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A Good Hard Look

Ann Napolitano · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
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The Help

Kathryn Stockett · 464 pages

Be prepared to meet three unforgettable women: Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will

American SouthWriter ProtagonistSmall TownCharacter-Driven
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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers · 334 pages

Set in 1930s Georgia, the novel centers around a deaf and mute man, John Singer. Singer has been devastated by the loss of his dear friend, Antonapoulos, who was committed to an asylum for bad behavior

American SouthLiterary FictionSmall TownMultiple POV
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Mother of Pearl

Melinda Haynes · 466 pages

American SouthSmall TownMultiple POVLiterary Fiction
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All the King's Men

Robert Penn Warren · 490 pages

The story is about Willie Stark, a slick politician of humble birth, who was based on real-life Huey Long, a Louisiana governor, but the real main character is Jack Burden, a reporter who serves to narrate the story and Stark's rise to power.

American SouthWriter ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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The Ballad of Frankie Silver

Sharyn McCrumb · 396 pages

American SouthSmall TownWriter ProtagonistHistorical Fiction
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Malas

Marcela Fuentes · 375 pages

American SouthLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenSmall Town
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March

Geraldine Brooks · 304 pages

American SouthLiterary FictionMultiple POVCharacter-Driven
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Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

Fannie Flagg · 403 pages

Folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is a now-classic novel about two women: Evelyn, who’s in the sad slump of middle age, and gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode, who’s telling her life story. Her tale includes two more women—the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth—who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Ala

American SouthSmall TownCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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The Known World

Edward P. Jones · 400 pages

Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for *Paradise Lost* and an unusual mentor -- William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation -- as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to

American SouthLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenMultiple POV
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Euphoria

Lily King · 272 pages

"English anthropologist Andrew Banson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in the Territory of New Guinea. Haunted by the memory of his brothers' deaths and increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when a chance encounter with colleagues, the controversial Nell Stone and her wry and mercurial Australian husban

Writer ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenMultiple POV
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No One Is Coming to Save Us

Stephanie Powell Watts · 384 pages

"JJ Ferguson has returned home to Pinewood, North Carolina, to build his dream house and to pursue his high school sweetheart, Ava. But as he reenters his former world, where factories are in decline and the legacy of Jim Crow is still felt, he's startled to find that the people he once knew and loved have changed just as much as he has. Ava is now married and desperate for a baby, though she can'

American SouthSmall TownMultiple POVLiterary Fiction
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American SouthCharacter-DrivenSmall TownLiterary Fiction
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Light in August

William Faulkner · 480 pages

One of Faulkner's most admired and accessible novels, "Light in August reveals the great American author at the height of his powers. Lena Grove's resolute search for the father of her unborn child begets a rich, poignant, and ultimately hopeful story of perseverance in the face of mortality. It also acquaints us with several of Faulkner's most unforgettable characters, including the Reverend Gail

American SouthLiterary FictionSmall TownHistorical Fiction
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Mudbound

Hillary Jordan · 335 pages

"It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm; a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not; charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eld

American SouthLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenMultiple POV
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The Hours

Michael Cunningham

Writer ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenMultiple POV
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Joe

Larry Brown · 348 pages

American SouthCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionSmall Town
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Beloved

Toni Morrison · 288 pages

Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in

American SouthMultiple POVLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Heart of Palm

Laura Lee Smith · 452 pages

Utina, Florida, is a small, down-at-the-heels southern town. Once enlivened by the trade in Palm Sunday palms and moonshine, Utina hasn't seen economic growth in decades, and no family is more emblematic of the local reality than the Bravos. Deserted by the patriarch years ago, the Bravos are held together in equal measure by love, unspoken blame, and tenuously brokered truces. The story opens on

American SouthSmall TownCharacter-DrivenMultiple POV
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The Next Time You See Me

Holly Goddard Jones · 372 pages

The murder of a single woman--the hard-drinking and unpredictable Ronnie Eastman--reveals the ambitions, prejudices, and anxieties of a small Southern town and its residents.

American SouthCharacter-DrivenSmall TownLiterary Fiction
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Life After Life

Jill McCorkle · 418 pages

The residents, staff, and neighbors of the Pine Haven retirement center (from twelve-year-old Abby to eighty-five-year-old Sadie) share some of life's most profound discoveries. What they eventually learn about themselves and one another will transform them all.

American SouthSmall TownLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Jim the Boy

Tony Earley · 227 pages

American SouthSmall TownLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Black Mountain Breakdown

Lee Smith · 256 pages

American SouthCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionSmall Town
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Homegoing

Yaa Gyasi · 320 pages

Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into two different tribal villages in 18th century Ghana. Effia will be married off to an English colonial, and will live in comfort in the sprawling, palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising half-caste children who will be sent abroad to be educated in England before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the

American SouthLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenMultiple POV
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The Air Between Us

Deborah Johnson · 321 pages

Revere, Mississippi, with its population of "20,000 and sinking" is not unlike most Southern towns in the sixties. Black people live on one side of town and whites live on the other. The two rarely mix, or so everyone believes. But the truth is brought to the forefront when Billy Ray Puckett, a white man wounded while hunting, shows up at the segregated Doctors Hospital. No one thinks much of his

American SouthSmall TownMultiple POVLiterary Fiction

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