Why am I passionate about this?

I’m the author of the Pulitzer Prize Finalist novel, The Bright Forever, among other books, and I teach in the MFA in Creative Writing program at Ohio State University. I was born in southeastern Illinois, where my father farmed eighty acres in Lawrence County’s Lukin Township. I’ve always been fascinated by the stories of ordinary people, particularly working-class folks in small towns and rural communities. I admire their dignity, their directness, and their big hearts. I’ve spent my life writing about them with help from writers like the ones whose books I’m recommending. I want to speak for those whose voices often get overlooked or silenced.


I wrote

Yours, Jean

By Lee Martin,

Book cover of Yours, Jean

What is my book about?

Yours, Jean portrays the events of September 3, 1952, when one man’s actions reverberate through a number of families in…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Winesburg, Ohio

Lee Martin Why did I love this book?

Yes, even at the turn of the Twentieth Century, there were all sorts of goings-on taking place in Clyde, Ohio. As an aspiring writer in my own small town of Illinois, I love following this story of George Willard and the lives of the townspeople he records. I particularly admire the sharp insights into rural people and into the loneliness common to those who are meant to live their lives alone.

By Sherwood Anderson,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Winesburg, Ohio as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Anderson profoundly changed the American short story, transforming it from light, popular entertainment into literature of the highest quality. His art belonged as much to an oral as a written tradition, and, as this collection shows, the best of his stories echo the language and the pace of a man talking to his friends. They explore with penetrating compassion the isolation of the individual and capture the emotional undercurrents hidden beneath ordinary events.


Book cover of Our Souls at Night

Lee Martin Why did I love this book?

Who can resist this tender love story of the widow, Addie Moore, and the widower, Louis Waters? This is the book Kent Haruf promised his wife he’d complete before he died, and now we have the gift of his sharp insights into the nature of love in our later years along with his crystalline prose. I’m a romantic at heart, and this book reinforced my faith in the power of love. The humanity and the dignity of these characters will stay with you forever, not to mention the gentle humor that comes from two senior citizens trying to make their late-in-life relationship work.

By Kent Haruf,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Our Souls at Night as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'Absolutely beautiful' The Times

'Luminous' Ursula K Le Guin, Guardian

'I loved Our Souls at Night' David Nicholls

Addie Moore's husband died years ago, so did Louis Waters' wife, and, as neighbours in Holt, Colorado they have naturally long been aware of each other. With their children now far away both live alone in houses empty of family. The nights are terribly lonely, especially with no one to talk to. Then one evening Addie pays Louis an unexpected visit.

Their brave adventures-their pleasures and their difficulties-form the beating heart of Our Souls at Night. Kent Haruf's final novel is an…


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Book cover of Hatching Love

Hatching Love By Heidi Matonis,

This is a story of how the human-animal bond can heal, connect and redeem us all – even possibly a very jaded ghost!

The story opens with Tom’s wife, Beth, receiving a shipment of duck eggs. She has watched a YouTube video and was charmed by the idea of hatching…

Book cover of Gilead

Lee Martin Why did I love this book?

A father writes a letter to his son in this moving book. The father, Reverend John Ames, is at the end of his life. He speaks hard-earned wisdom as he contemplates the nature of faith, the complicated relationships between fathers and sons, and the life he has long loved. Part hymn and part lamentation, this book appeals to me because of my difficult relationship with my father as well as my struggles with faith.

By Marilynne Robinson,

Why should I read it?

8 authors picked Gilead as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION and THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD

AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK

In 1956, towards the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son: 'I told you last night that I might be gone sometime . . . You reached up and put your fingers on my lips and gave me that look I never in my life saw on any other face besides your mother's. It's a kind of furious pride, very passionate and stern. I'm always a little surprised to find my eyebrows unsinged after…


Book cover of So Long, See You Tomorrow

Lee Martin Why did I love this book?

I love this book for its depiction of 1920s rural Illinois and its beautiful writing. My father was a boy during the 1920s, and this story of two friends, their friendship tested by a murder, connects with what I imagine my father’s boyhood to have been like and gives me insight into what he kept guarded throughout his life. Maxwell’s narrator reconstructs the facts of the murder in a way that keeps me on the edge of my seat in this story of youth and loss. 

By William Maxwell,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked So Long, See You Tomorrow as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A novel which charts the lives of two former friends until the father of one was responsible for the murder of the father of the other. They do not speak following the tragedy, but the victims son realises fifty years later that he has failed in a fundamental act of friendship.


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Book cover of The Bloomsbury Photographs

The Bloomsbury Photographs By Maggie Humm,

An enthralling portrait of the Bloomsbury Group’s key figures told through a rich collection of intimate photographs. Photography framed the world of the Bloomsbury Group. The thousands of photographs surviving in albums kept by Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, and Lytton Strachey, among others, today offer us a private…

Explore my book 😀

Yours, Jean

By Lee Martin,

Book cover of Yours, Jean

What is my book about?

Yours, Jean portrays the events of September 3, 1952, when one man’s actions reverberate through a number of families in the small towns of Vincennes, Indiana, and Lawrenceville, Illinois. Jean De Belle, the new librarian, is eager to begin the next phase of her young life after breaking off her engagement with her fiancé, Charlie Camplain. She has no way of knowing that in a few hours, Charlie will arrive at the school, intent on convincing her to take back his ring. What happens next will challenge the bonds within the families whose lives intersect with them on that fateful day. Yours, Jean is a novel about small-town manners and the loneliness and the desire for connection that drive people to do things they never could have imagined. 

Book cover of Winesburg, Ohio
Book cover of Our Souls at Night
Book cover of Gilead

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