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American Ghost

Janis Owens · back to the book

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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

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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

American SouthSmall TownRacial ViolenceRacism
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The Quiet Game

Greg Iles · 564 pages

Widower Penn Cage returns to his hometown of Natchez, Mississippi, where, finding that his father is being blackmailed, he reopens a notorious murder case that involves powerfully dangerous town forces, the FBI, and his own past.

American SouthFamily SecretsSmall TownRacial Violence
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The Silver Star

Jeannette Walls · 304 pages

Two motherless sisters--Bean and Liz--are shuttled to Virginia, where their Uncle Tinsley lives in the decaying mansion that's been in their family for generations. When school starts in the fall, Bean easily adjusts and makes friends, and Liz becomes increasingly withdrawn. Then something happens to Liz and Bean is left to challenge the injustice of the adult world.

American SouthFamily SecretsSmall TownLiterary Fiction
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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

American SouthFamily SecretsSmall TownLiterary Fiction
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The Resurrectionist

Matthew Guinn · 288 pages

A young doctor wrestles with the legacy of a slave "resurrectionist" owned by his South Carolina medical school.

American SouthFamily SecretsRacial ViolenceLiterary Fiction
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Go Set a Watchman

Harper Lee · 288 pages

Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch -- "Scout" -- returns home from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise's homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town and the people dearest to her. Memori

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Malas

Marcela Fuentes · 375 pages

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Sycamore Row

John Grisham · 504 pages

In this novel the author takes you back to where it all began in A Time to Kill. Now we return to that famous courthouse in Clanton as Jake Brigance once again finds himself embroiled in a fiercely controversial trial; a trial that will expose old racial tensions and force Ford County to confront its tortured history. Seth Hubbard is a wealthy man dying of lung cancer. He trusts no one. Before he

American SouthFamily SecretsSmall TownRacial Violence
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The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter

Sharyn McCrumb · 306 pages

American SouthFamily SecretsSmall TownLiterary Fiction
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Penumbra

Carolyn Haines · 280 pages

The daughter of a white mother and black father, beautician and undertaker's assistant Jade Dupree comes to the aid of her white half-sister, Marlena, when the woman is found badly beaten and her young daughter kidnapped.

American SouthFamily SecretsSmall TownRacial Violence
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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 SouthFamily SecretsSmall TownRacism
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Necessary Lies

Diane Chamberlain · 370 pages

Caring for her family on their mid-20th-century tobacco farm after the loss of her parents, 15-year-old Ivy connects with Grace County social worker Jane, who strains her personal and professional relationships with her advocacy of Ivy's family, whose dark secrets test Jane's resolve against racial tensions and state-mandated sterilizations.

American SouthFamily SecretsLiterary FictionSmall Town
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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

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A Fine Dark Line

Joe R. Lansdale · 308 pages

American SouthSmall TownRacial ViolenceLiterary Fiction
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Blue Hole Back Home

Joy Jordan-Lake · 303 pages

American SouthSmall TownLiterary FictionRacial Violence
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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

American SouthFamily SecretsSmall TownLiterary Fiction
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One More River

Mary Glickman · 258 pages

Bernard Levy, always a mystery to his community of Guilford, Mississippi, was even more of a mystery to his son Mickey Moe, who was just four years old when his father died in World War II. Now in 1962, Mickey Moe sets out into backwoods Mississippi and Tennessee to uncover his father's murky past during the Great Flood of 1927.

American SouthFamily SecretsLiterary FictionRacism
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Summertime

Vanessa Lafaye · 354 pages

Florida, 1935, and the residents of Heron Key are preparing for the 4th of July barbecue, little realising how much their world is about to change. Tensions simmer at the party and in the early hours of the morning, a woman is found half-beaten to death. As whites turn on blacks, the finger of suspicion points at one man. Far over the Atlantic a tropical storm changes direction and turns towards F

American SouthSmall TownLiterary FictionRacial Violence
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Swan

Frances Mayes · 319 pages

When the body of her mother, a suicide nineteen years earlier, is mysteriously exhumed, Ginger Mason returns to her small Georgia hometown and is reunited with her reclusive brother as dark secrets about their family begin to surface.

American SouthFamily SecretsSmall TownLiterary Fiction
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Sweet Jiminy

Kristin Gore · 230 pages

When Jiminy retreats to her grandmother Willa's farm in rural Mississippi, she is shocked to discover there was once another Jiminy-- the daughter of her grandmother's longtime housekeeper, Lyn-- who was murdered along with Lyn's husband four decades earlier, in a civil rights era hate crime. With the help of Lyn's nephew, Bo, Jiminy sets out to solve the long-ago murder, to the dismay of those wh

American SouthFamily SecretsRacial ViolenceDual Timeline
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The Liar

Nora Roberts · 583 pages

Shelby Foxworth lost her husband. Then she lost her illusions. The man who took her from Tennessee to an exclusive Philadelphia suburb left her in crippling debt. He was an adulterer and a liar, and when Shelby tracks down his safe-deposit box, she finds multiple IDs. The man she loved wasn't just dead. He never really existed. Shelby takes her three-year-old daughter and heads south to seek comfo

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Alligator Lake

Lynne Bryant

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Midnight Secrets

Ella Grace · 440 pages

"On a hot southern night, with a storm on the horizon, a family is shattered. Three beautiful daughters--Savannah, Samantha, and Sabrina Wilde--go on with their lives, each significantly changed, as they bear the memory of the murder-suicide that killed their parents. For years, they have stayed away from Midnight, Alabama. Until Midnight calls them home. Savannah is the first one back, when a gru

American SouthFamily SecretsSmall TownSmall Town Secrets
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Breakheart Hill

Thomas H. Cook · 319 pages

Only one person truly knows what happened to Kelli Troy on that fateful night almost thirty years ago and he is determined not to break his silence.

American SouthSmall TownLiterary FictionRacism

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