What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe 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
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
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee · 309 pages
One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than 40 languages, sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and voted one of the best novels of the 20th century by librarians across the United States. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poi
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
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'
Where the Crawdads Sing
Delia Owens · 384 pages
For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter
Tom Franklin · 305 pages
"In the late 1970s, Larry Ott and Silas '32' Jones were boyhood pals. Their worlds were as different as night and day: Larry, the child of lower-middle-class white parents, and Silas, the son of a poor, single black mother. Yet for a few months the boys stepped outside of their circumstances and shared a special bond. But then tragedy struck: Larry took a girl on a date to a drive-in movie, and sh
Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison · 338 pages
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s ori
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.
The Hamlet
William Faulkner · 373 pages
Traces the growing power of Flem Snopes, a white-trash farmer, in the Mississippi town of Frenchman's Bend.
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
A Good Hard Look
Ann Napolitano · 339 pages
Crippled by lupus at twenty-five, celebrated author Flannery O’Connor was forced to leave New York City and return home to Andalusia, her family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. Years later, as Flannery is finishing a novel and tending to her menagerie of peacocks, her mother drags her to the wedding of a family friend. Cookie Himmel embodies every facet of Southern womanhood that Flannery lack
Let Me Die in His Footsteps
Lori Roy · 352 pages
On a dark Kentucky night in 1952 halfway between her fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays, Annie Holleran runs through the lavender fields to the well on the Baines' place. Hollerans don't go near Baines since Joseph Carl was buried two decades ago. At the stroke of midnight, she gazes into the water in search of her future. When the body she sees there in the moonlight is discovered come morning, An
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
The Peach Keeper
Sarah Addison Allen · 273 pages
Willa Jackson of Walls of Water, North Carolina, has lately learned that an old classmate--socialite do-gooder Paxton Osgood--of the very prominent Osgood family, has restored her family's Blue Ridge Madam home to its former glory, with plans to open a top-flight inn. But when a skeleton, found buried beneath the lone peach tree on the property is found, Willa and Paxton must confront the dangerou
The Casual Vacancy
J.K. Rowling · 512 pages
When Barry Fairbrother dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war. Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils…. Pagford is no
South of Broad
Pat Conroy · 646 pages
The publishing event of the season: The one and only Pat Conroy returns, with a big, sprawling novel that is at once a love letter to Charleston and to lifelong friendship.Against the sumptuous backdrop of Charleston, South Carolina, South of Broad gathers a unique cast of sinners and saints. Leopold Bloom King, our narrator, is the son of an amiable, loving father who teaches science at the local
The Raven Boys
Maggie Stiefvater · 439 pages
Though she is from a family of clairvoyants, Blue Sargent's only gift seems to be that she makes other people's talents stronger. When she meets Gansey, one of the boys from the expensive Aglionby Academy, she discovers that he has talents of his own--and that together their talents are a dangerous mix. Blue has a policy of staying away from Aglionby boys. Known as "raven boys", they can only mean
The God of the Woods
Liz Moore · 496 pages
When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disa
Middlemarch
George Eliot · 795 pages
Eliot’s epic of 19th century provincial social life, set in a fictitious Midlands town in the years 1830-32, has several interlocking storylines blended effortlessly together to form a fully coherent narrative. Its main themes are the status of women, social expectations and hypocrisy, religion, political reform and education. It has often been called the greatest novel in the English language.
We Were the Mulvaneys
Joyce Carol Oates · 464 pages