The most recommended Southern fiction books

I love a Dark Academia book that knows the world of academia intimately, and this thriller, which focuses on controversial Greek life at the University of Georgia, gets everything right.

Competition between students, peer pressure, department intrigues, and more come alive in this brilliant debut. This comes as no surprise, as Nossett, in addition to being an amazing writer, is herself a professor, and holds a PhD in German literature.

In addition to being a total page-turner, this enthralling novel highlights contemporary issues faced on college campuses, with an emphasis on ethical debates surrounding fraternities and sororities. Nossett’s characterization is excellent, and her determined, whip-smart, and yet imperfect protagonist, Detective Marlitt Kaplan, is one I rooted for, and you will, too.

Set in the depression era in North Carolina’s turpentine pine forests, Rae Lynn Cobb learns a Tar Heel’s dangerous work. After life in an orphanage, she appreciates the work, a home of her own, and her loving husband. When he dies, with her grief-stricken help, she cuts her hair and flees dressed in his clothes and driving his rattle-trap truck. As a man, she works in a hazardous and treacherous turpentine labor camp and becomes indebted to the company-owned commissary. Like most labor camps, the owners have ways to keep indebted workers from running – dogs and guns. She gets locked in a sweatbox by a scheming man and survives, runs again, and finds peace. Rae does what is necessary with quiet grit and determination. For me, this book exemplifies what is missing in our world—personal responsibility—and I couldn't quit cheering for the heroine. A beautiful historical novel.

I adored this book from the first page to the last and missed the ebullient, foppishly theatrical, heartbreaking, and inspiring Sancho when he was gone.

It’s an important story—the true tale of the first black Briton to have the vote—but it’s also a supremely well-told story, following Sancho, via letters and diaries, from his birth on a slave ship through the often dangerous streets of 18th-century England.

Sancho, his contemporaries, and their environment are vividly brought to life. I was particularly delighted by Joseph's language—virtually every line contains an arresting image or a poetic turn of phrase.

This is a quiet first novel that deals directly with writers’ struggles to find their voices and places in the world.

The main character, an aspiring writer who works as a laborer to pay for classes and for entrée into the literary world, falls in love with a poet who has already won acclaim and doesn’t have to take menial jobs that distract her from her real passion.

Both characters struggle to find their voices and make their ways as writers in a country that doesn’t offer public funding to aspiring artists and writers. Both opt to live modestly in order to pursue their chosen career paths, and ultimately find that they must consider their own career above the other’s.

This is the first in the Franky Dast series and it was nominated for a Shamus Award. Dast was convicted and sentenced to Death Row when he was 18, for the rape and murder of two adolescent boys. Eight years later, the verdict is overturned, in part as a result of the relationship Dast has established with the Justice Now Initiative, an organization specializing in cases of wrongful imprisonment. On his release, Dast joins the group and becomes involved in a case that hits close to home: the cop who arrested and coerced a confession from him is accused of shooting the son of a prominent judge. In Dast, Wiley has created the kind of complex character I’m drawn to, both as a writer and a reader. Wiley’s ability to dive deep into the psyche of complicated characters is something I’m always striving for.

There are two scenarios in which I will set a book down after reading only the first page: either the prose is so atrociously bad that I fear neuronal loss if I read any further, or the prose is so incandescent that I fear irreparable damage to my self-confidence as a writer. James’s prose made me consider giving up writing and transitioning to, I don’t know, goat farming.

None but the Righteous follows a boy named Ham, who is possessed by the spirit of the saint whose relic he carries around in a pendant. After Hurricane Katrina, he must try to find his way back to his adoptive home of New Orleans despite complicated feelings about the woman who took him in as a child. 

Part climate fiction and part mystical tract, this book is hypnotically, hauntingly beautiful.

The Sweetness of Water is historical fiction that captures the reality of the human issues – the opportunities, the hopes and fears, the dreams and taboos – of life in the American South in the years just after the Civil War.

The characters are complex, the history solid, the writing gorgeous. It is rare that one encounters historical fiction that is truly fictional and yet also “fictionally true” – that is, accurate to small historical details even though the story is made-up. But this book is that, and I’m glad to have it part of me not only as a historian of the nineteenth century, but also for what it brought me and taught me.

Grace Greene writes the ultimate “beach read”—endearing characters, descriptions that put you right there at oceanside, and a poignant blend of emotion and humor. I love how Lilliane, the heroine, discovers courage she never thought she had. A temporary job as a live-in caregiver begins merely as a way to earn money for much-needed home repairs. But her stay in Emerald Isle, NC, becomes a life-changer, not only for her but for the elderly gentleman who soon becomes both friend and mentor. It’s a book about stepping out of your comfort zone and opening your heart to new possibilities no matter your age. And if this novel stirs your heart as it did mine, you won’t want to miss the sequel, A Dancing Tide.

During the Great Depression, a charming con artist and his precocious young accomplice navigate the American Midwest, pulling off small-time scams while forging an unexpected bond. Their adventures blend humor and heartache in a vivid portrayal of survival and unlikely family ties.

Originally released as Addie Pray, the novel inspired the 1973 Peter Bogdanovich film, Paper Moon. Tatum O'Neal, who played Addie Loggins, won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress at the age of 10, making her the youngest competitive Oscar winner in history.

The film is also known for its nostalgic depiction of Depression-era America and the vibrant chemistry between Tatum and her father, Ryan O'Neal. This movie was so successful that modern printings of Addie Pray use the better-known film title. 

The ‘sorority girl’ is a stock character in most novels set on American college campuses, and you’ll be hard pressed to find one who isn’t portrayed as beautiful but vapid and one misstep away from the twin horrors of having a bad hair day and witnessing their ex leave a party with their best friend.

Patton’s novel self-consciously leans into the stereotypes of white Greek culture at a big southern university, which makes its critique of that culture and its broader cast of characters both funny in their exaggeration and horrifying in their appeal.

This is exactly the kind of sorority-themed novel you would expect from the genre but also, because of a couple of unexpected twists, the one you never saw coming.