The most recommended books about New Orleans

New Orleans is a favorite city of mine, for its clammy claustrophobic parishes as much as its rollicking good times and extraordinary food. Scorched Grace delivers richly textured excursions into the heat and bent psyche of New Orleans, in a story led by Sister Holiday, a tattooed lesbian nun with grunge rocker vibes.

This exciting twist on noir and amateur sleuth tropes was fun, harrowing, heart-opening, and satisfying.

I ended up really enjoying this book! I didn't think I'd care for it, and I started it twice. Why? I don't cook, I don't care about cookbooks, and I'm never sure about youthful amateur sleuths.

And although I love New Orleans as a visitor, I don't live there, and surely this was a love letter to The Big Easy. What ultimately impressed me was the complexity of the story, the way it turned into a real tangle of murder and vintage books and sneaky villains.

Add to this a sexy neighbor, cool work friendships, and people with a history and I had a great time reading.

In a complete departure from the previous book, Gods of New Orleans is a dieselpunk science fiction adventure. Emma Farnsworth, her saxophone-playing boyfriend Eddie Collins, and the Conroy family have escaped from Chicago City and are going to start life again in New Orleans. However, everything they think they know about New Orleans is turned on its ear.

People of color are in charge. White people are expected to keep their eyes averted, refer to people of color as "sir" or "ma'am" ... and mixed ethnicity couples like Emma and Eddie are eyed askance. White people are also expected to carry a little tin badge with them if they're "working out" -- which is what slaves who were allowed to "sleep out" in New Orleans during the 19th C. were required to do. In short: Sikes has turned the typical examination of racism on its ear with this book. 

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Another work that is wonderfully and winningly hard to pin down, Coming Through Slaughter is an imaginative and fragmentary collage of monologue, memoir, interviews, lyrics, photographs, archival material, hospital files—and white space—that builds a novelistic portrait of the mythical dark life and hard times of cornet player Buddy Bolden, one of the originators of jazz in New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century. From the little that is known about Bolden and his music, Ondaatje shapes an audacious story that is short, cinematic, dream-like, and devastating, a book that incontrovertibly proved once again to me that there are many, many ways to tell the story of a life. 

I met Robyn at an author retreat in New Orleans. She's just as fun in real life as she is in her writing. Her paranormal women’s fiction books are hilarious, heartbreaking, magical, and so addictive with an engaging storyline that will captivate readers from page one! Warning, like all of these books on this list, you'll be up all night reading.

The premise is simple but ingenious. Winik catalogs the lives and deaths of people she’s known throughout her life, some well, others hardly at all. Each entry is no longer than a page or two, and her writing is stark and unruffled, creating moments of dark humor. She never glorifies the departed, yet her emotion buzzes below the surface. And you immediately wonder how your own page or two might go.

There’s so much to love in Daughters of the New Year. I was captivated by the way the mythology of the Vietnamese zodiac provides a frame for this story of family and immigration and the generational legacy of trauma.

In the present generation of Vietnamese women, one of the daughters is on a reality TV show, and I’m always a sucker for books about reality TV. But what really stuck out to me is the book’s structure, moving backward in time through the generations of women, the narrative becoming fuzzier and fuzzier in the distant past.

It shouldn’t work, but it does and creates a perfect picture of assimilation and resistance.

I discovered and used The World That Made New Orleans as a source for my book.

Upon opening the book, I was gleefully surprised to discover what an informative, interesting, and fun read it is. Sublette describes the French origins of the city in the early 1700s which involved wild parties, debauchery, tragic exploratory expeditions, and a massive Ponzi scheme that used Louisiana and the fictional gold mines there to defraud most every rich person in France, eventually crashing the entire French economy.

He then took me on a thrilling journey through the Spanish and early American periods to quadroon balls, Congo Square, and so many other fascinating places. I knew the city’s history was interesting, but reading The World That Made New Orleans blew me away. 

This book provides an intimate look at Storyville, the legal New Orleans red-light district that operated in a grid of streets nestled between St. Louis Cemeteries no. 1 and 2 near the French Quarter from 1897 to 1917.

Although the book is a bit dated (it was published in 1974) and includes a few wild and unsubstantiated stories about certain historic New Orleans personalities, such as Marie Laveau, this mostly factual volume is a fascinating and detailed portrait of the "District," as Storyville was often called, and the colorful, sometimes tragic stories of the people who lived and worked there.

Did I mention how much I love vampires? I grew up reading The Vampire Diaries, so I am all about a good (fictional) love triangle. Add vampires to that love triangle? Yes please! Cue Alys Arden’s The Casquette Girls series. Like my first two recs, this is also set in New Orleans, except unlike the others, this book is set in more modern times, specifically right after Hurricane Katrina. Since the author is from the area, the setting feels all the more authentic, and she doesn’t shy away from describing the devastation and rebuilding efforts; these are woven into the narrative. The writing itself is beautiful, but the characters are the star here. This series has quickly climbed to my favorites list. 

This book is about the city of New Orleans, and how it came to be, as an outpost of 3 empires in turn (the French, the Spanish, and the nascent United States). Its cultural mix gave it a rich identity, but also practical issues - whose legal system would be followed? What language should be used? This legacy created a particular urban environment, and Dawdy’s work brings out the most fascinating stories in how this city came to be.

This brilliant book tells the story of a lesser-known piece of African American history. Congo Square in New Orleans was a place where slaves were free to set up an open market, sing, dance, and play music...but only on Sundays for half a day. If you ever feel down this is a reminder of how indomitable the human spirit can be in the face of unspeakable adversity.

Director Oliver Stone based his 1991 movie JFK on the failed late 1960s JFK assassination probe of New Orleans district attorney, Jim Garrison. In this investigative book, Lambert methodically deconstructs Garrison’s investigation and exposes it as a total fraud. Her prodigious original research both archives and interviews is woven into a faced-paced book that is utterly convincing.

When I read Junky, I could hear the soundtrack of Low Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side, followed by the extended guitar solo on the live version of Heroin. This is Burroughs using a straightforward narrative before he decided to cut up everything and destroy the notion that there was any purpose to a beginning, middle, and end (see Naked Lunch and beyond!). Junky pulses with the desperation of an addict’s life in post-war New York and drifting down south to places like New Orleans and Mexico City. It’s a unique insight into a drug-infested lifestyle, before drugs became a fashionable accessory. It has authenticity dripping through it and is a testament to Burroughs own addiction, which at one point caused his father to collect him and move him back to live with his parents (just like Lou Reed did before he went on to ‘make… show more.

The ultimate in historical Southern Gothic family saga is Crescent Carnival. Keyes was a bestselling author in the mid-twentieth century because of her in-depth sagas. This epic tome covers three generations of high-society New Orleans characters through their scandals and secrets from the 1890-1940s. I had to remember not to get bogged down by the historical information which showed how grounded it is in facts that enriched my knowledge about the city, state, and Mardi Gras. Instead, I focused on the characters I was rooting for—no matter if I agreed with them or not. The last quarter of the book was binge read worthy, and I used a lot of tissues.

This is a bit of a cheat selection because it’s a set of short stories and not all of them are speculative or future-focused. Still, sometimes cheating is worth it.

Okoije has a wonderfully warped imagination and a wide-ranging set of edgy interests that seed her stories with such invention and energy that she expands your idea of what a good story can do.

Fancy some fluorescent, scaly fish wriggling out of mouths? Try ‘Outtakes’. Want to hear from a girl with a long, furry grey tail? Have a read of  ‘Animal Parts’. Keen on psychopaths with a penchant for sending unsuspecting women poetry? Then ‘Fractures’ will float your boat.

Why Okoije is not a major literary star I have no idea. But I love her writing the way I love cream cakes.

There is no New Orleans without the Mississippi River.  

Rising Tide tells the story of government and engineers’ flawed efforts to control this mighty river, and how they contributed to the disastrous 1927 flood that left over one million people homeless and destroyed scores of towns. 

It provides a rich picture of the enduring social and racial divides in early twentieth-century New Orleans.

Moreover, it reveals how the city’s wealthy white leaders chose to flood neighboring communities to protect the city while undermining efforts to compensate the victims—creating a precedent for injustice and corruption, and ensuring a long-standing distrust of the city’s levees and flood control system.    

As fascinating as Louisbourg’s history is all by itself, it is also important to place it in a wider context. René Chartrand provides just such a comparative look in this well-illustrated book about four major French colonial centers, including Louisbourg. Readers are able to grasp the imperial significance of the French colonial stronghold on Cape Breton Island (then known as Ile Royale) and compare it to the brief histories of three other North American towns: Québec, Montréal, and New Orleans.

What I love best about this novel is how adept the author is at combining the traditional elements of a serial killer story with those of supernatural tales such as Peter Straub’s terrifying Ghost Story. And trust me, the combination works. If you’re in the mood to be scared, then touched by the tortured yet loyal and loving Trinity LeDoux, I suggest you stop what you’re doing and acquire The Curse She Wore.

With an awesome nineties vibe that took me right back to my own teen years, Mina and the Undead is about a British teen girl battling vampires (obviously) in New Orleans. A great Gothic horror written by a fantastic new British writer, filled with gore and references to 90’s pop culture. A ton of fun!