The best books about North Carolina

When I picked up Homefront, I couldn’t put it down. A study of perhaps the most iconic military community in the US, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Homefront brings a reader as close to everyday life in a military town as they can get without being there. Lutz burrows into Fayetteville and Fort Bragg, and pries open their histories and cultures. She offers glimpses into military subculture, the militarization of American infrastructure, the tensions surrounding town-and-installation relations. More than any other book, Homefront sensitized me to the complexities of twentieth-century US military culture and its deep influence on American people, places, and ideas. 

In one of my very favorite books of the past twenty years, Tim Tyson describes the brutal racist murder of a Black man in small-town North Carolina in 1970. He also goes into the aftermath, which Tim personally observed with the eyes of the ten-year-old son of the town’s Methodist minister. His father tried sincerely, with little success, to bridge the town’s racial divide as militant young Blacks took to the streets, burning warehouses. Tim is a remarkably poignant storyteller, and every page is stamped with his compassion, his wit, his keen eye for human nature. And most especially, with the wisdom that he learned from his father over the years. Some folks have compared it with To Kill a Mockingbird, and I definitely agree. And on a personal note, Tim’s father, Reverend Dr. Vernon Tyson, was a friend of my family for many years.

In its ambition and sweep across time and political upheavals as well as musical styles, this book may have been the closest thing I had to a model for my book.

Part musical memoir and part capsule history of the American South’s era of integration, Dixie Lullaby was written by longtime music journalist Mark Kemp – a man who grew up in Asheboro, North Carolina in the 1960s and ’70s and has the Lynyrd Skynyrd and Allman Brothers records to prove it.

I laughed out loud reading The Remember Box. Though the story is serious, Sprinkle captured the concerns and problem-solving that 11-year-old girls have in a time in history, 1949, when life in the South was confusing for those families who took a stand against prejudice.

The author sprinkles Carley’s sense of humor throughout the novel, such as describing an imaginary friend her young neighbor has. You grow to love and understand Carley.

That Carley’s Uncle Stephen is a minister, and the novel describes the difficulties of applying God’s word to real-life issues, makes the book even better. As Carley deals with the loss of her mother to polio, she must decide if she wants to embrace her uncle’s Christian faith or reject it.

One can’t read about families in crisis and not confront the devastation and stigma of mental illness. I think this theme resonates with many people, who are close to someone dealing with this illness, including me. In Where the Watermelons Grow, the consequences of mental illness in a family are stark as seen through the eyes of twelve-year-old Della, whose mother is on the verge of a serious breakdown. Della is thrust into new responsibilities for her baby sister and on the family farm. Despite this, Della is still a child who believes in magic and searches for a cure to heal her mother. Of course, there is no magical cure, but there is magic in understanding and acceptance.

It’s been a decade since I wrote my novel that featured as a backdrop the conflict over North Carolina’s western (Overmountain) counties’ attempt to form the controversial State of Franklin, but I remember how helpful Barksdale’s book was in forming my understanding of the era, the place, and the people involved. If I didn’t, the copious highlights and notes I left in my copy of this book would be enough to jog my memory. This book was highly readable and rich in detail.

Though not published until 2002, after Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. purchased and authenticated the manuscript, the autobiographical novel The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts is widely considered the first book known to have been written by a fugitive enslaved woman. Crafts was the author’s pseudonym, and the novel, estimated to have been written in 1858, parallels the life of Hannah Bond, a woman who is documented to have escaped enslavement on a North Carolina plantation and who, like the novel’s protagonist, eventually settled in New Jersey. The preface and introduction of the published book read like a mystery adventure as Professor Gates reveals his multifaceted strategies to identify the real-life author and the real-life characters of her book.

The sisterly bond in this book and the hallmark parallels had me wanting to stay wrapped up in this cozy read as long as possible.

The mishaps along the way added a touch of humor that had me smiling as I read. And the interactions between ‘enemies turned lovers’ Nora and Charlie were great.

The coincidences that followed the main leads, like running into each other in a remote small town when both are from New York and didn’t know the other would be there and the fact Charlie’s mom owns the house Nora and her sister are renting made me want to keep reading and see what other situations the two would get in that would thrust them together. 

From the first chapter, I was bewitched by the effortless overlay of the fantastical with the everyday.

This delightful sugary read showcases a heroine who craves sweets, connection, and acceptance—I can relate to all of that!

When she succeeds, I feel I do too. I love how this book creates a feeling of hope in a new day within me. 

The vintage fashion descriptions are killer diller with little mini-stories about each dress featured that evoke nostalgia and often melancholy. The mini-stories were sweet, delightful vignettes that reminded me of the way I think of my vintage clothing. They were beautifully written and I loved them all but most noticeably, I loved the story about the wartime mother splashing in puddles with her children. Dora’s character was likable and believable and I rooted for her. The supporting characters were perfectly quirky and delightfully despicable. Plus there is a nice romantic element with a fun love-triangle with wonderful supporting characters.

King and I share a love of mysteries. This beauty, set in the early 1970s, fits the bill for a cozy story. Teenagers working at the amusement park are just trying to make some money and get ready for college. But there’s an unsolved murder that captures their attention as well.

King’s ability to create great characters, both good and bad, has always been one of his many talents. That’s evident in this story and it pulled me in right from the start. This isn’t a traditional mystery, with experienced detectives chasing down leads. As with many of his stories, I’ve read this one more than once.

Another Southern cultural landmark, this North Carolina tour de force comes, like Faulkner, out of a tradition steeped in Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible. Some people think you can appreciate this one only when you’re young. Not true. I read it for the second time in my 40s and got caught up again in the Gant family saga and those wonderful, rolling sentences, exploding like thunder all around.

You will likely never see finer photographs of shelter dogs than those inside Shannon Johnstone’s exquisite book. The photographs capture the dogs’ character, grit, and heart as they run, jump, fetch, or simply stare into the distance. Their faces are joyful, wistful, earnest. In most cases, these photographs saved lives. Posted on a North Carolina shelter’s website, the dogs captured the imaginations of those who would adopt them. Photographs of dogs with their new families cap off the book.

Like me, John Darnielle of the band Mountain Goats (a Merge Records act, as it happens) was not born in North Carolina, but fully embraced it upon moving here.

After much acclaim for the twisted freak-folk of his band, Darnielle launched a parallel career as a fiction writer with this novella in Continuum Books’ 33-1/3 series.

Nominally about the 1971 Black Sabbath album of the title, Master of Reality is actually a personality sketch of obsessed and troubled super-fans of the sort Darnielle has in abundance in his hometown of Durham and elsewhere.

He has followed it up with more literary greatness, especially his revelatory 2014 novel Wolf in White Van.

Being a New Englander, I don’t care much about Southern literature but Wolfe transcends it and also influenced Jack Kerouac, who would be my sixth choice. It was recommended to me by Joe Fineman, son of novelist Irving Fineman, after I flunked out of Caltech (Joe didn’t), saying “This is your book.” I have no idea who my influences are but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me that they thought Thomas Wolfe was one of them. He probably is. 

This book is an intense psychological thriller that kept me on the edge right towards the end of the book. Cassie Neil has psychic gifts and works with the detectives to locate serial killers wherein her ability to tap into the mind of the killer evoked a chilly feeling in me. But often, her ability to see through the murderer’s eyes didn’t ensure sufficient information to prevent the murders and this often took a toll on her emotionally and spiritually. This was a fresh and exciting read though more than often I was filled with dread hoping there wouldn’t be another victim or guessing who the next one might be! This haunting suspense with an unexpected but interesting twist at the end makes it a delicious paranormal crime thriller. 

One of the throughline themes of my book is the ongoing resourcefulness of the state’s musicians as they battle day jobs as well as an unfriendly music industry.

As portrayed in this highly engaging oral history, North Carolina institutions don’t get much more resourceful than Merge Records, a Chapel Hill-based independent label founded by members of the local band Superchunk.

Over the years, Merge went from putting out indie-rock seven-inch singles to topping the Billboard charts, and even winning an album-of-the-year Grammy Award.

More than one-third of a century later, both Merge and Superchunk are still at it.

Camuto’s supple prose draws the reader into a journey toward mountains that no longer exist, although they are named on some old maps: the southern Appalachians not as they are, but as they were before the European invasion. A keen historian and observant naturalist, Camuto walks deep into “what’s left of the backcountry,” documenting the hopeful reintroduction of the nearly extinct red wolf and reflecting on Cherokee place names, culture, and history. "Needless to say,” he confesses, “I never got to the Cherokee Mountains”—and, in sad irony, shortly after the book’s publication the red wolf reintroduction failed. Still, Camuto has succeeded in recording resonant reminiscences of places, peoples, and biotic populations now lost.

Separate Pasts is McLaurin’s account of his 1950s boyhood in the tiny hamlet of Wade, North Carolina, years when the Jim Crow system still reigned. He describes the complex, interconnected lives of the town’s white and black families, and his own confusion as he tried to make sense of the contradictions he observed in his world. A painfully honest account of a white boy’s reckoning with the legacies of segregation and oppression, McLaurin reveals how his own relationships with black neighbors undermined the racist beliefs he was taught.

This book is a bit different from my other recommendations. It’s not a fantasy. What it is is a series of books to make you laugh, cry, think, and most of all, want to go live in the imaginary town of Mitford, North Carolina. This is a small town where the phrase “Mitford takes care of its own” is sometimes hard but always rewarding. Reverend Tim Cavanough is a flawed man with a heart of gold who is in the mid to later stage in life and takes care of his flock of often eccentric, lovable townsfolk with a heart of love. I was with a friend one time walking through a little town in West Virginia, and we had both finished Ms. Karon’s books. The town and its folks reminded us of Mitford with its quaint charm.