Here are 25 books that Plainsong fans have personally recommended once you finish the Plainsong series.
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As a kid, our public library in the basement of the Methodist church became my second home. However, I considered any visit a bitter disappointment that didn’t result in one or two dog stories in the stack I signed out. Big Red, Old Yeller, Lassie, Lad a Dog, Call of the Wild, White Fang (the occasional wolf was also okay), I loved them all. That experience has continued to affect the adult I’ve become. As I’ve turned to reading, and writing, stories of family, relationships, and, lately, of aging, it’s become clear to me that I’ve never found a story that wasn’t improved by the appearance of a good dog.
Kent Haruf wrote Our Souls at Night as he was dying. What happens in it? Not a lot. It’s much easier to write stories in which things blow up, plot devices creak, and an ending ties everything up neatly. This quiet, elegiac novel is not that.
Addie and Louis, elderly neighbors, begin sleeping together because the nights are long and they are lonely. Her young grandson, Jamie, visits. Louis gives him a catcher’s mitt and brings home a shelter dog, Bonnie. Their grown children interfere. Complications ensue. And there are no quotation marks to indicate dialogue.
Yet, here I am telling you to go, now, find this book and read it today? Am I crazy? You decide (after you read the book).
P.S. Skip this film. Jane Fonda’s Stepford Wives’ perfection ruins a movie that needed its female beauty defined by wrinkles and gray hair, and an aging, infirm body.…
Addie Moore's husband died years ago, so did Louis Waters' wife, and, as neighbours in Holt, Colorado they have naturally long been aware of each other. With their children now far away both live alone in houses empty of family. The nights are terribly lonely, especially with no one to talk to. Then one evening Addie pays Louis an unexpected visit.
Their brave adventures-their pleasures and their difficulties-form the beating heart of Our Souls at Night. Kent Haruf's final novel is an…
I grew up on the high plains of eastern Montana. Like most rural folks, we lived close to the bone, even in the best of times. Then, when I was nine, my father died—and things got even harder. We finally had to put our acres up for lease, and I made a goal to leave that hard place. Though I worked hard for this new life I find myself leading—I studied, won scholarships, earned an MFA, and became a professor—ever since I left Montana, I’ve been trying to understand the distance between there and where I find myself now. I’ve been trying to understand rural America.
Loads of commentators are talking about the struggles of rural America, but Bonnie Jo Campbell brings those hardships to life in the stories in this book. She intimately knows her place—the rust belt counties of rural Michigan—and her characters are sharply drawn and utterly convincing.
She makes me care about each and every one of them, even when I disagree with them, even when I don’t really like them at all! Still, I understand and respect them, and I’m forced not to treat them as statistics but as human beings. I love the brutal honesty and hard-won moments of hope in this book.
American Salvage is rich with local color and peopled with rural characters who love and hate extravagantly. They know how to fix cars and washing machines, how to shoot and clean game, and how to cook up methamphetamine, but they have not figured out how to prosper in the twenty-first century. Through the complex inner lives of working-class characters, Bonnie Jo Campbell illustrates the desperation of post-industrial America, where wildlife, jobs, and whole ways of life go extinct and the people have no choice but to live off what is left behind.
Two instincts drive this list, one “writerly” and one about being human: 1) all good fiction maximizes various kinds of tension, particularly between people, and unusual or unexpected character pairings offer rich tensions; 2) I think we live in times when we are in desperate need of human kindness and must recognize that people from very different backgrounds can come together in their humanity. I love novels with complex characters and in books, as in life, I like to see people grow and change, and a big part of change is letting other people into your life.
I am a sucker for stories of redemption, especially those that show even the most entrenched people are capable of change.
Make the agent of change a child, and you’ve got me for sure. Place the story in the hands of a lyrical writer and then locate it in the hard-loved, haunting beauty of my native state—Wyoming—and it’s a hopeless match.
An Unfinished Life tells of the escape from an abusive boyfriend by Jean Gilkyson and her ten-year-old daughter Griff. With nowhere left to go, they take refuge with Jean's estranged father-in-law, Einar, a more-than-reluctant host who blames Jean for the death of his son.
Griff is the transformative agent, falling in love with Einar’s sprawling ranch and quiet way of life, and eventually, with the grandfather she didn’t know she had.
Hailed by Kent Haruf as 'one of the truest and most original new voices in American letters', Mark Spragg now tells the story of a complex, prodigal homecoming. Jean Gilkyson, pregnant when her husband was killed, is raising their daughter Griff when, in an Iowa trailerhouse with yet another brutal boyfriend, she realizes this can't go on. But the only refuge available is a town in Wyoming where her loved ones are dead and her father-in-law wishes she was too. For a decade he has blamed her for his son's death, choosing to go on living himself largely because his…
I grew up on the high plains of eastern Montana. Like most rural folks, we lived close to the bone, even in the best of times. Then, when I was nine, my father died—and things got even harder. We finally had to put our acres up for lease, and I made a goal to leave that hard place. Though I worked hard for this new life I find myself leading—I studied, won scholarships, earned an MFA, and became a professor—ever since I left Montana, I’ve been trying to understand the distance between there and where I find myself now. I’ve been trying to understand rural America.
This book takes on class, gender, and addiction, plus a host of other contemporary issues facing rural America and the nation—and Smarsh still manages to craft a compelling, human memoir.
This book might be the antidote to all the easy, anodyne, partisan conclusions the talking heads offer about rural America. As someone who grew up in rural America but now lives in a small city on the West Coast, I felt challenged reading this memoir.
Smarsh is the best kind of rabble-rouser; she’s telling it straight no matter who is listening.
*Finalist for the National Book Award* *Finalist for the Kirkus Prize* *Instant New York Times Bestseller* *Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, New York Post, BuzzFeed, Shelf Awareness, Bustle, and Publishers Weekly*
An essential read for our times: an eye-opening memoir of working-class poverty in America that will deepen our understanding of the ways in which class shapes our country and “a deeply humane memoir that crackles with clarifying insight”.*
Sarah Smarsh was born a fifth generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side, and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side. Through…
I grew up on the high plains of eastern Montana. Like most rural folks, we lived close to the bone, even in the best of times. Then, when I was nine, my father died—and things got even harder. We finally had to put our acres up for lease, and I made a goal to leave that hard place. Though I worked hard for this new life I find myself leading—I studied, won scholarships, earned an MFA, and became a professor—ever since I left Montana, I’ve been trying to understand the distance between there and where I find myself now. I’ve been trying to understand rural America.
I’ve read and deeply admired nearly everything Erdrich has written, from Love Medicine to The Roundhouse. Erdrich’s language is always incantatory, and her stories are full of magic, landscape, and history. But this one is my absolute favorite. Even the title is amazing!
The story moves back and forth across the decades, and characters shift and transform before your eyes. Erdrich reminds me of Faulkner or even Homer; though deeply rooted in the lives and experiences of the Ojibwe communities of eastern North Dakota, Erdrich’s novels have a timeless, mythic feel.
A powerfully involving novel from one of America's finest writers, and winner of America's prestigious National Book Award for Fiction 2012
Sister Cecilia lives for music, for those hours when she can play her beloved Chopin on the piano. It isn't that she neglects her other duties, rather it is the playing itself - distilled of longing - that disturbs her sisters. The very air of the convent thickens with the passion of her music, and the young girl is asked to leave. And so it is that Sister Cecilia appears before Berndt Vogel on his farm, destitute, looking for…
I moved around non-stop as a kid, attending a dozen schools by age
eleven. As a result, once I stayed put long enough to make real
friends, I stuck to them like glitter glue. As a reader and writer, I
can’t get enough stories about female friendships, whether rock-solid or
fraying. My latest novel involves
childhood friends whose loyalty is stretched like a pair of latex gloves
yanked off at a crime scene. The book grew out of a meme I saw on
Facebook, captioned: “Real friends help you hide the bodies”. My first
thought was: who would I help? Straight off, I thought of my oldest
friends.
I’m a huge sucker for stories involving teen girls and secrets—and no one handles this trope better than Tana French in this wildly atmospheric boarding school mystery.
A year after a boy’s found murdered at a secluded Irish school, a note appears on a bulletin board reading: “I know who killed him.” It’s soon clear that a lot of the girls know something. What though?
I love the dark academia vibe, the claustrophobia, and the girls, so close-knit and determined. This is a gorgeously written tale of friendship, loyalty, lies, and betrayal, just buzzing with witchy teen energy.
"An absolutely mesmerizing read. . . . Tana French is simply this: a truly great writer." -Gillian Flynn
Read the New York Times bestseller by Tana French, author of the forthcoming novel The Searcher and "the most important crime novelist to emerge in the past 10 years" (The Washington Post).
A year ago a boy was found murdered at a girls' boarding school, and the case was never solved. Detective Stephen Moran has been waiting for his chance to join Dublin's Murder Squad when sixteen-year-old Holly Mackey arrives in his office with a photo of the boy with the caption:…
When I was in elementary school, I was poor at writing essays. My mother believed that reading could help to improve my school performance, and started collecting short stories suitable for me. Incidentally, my interest in reading and writing was fostered. I grew older and became passionate about books that led me to see new worlds, to experience lives unknown to me before, and to empathize with other people regardless of race. With hindsight, I realized that all the books I’d read had something in common–that is, love, with its profound meaning and influence on our forever imperfect world, is the eternal theme and always inspiring me.
During my schooling years, mathematics was my forte, though I hardly found it interesting. When I read the book, I felt that my pride was dwarfed by the beautiful writing on mathematics, about which I realized I had known almost nothing.
The writing endowed mathematics with a life full of various feelings, and enabled it to become ties of love, friendship, care, etc. which, in turn, changed people’s life for better. In a way, the book reshaped my view of the world.
This is one of those books written in such lucid, unpretentious language that reading it is like looking into a deep pool of clear water...Dive into Yoko Ogawa's world and you find yourself tugged by forces more felt than seen' New York Times
Each morning, the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to one another. The Professor may not remember what he had for breakfast, but his mind is still alive with elegant mathematical equations from the past. He devises clever maths riddles - based on her shoe size or her birthday - and the numbers reveal a sheltering and…
As a writer of seven historically themed books, fiction and nonfiction, I’ve loved the intense, deep dive into World War I, World War II, the Civil War, and the Paris Commune that researching my books entailed. It’s been particularly fascinating to explore how women, whether on or near the front lines, or on the home front, negotiate life during war and how their behavior illuminates character. My protagonists are all women, and I’ve found that writing their lives offers a sharp opportunity to see the moral ambiguities of war. What’s more, their stories often transcend the personal to symbolize the spirit of a particular time and place at war.
My favorite of Hemingway’s books, this great anti-war novel about a passionate love affair between a young, wounded soldier and the beautiful nurse who cares for him, never loses its power for me despite repeated readings.
I admire not only the book’s lyrical writing, exquisite observations and heartbreaking story, but also how the horror of what men are experiencing on the battlefield is mirrored in the tragedy of Catherine’s death in childbirth.
Ernest Hemingway's classic novel of love during wartime.
Written when Ernest Hemingway was thirty years old and lauded as the best American novel to emerge from World War I, A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Set against the looming horrors of the battlefield, this gripping, semiautobiographical work captures the harsh realities of war and the pain of lovers caught in its inexorable sweep.
Hemingway famously rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times to get the words right. A…
Genre fiction and Robert Louis Stevenson aside, I can’t imagine loving a novel that has no strong thread, or threads, of love running through it. Fiction is written to entertain, it is true, but fiction’s higher aim is to put us in touch with our own humanity—our capacity to love, and to feel loss. We write to make people feel, and a powerful evocation of love will do that. I wouldn’t write a novel with no romantic love at its center, but I work hard too at love between siblings, friends, children, and parents.
Great characters drive great novels, and the cast of Huck Finn is as rich, varied, idiosyncratic, and vivid as any in literature. Some will make you laugh, some will make you angry, some will touch your heart. This is America’s best book, as Ernest Hemingway famously said, and if you haven’t read it, you’ve deprived yourself.
Chafed by the "sivilized" restrictions of his foster home, and weary of his drunkard father's brutality, Huck Finn fakes his own death and sets off on a raft down the Mississippi River. He is soon joined by Jim, an escaped slave. Together, they experience a series of rollicking adventures that have amused readers, young and old, for over a century. The fugitives become close friends as they weather storms together aboard the raft and spend idyllic days swimming, frying catfish suppers, and enjoying their independence. Their peaceful existence comes to…
COVID killed my father early on during the pandemic. Every day, I blogged about him. First, when he was in the ICU and I was begging the universe to save him. Then, after he died, as I grieved in a world that seemed cold and lonely. I wrote about Dad, telling stories of happier times, to keep him alive through my memories and to share his life with others. Soon, friends started recommending books about grief. In reading, feeling, and absorbing the pain of others, I somehow felt less alone.
I loved this book because it brought me into a the heart of Ward’s culture.
She brilliantly depicted the discrimination African-American men experience in America. Her love for her brother was endearing. I cried when she wove in the story of his death, and the deaths of other men she knew while growing up.
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'A brutal, moving memoir ... Anyone who emerges from America's black working-class youth with words as fine as Ward's deserves a hearing' - Guardian
'Raw, beautiful and dangerous' - New York Times Book Review
'Lavishly endowed with literary craft and hard-earned wisdom' - Time
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The beautiful, haunting memoir from Jesmyn Ward, the first woman to win the National Book Award twice
'And then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped' - Harriet Tubman
Jesmyn Ward's acclaimed memoir shines…
