Here are 76 books that Loving the Dead and Gone fans have personally recommended if you like
Loving the Dead and Gone.
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I have learned about the nature of magic and the mythical firsthand. I have always been a seeker, fiercely curious and an avid reader to try to understand the world so as to find myself and my destiny. Wise women appeared to guide my path as I quested the heroine’s journey with its many helpers and spirits, its coincidences, and its marvels. When I dreamt about the Roma, I knew the story was important; I attended UCLA and got to work. My passion has never dwindled during the 20 years it took to manifest the Destiny's Consent book series.
I so loved and continue to love this book because I love heroines who embody wisdom and pass it on to others. Isn’t this really the whole point of life? Any chunk of learning needs to be shared, especially by women for women who come after them.
As far as heroines are concerned, there are so many to choose from in this book. It begins with Lily, a girl, who decides to run away to find out about her mother; she has reason to leave her violent home with an abusive father. But then Lily has the opportunity to safeguard Rosaleen, her ‘stand-in’ black mother, who has made the serious mistake of standing up to legendary racist bullies. Lily is white but understands Rosaleen's peril in terms of danger. Lily is hardly fierce. This is when real courage becomes poignant…taking action in spite of immense fear.
The multi-million bestselling novel about a young girl's journey towards healing and the transforming power of love, from the award-winning author of The Invention of Wings and The Book of Longings
Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted Black "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free. They escape to Tiburon, South Carolina-a town that holds the secret to her mother's…
There are places one feels at home, even though not from there. The South does that to me. I'm drawn to its exotic beauty—the magnolias and moss. It's deep porches and melodic accents. There is a degree of tranquility that hangs over it, veiling the repulsive scars of years of master-slave culture. The South is the perfect backdrop for the themes that appeal to me—coming-of-age, political unrest, and social activism. These excellent Southern novels below all place the reader deep in the culture.
Pat Conroy once said, "Great words arranged with cunning and artistry could change the perceived world of some readers." This book did that for me. Throughout the read, I felt wrapped in a velvet cloak of beauty and struggle woven by a master.
Throughout the book, Conroy sets me in the narrator's struggle with how much someone can love their family despite the pain and anger they've caused. Especially with his mother, Lila, because he loves her as much as he hates her. It's a family epic of the highest order. I found it beautiful, brilliant, and brutal.
Pat Conroy's inspired masterpiece relates the dark and violent chronicle of an astounding family: the Wingos of Colleton, South Carolina. No reader will forget them. And no reader can remain untouched by their story.
All Wingos share one heritage ... shrimp fishing, poverty and the searing memory of a single terrifying event - the source of Tom Wingo's self-hatred and of his sister Savannah's suicidal despair.
To save himself and Savannah, Tom confronts the past with the help of New York psychologist Susan Lowenstein.
As Tom and Susan unravel the bitter history of his troubled childhood, in episodes of grotesque…
There are places one feels at home, even though not from there. The South does that to me. I'm drawn to its exotic beauty—the magnolias and moss. It's deep porches and melodic accents. There is a degree of tranquility that hangs over it, veiling the repulsive scars of years of master-slave culture. The South is the perfect backdrop for the themes that appeal to me—coming-of-age, political unrest, and social activism. These excellent Southern novels below all place the reader deep in the culture.
I know the words poignant and Shakespearean are almost cliché when describing stories, but I say, "If the cliché fits, use it."
I love good vs. evil stories, especially if they're set in the South. This one delivers. Forbidden love in the 1950's Jim Crow South is fertile soil for missteps and trouble. During a summer visit to her grandmother's, Catherine's naiveté about the way things were in the South back then made me anxious for her and Jimmy. Their mixed-race attraction for each other was doomed from the start. Part romance, part thriller, I found the suspense in this book powerful.
Arkansas Summer is a powerful novel about love and racial terror in the Jim Crow South. It's 1955, and Catherine has joined her father in Arkansas after her grandfather's death. She's a California college student, and it's her first visit to her grandparents' farm since the summer she was nine. When she is reunited with Jimmy, whom she'd played with as a child, the two are immediately drawn to one another. They understand the dangers of their interracial attraction, but could never have imagined the far-reaching consequences of their untimely love. Arkansas Summer takes readers on an emotional journey of…
There are places one feels at home, even though not from there. The South does that to me. I'm drawn to its exotic beauty—the magnolias and moss. It's deep porches and melodic accents. There is a degree of tranquility that hangs over it, veiling the repulsive scars of years of master-slave culture. The South is the perfect backdrop for the themes that appeal to me—coming-of-age, political unrest, and social activism. These excellent Southern novels below all place the reader deep in the culture.
Give me good writing and a sense of place, and I could read forever. This one's called Grisham's best work, and I agree. He transports us to the cotton fields of the Arkansas Delta through the eyes of the seven-year-old narrator.
I think this book has everything a great story needs: a narrator who never loses focus, a great cast of characters, and a way of life that has mostly vanished. It's about families and faith and justice and coming-of-age. And, if that's not enough, it has baseball—Stan Musial and the Cardinals, to be exact.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Until that September of 1952, Luke Chandler had never kept a secret or told a single lie. But in the long, hot summer of his seventh year, two groups of migrant workers — and two very dangerous men — came through the Arkansas Delta to work the Chandler cotton farm. And suddenly mysteries are flooding Luke’s world.
A brutal murder leaves the town seething in gossip and suspicion. A beautiful young woman ignites forbidden passions. A fatherless baby is born ... and someone has begun furtively painting the bare clapboards of the Chandler farmhouse,…
In the wake of my father’s sudden death (when I was sixteen) I was left with many questions about my heritage. Why didn’t I know more about my parents and their homeland of Korea? Why wasn’t I curious enough to ask questions when my father was alive? Now I’m a Korean American author of many award-winning children’s books most of which are inspired by my family heritage. I’ve spent my adult life unearthing the past, immortalizing long-lost loved ones, sharing meaningful stories that would otherwise be forgotten. I’m drawn to historical fiction the way most people are to their smartphones. The truth is, there is no future without remembering the past.
“Nine robed figures dressed all in white,” begins this haunting story of the Ku Klux Klan arriving in the small town of Bumblebee, North Carolina. The year is 1932 and the town is, of course, segregated. Black and White. A line in the soil―just like the neighborhood street of my childhood in Springfield, Virginia that divided my Korean family from the white family who fought and failed to keep us from moving into our home. The reader will step into eleven-year-old Stella Mills' shoes and feel all her fear and anger over the injustices of her world that highlights voting rights. But young Stella harnesses her anger through words (much the way I did as a child) by creating a fantasy newspaper column called Stella Star’s Sentinel. Why didn’t I think of that? I only had my blue diary with a gold clasp. In Stella’s ‘newspaper’ she expresses how…
Sharon M. Draper presents "storytelling at its finest" (School Library Journal, starred review) in this New York Times bestselling Depression-era novel about a young girl who must learn to be brave in the face of violent prejudice when the Ku Klux Klan reappears in her segregated southern town.
Stella lives in the segregated South-in Bumblebee, North Carolina, to be exact about it. Some stores she can go into. Some stores she can't. Some folks are right pleasant. Others are a lot less so. To Stella, it sort of evens out, and heck, the Klan hasn't bothered them for years. But…
It took a career as a librarian to help me understand my need for order, instead of the emotional chaos I grew up with in a large family. Being the child of an alcoholic father and a codependent mother gave me little personal value. After gaining some sense of worth in college, I wanted to give my kids the stability and support every child deserves, but I had to learn how to do this. I used my resources: education, self-scrutiny, honesty, art, nature, and the good Lord of the universe.
As a leader in autobiographical fiction, Wolfe writes of a large family dominated by an alcoholic, authoritarian father who is highly dramatic in words and behavior.
His wife’s determination to survive by running a boarding house and investing in real estate leaves little time for parental attention to the needs of their children.
While most grow to repeat the dysfunctional family habits that hinder healthy development, the youngest child, with the help of his teachers, struggles enough to finally take steps away from the pain, and out of the cycle, as I did with my own life.
The spectacular, history-making first novel about a young man’s coming of age by literary legend Thomas Wolfe, first published in 1929 and long considered a classic of twentieth century literature.
A legendary author on par with William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Wolfe published Look Homeward, Angel, his first novel, about a young man’s burning desire to leave his small town and tumultuous family in search of a better life, in 1929. It gave the world proof of his genius and launched a powerful legacy.
The novel follows the trajectory of Eugene Gant, a brilliant and restless young man whose…
I’m from East Texas, which is closer in culture and climate to the South than the Southwest. The southern voice in American literature has given us countless classics, specifically when it comes to dealing with our very dark, very human nature. Violence, racism, religion, and redemption are all explored under the Southern Gothic umbrella. My own upbringing exposed me to much of the darkness that still exists in these shadowed pockets of the country. I want to illuminate some of those places, and each of these books serves as a massive spotlight.
I don’t read many current authors. It’s not their fault I’m a slow reader and have so many older novels to work through. But there are exceptions and David Joy is certainly one of those. I’d recommend starting at his beginning with Where All Light Tends to Go. His voice helped (and is still helping) usher in a new generation of southern authors. Joy, unlike the other authors on this list, tends to lean toward spare prose, which creates a bingeable quality to his work. Bonus points for a perfect ending.
A Finalist for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel
“Remarkable . . . This isn’t your ordinary coming-of-age novel, but with his bone-cutting insights into these men and the region that bred them, Joy makes it an extraordinarily intimate experience.”—Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review
"Lyrical, propulsive, dark and compelling. Joy knows well the grit and gravel of his world, the soul and blemishes of the place."--Daniel Woodrell
In the country-noir tradition of Winter's Bone meets 'Breaking Bad,' a savage and beautiful story of a young man seeking redemption.
The area surrounding Cashiers, North Carolina, is home…
Thrillers are just that—thrilling. But thrillers with lots of explosions and gunfights aren’t that appealing to me since I know the hero will make it. With realistic domestic, at-home-style thrillers, the thrilling nature is how the scenarios could really happen. Those are the most thrilling ideas, the ones I can see how they could actually happen to someone—or to me. That makes it exciting. This is why I read many of them and have written quite a few, too, because there’s nothing more thrilling than thinking your home, or the people in it, isn’t as safe as you thought.
I credit John Hart for inspiring me to write; I think this is his best work. I love the balance between gritty, literary-style writing and an action-filled, fast-paced plot.
As a reader, I found that balance to be exquisite, especially as the POVs shift from a child's mind to troubled adults and the investigation into the missing child.
It contains all the elements that make a great novel. I’ve only read one novel twice, and this was the one.
Thirteen-year-old Johnny Merrimon has to face things no boy his age should face. In the year since his twin sister's abduction his world has fallen apart: his father has disappeared and his fragile mother is spiralling into ever deeper despair.
Johnny keeps strong. Armed with a map, a bike and a flashlight, he stalks the bad men of Raven County. The police might have given up on Alyssa; he never will. Someone, somewhere, knows something they're not telling.
Only one person looks out for Johnny. Detective Clyde Hunt shares his obsession with the case. But when Johnny witnesses a hit-and-run…
I grew up in a mostly white town in Ohio, where, as a White woman, I didn’t have to think much at all about race. During college in North Carolina, I first began to consider racism. As a journalist, I’ve learned (sometimes the hard way) that you can’t write in a meaningful way about social justice issues without connecting them to history. The books I’ve recommended provide that connection. Once you make it, you’ll never be able to see the world the same way.
Wilmington’s Lie, winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, documents one of the darkest episodes in North Carolina’s history – the violent overthrow of an elected government in the Black-majority city of Wilmington. It was a massacre that left at least 60 Black men dead. I lived in North Carolina for decades before I heard about this history. And I’m hardly alone. Until recently, this coup had been described as a “race riot” and largely omitted from textbooks, while its White supremacist organizers had been revered as great North Carolinians. If you want to understand what people mean when they talk about the “whitewashing” of American history, this book is the ultimate case study.
WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE FOR GENERAL NONFICTION
From Pulitzer Prize-winner David Zucchino comes a searing account of the Wilmington riot and coup of 1898, an extraordinary event unknown to most Americans
By the 1890s, Wilmington was North Carolina’s largest city and a shining example of a mixed-race community. It was a bustling port city with a burgeoning African American middle class and a Fusionist government of Republicans and Populists that included black aldermen, police officers and magistrates. There were successful black-owned businesses and an African American newspaper, The Record. But across the state—and the South—white supremacist Democrats were…
I first became interested in extremism and terrorism when I was young, following the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. As a student and then as an intelligence analyst, I became deeply immersed in terrorism emanating from the Middle East and later served with the 9/11 Commission. In the last decade, I focused on the white supremacist threat, motivated both by its growing lethality and its political impact during the Trump era and today. In this book, I share my insights on the movement’s modern history, global dimensions, presence on social media, and numerous vulnerabilities.
To understand white supremacy today, it’s vital to understand how it changed from a set of ideas embedded in law as well as society to a fringe belief scorned by right-thinking people. Klansville, USAis set in the Civil Rights era deep inside the Klan in North Carolina, probably the most important state for the Klan at the time. Sociologist David Cunningham explains why the Klan was so strong in North Carolina and why it was weaker in many states where racism was also deeply entrenched. Cunningham shows how ordinary and embedded the Klan was in many parts of North Carolina and also reveals the tough, and incredibly effective, FBI campaign to crush the Klan, which included an array of dirty tricks against various Klan chapters that ultimately devastated many white supremacist organizations.
In the 1960s, on the heels of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision and in the midst of the growing Civil Rights Movement, Ku Klux Klan activity boomed, reaching an intensity not seen since the 1920s, when the KKK boasted over 4 million members. Most surprisingly, the state with the largest Klan membership-more than the rest of the South combined-was North Carolina, a supposed bastion of southern-style progressivism.
Klansville, U.S.A. is the first substantial history of the civil rights-era KKK's astounding rise and fall, focusing on the under-explored case of the United Klans of America (UKA) in North Carolina.…
