Lucy Maud Montgomery published Anne of Green Gables in 1908, having set it on the farm landscape and red roads of Prince Edward Island where she had grown up. The novel follows Anne Shirley, a red-haired orphan sent to the wrong farm and then adopted anyway, through her childhood on the island. It became an international bestseller almost immediately and has never gone out of print.
Montgomery intended it partly as a portrait of the island itself — the birch lanes, the sea glimpsed from clifftops, the particular quality of summer light. Reading it before visiting PEI makes the landscape more vivid and helps explain why Japanese tourists in particular make pilgrimages to Cavendish, a village on the north shore, where Montgomery set the book. The Anne figure has become so embedded in PEI's identity that it can feel overwhelming in the tourist infrastructure, but the novel itself has earned the attention.