Love To Dance with the White Dog? Readers share 100 books like To Dance with the White Dog...

I could not stop reading this book—and when the TV series came out, I fell in love all over again. A trapped, imprisoned aristocrat who is elegant and only slightly snotty and who has a bedrock of humanity underneath any stiffness and propriety—that’s the protagonist, Rostov.

This novel features not one but two abandoned children, and, in both cases, their plights bring out the best in Count Rostov. He is naturally kind, but he also finds resources and courage he never knew he had. I’ve experienced the book three times—reading, listening to an audiobook, and watching the TV series and I was in love every time.

As the parent and sister of a person with disabilities, I look for authors who can handle this topic in a sensitive and loving way.

Ms. Brown does an amazing job as she weaves suspense into this depression era story. I fell in love with the characters, and this book encouraged me to keep looking for ways to include these special people into my own stories.

Pat Conroy was a master at conjuring characters and writing stories chock-full of emotion. Heck, even the way he describes his beloved state of South Carolina makes it seem like one of the characters in his novels. (Truth: I made my family go to South Carolina one summer after binge-reading Pat Conroy’s books.)

If forced to choose which of his novels is my favorite, I’d have to go with South Broad. With a lead character named Leopold Bloom, you just know it’s going to be good 😊 As Leopold’s life is defined by unimaginable tragedy, he is drawn to a group of outsiders in school. This unlikely band of friends experiences two decades of poignant, life-changing moments together.

Love, loss, and grief are prevalent in this novel, but there is also total hilarity as the bonds of friendship overcome disappointment and heartbreak.  

I read Home Again many years ago, and while I love all of Kristin Hannah’s books, this story in particular combined everything I love—ill-fated love, mother-daughter conflict, friendship, sibling rivalry, and an utterly shocking ending.

Madelaine Hillyard is a heart surgeon whose relationship with her teenage daughter, Lina, is strained. The DeMarco brothers, one a priest and one a bad boy, are a crucial part of Madelaine and Lina’s past, and as the plot evolves, I admit I fell a little in love with both of them. 
A relatable, heartbreaking story full of humanity, Home Again hits all the marks…and makes you believe in miracles again.  

Southern writer Joshilyn Jackson is one of my all-time favorites, with her unerring sense of place. In her last few books, she has turned to mystery plots. The results are mysteries of high literary quality. In The Almost Sisters, unflinching questions about race and privilege reside next to questions of guilt and innocence. I was close to the end before I picked up on a twist she’d embedded. 

When it comes to “selling the voice” in the first-person narrative, so much depends on the language and the style by which the chosen character tells the story. How convinced is the reader of this voice that promises us everything?

Let us only pay attention to Jabari Asim and his slave narrative Yonder, to know how to do it well. From the first chapter we are thrown into William’s world, the harsh truth of living on a plantation in the American South.

Once he starts narrating in his believable and lyrical voice, we feel the danger, and the hopelessness: ”I had known death could come at any time. You could keel over in the fields. You could be crushed under a wagon wheel, kicked by a horse, or have your skull split open because a slice of ham…had gone missing.” The first-person magic takes over and we have no choice… show more.

As a fiction author who investigates the Southern Jewish Experience as it transects with the African American one, I’ve found the work of Eli Evans indispensible. This collection of essays highlights Evans’ Civil Rights Era bona fides, his work in the LBJ administration as speech writer, his trip with Henry Kissinger to the Middle East. But it is also a book at its most personal and insightful when it celebrates small-town Southern life and the Southern Jew’s place in it. In the title essay Christian neighbors, both Black and white, are at church or enjoying Sunday supper after church, which leaves the often isolated Jewish children with little to do. An experimental fishing trip with his father on one such Sunday warms the heart and brings a smile. It’s worth the price of the book entire.

The Civil War in this short novel by Bisson, who sadly died in early 2024, is part of the book's backstory. It is set in a 1950s America in which our 1860s Civil War never happened.

In Bisson’s mirror America, Harriet Tubman joined John Brown in his raid on Harper’s Ferry, resulting in a victory for the abolitionists that led to a massive slave uprising in the South, aided by radical Europeans and Mexicans seeking to reclaim territory and ultimately the formation of a new socialist utopia from the former states of the Deep South.

With this bold and radical counterfactual as the backdrop, Bisson uses a chorus of compelling narrations to imagine the more just America that could be—and the struggles it would take to realize it.

Just before the onset of the American Revolution, Philadelphia gardener William Bartram made plant collecting trips through the Carolinas, Georgia, and north Florida. Relying on the hospitality of strangers, his account of those journeys includes personal encounters with settlers, slaves, immigrants on the run, and native Americans under intense pressure, as well as landmark details of Southeastern flora and fauna. Combined with watercolors that present dreamy visions of lost landscapes, there is nothing quite like Bartram’s Travels in American literature.

This novel by one of my favorite writers, the late, great Paul Hemphill – an icon of journalism and storytelling in the American South – is a hilarious, vaguely autobiographical story of life in the low minor leagues. Hemphill perfectly captures the language, grit, rhythm, and flow of minor league baseball in the mid-1950s, touching on issues of worker’s rights, segregation, sex, love, teamwork, and courage, without preaching or being sentimental.

My favorite moment in the book (and the terrific HBO movie version, starring William Peterson and Virginia Madsen) is when a Klan roadblock stops the Stogies’ team bus because they want to lynch the team’s star catcher, Joe Louis Brown, the only black player in the league – one the Stogies suggests, “let ‘em hang Whisenant, he’s only batting .179.”