFTER: Nothing will ever be the same.

Poignant, funny, heartbreaking and compelling, this novel will stay with you forever.

Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier – set in CORNWALL

The scenery and setting are a crucial background to this book. Mary Yellan is to go and live on these very bleak and hostile moors at the solitary and isolated Jamaica Inn, run by the frightening and cruel drunkard, Joss Merlyn, to whom her Aunt Patience is married. There are strange events during the night, skulduggery, and Mary plots how both women can make their escape.

The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden – set in UGANDA

No, we’re not talking Bonnie Prince Charlie here. The title character of Giles Foden’s debut novel, The Last King of Scotland, is none other than Idi Amin, the former dictator of Uganda. Told from the viewpoint of Nicholas Garrigan, Amin’s personal physician, the novel chronicles the hell that was Uganda in the 1970s. Garrigan, the only son of a Scots Presbyterian minister, finds himself far away from Fossiemuir when he accepts a post with the Ministry of Health in Uganda. His arrival in Kampala coincides with the coup that leads to President Obote’s overthrow and Idi Amin Dada’s ascendancy to power. Garrigan spends only a few days in the capital city, however, before heading out to his assignment in the bush. But a freak traffic accident involving Amin’s sports car and a cow eventually brings the good doctor into the dictator’s orbit: a few months later, Garrigan is recalled from his rural hospital and named personal physician to the president. Soon enough, Garrigan finds himself caught between his duty to his patient and growing pressure from his own government to help them control Amin.

Subscribe to future blog posts