Here are 61 books that Love in a Small Town fans have personally recommended if you like
Love in a Small Town.
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My passion for this theme comes from my own long marriage and my passion for it. Having heard the phrase “I wouldn’t put up with that” so many times, it’s a relief to me to read that yes, many people do. Instead of giving up on something as important to them as a life partnership, they don’t give up until all hope is gone. Marriage resurrected is all about hope.
Achieving happily-ever-after after betrayal isn’t for the faint of heart and this book addresses that. You get the feels and, frankly, you suffer a little bit.
The hero isn’t likable and the reader has to learn to see what she saw. His point of view gives a special “yes, this” quality to the story.
Once upon a time in a land not so far away, a man and a woman fell in love. They were very happy. Until one day they weren’t – their happily ever after disappeared.This is their story.SummerHave you ever been in love?The kind of love that leaves you breathless and makes you feel like you can fly? I have…. It was the biggest mistake of my life. I let him become my everything; my sun, moon and stars but that wasn’t enough for him.What he did nearly destroyed me.My husband’s betrayal taught me the hard way that once trust is…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
My passion for this theme comes from my own long marriage and my passion for it. Having heard the phrase “I wouldn’t put up with that” so many times, it’s a relief to me to read that yes, many people do. Instead of giving up on something as important to them as a life partnership, they don’t give up until all hope is gone. Marriage resurrected is all about hope.
I love this story, although my heart was breaking the whole time I read it.
Sam and Rachel’s dream of a houseful of kids is going to come true, at least for 12 days, although it’s already too late to salvage their marriage. Too much has happened…or hasn’t.
Rachel and Sam have already faced more loss and disappointment than they can bear, but it’s amazing what the heart can handle when it needs to, albeit with lots of cracks and scar tissue.
My passion for this theme comes from my own long marriage and my passion for it. Having heard the phrase “I wouldn’t put up with that” so many times, it’s a relief to me to read that yes, many people do. Instead of giving up on something as important to them as a life partnership, they don’t give up until all hope is gone. Marriage resurrected is all about hope.
This is written by one of my favorite authors of Amish stories.
There is much heartache in this story, but that goes along with the marriage resurrected theme; regardless of what happens, the story of a marriage disintegrating is painful.
While there is never doubt that Judith and Isaac’s relationship will survive, the story of how is captivating.
As an Amish wife and mother struggles to hold her family together, a story from the past teaches her how to face her daily challenges with strength and love in the second Keepers of the Promise novel.
In modern day central Pennsylvania, Judith Wegler tries to heal the growing rift between her husband, Isaac, and his teenage brother Joseph—whom Judith and Isaac have raised as their own ever since both brothers lost their parents and siblings in a horrific fire. Meanwhile, Isaac’s hurtful silence about this tragic past has robbed Judith of any certainty of her husband’s love. But when…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
My passion for this theme comes from my own long marriage and my passion for it. Having heard the phrase “I wouldn’t put up with that” so many times, it’s a relief to me to read that yes, many people do. Instead of giving up on something as important to them as a life partnership, they don’t give up until all hope is gone. Marriage resurrected is all about hope.
I could cheerfully “pick” any one of Kathleen Gilles Seidel’s books as a recommendation.
I have read, loved, and reread them all. In my reading mind, she has the purest voice in both romantic fiction and women’s fiction. Her characters are all fascinating, all different, and all relatable. They make you care.
Within this writer’s voice lies tenderness that is never wordy, never sappy, never tired. I don’t have enough words to explain it, so by all means, read hers for yourself.
In a small Minnesota mining town, young Krissa is sheltered from her violent father by Danny, the brother she idolizes. Danny, a budding musician, is determined to escape with his sister in tow.
When the pair finally succeed, they meet Quinn, a privileged and wealthy college student. Drawn together by a passion for music, Danny and Quinn set up a successful pop group. As their stars begin to rise, Danny falls in love with fame, and Quinn and Krissa fall in love with each other. But the higher Danny, Quinn and Krissa climb, the faster their worlds crumble, until they…
My entire life I’ve been a historian, a treasure hunter, and a crime solver, which is likely why I became a broadcast journalist and investigative reporter. Having worked cases, worked with police, and asked the questions I believe the public wanted answered, there isn’t much which gets by me. I see every story as a movie and every scene in life as a story that needs telling. One of my passions has always been genealogy which fits right into all of the above. I live by a simple saying, “Be a student of history, not a victim of it.”
It truly is a diary, and it rests in the local county museum in rural Pennsylvania. Being a Pennsylvanian myself, I was fascinated to read this Civil War account of a foot soldier who came back alive and lived to a ripe old age as a local businessman. Bull’s story really does read like a movie script and I plan at some point to do exactly that with it. The story of courage and the logic he uses to get through each day as a soldier, wanting nothing more than to do his duty and to return home.
Monuments and memorials pepper our public landscape. Many walk right by them, uncurious about who or what’s being honored. I can’t. I’m a historian. I’m driven to learn the substance of the American past, but I also want to know how history itself is constructed, not just by professionals but by common people. I’m fascinated by how “public memory” is interpreted and advanced through monuments. I often love the artistry of these memorial features, but they’re not mere decoration; they mutely speak, saying simple things meant to be conclusive. But as times change previous conclusions can unravel. I’ve long been intrigued by this phenomenon, writing and teaching about it for thirty years.
The Unfinished Bombingwas eerily prescient when first published in 2001 and remains uncannily relevant today.
Linenthal set the standard in his analysis of public tragedy, its impact on an American community and the larger nation, and its memorialization.
In April 1995, a white homegrown right-wing terrorist bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 men, women, and children. Linenthal’s story of the massive crime, outpourings of grief, and the efforts to memorialize the dead and prevent future cataclysms is gripping and personal yet academically astute.
The Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum that rose from the rubble is among the most culturally and aesthetically successful monuments in the history of American public memory. Though seemingly eclipsed by the catastrophic events of September 11, 2001, this story of rupture and recovery, so well told by the author, continues to be critical and instructive.
On April 19, 1995 the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City shook the nation, destroying our complacent sense of safety and sending a community into a tailspin of shock, grief, and bewilderment. Almost as difficult as the bombing itself has been the aftermath, its legacy for Oklahoma City and for the nation, and the struggle to recover from this unprecedented attack. In The Unfinished Bombing, Edward T. Linenthal explores the many ways Oklahomans and other Americans have tried to grapple with this catastrophe. Working with exclusive access to materials gathered by the Oklahoma City National…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
The Black Experience is my experience. Through living that experience, and with the benefit of education, my passion for storytelling—for sharing oft-neglected Black history from a Black perspective—evolved. Professionally, I am a Harvard-educated attorney who writes, lectures, teaches, and coaches in the general area of the Black experience and in the broader realm of diversity, equity, and inclusion. My ten books focus on aspects of the Black experience in America. I have received many honors and accolades for my professional and community work, including induction into both the Tulsa Hall of Fame and the Oklahoma Hall of Fame.
Release Me is an anthology that looks at the legacy of Tulsa's Historic Greenwood District through the eyes of various authors tapping a plethora of literary styles and devices. Through Release Me, the voices of the oft-unheard ring out. The legacy of the Greenwood District lives.
“Apparitions roam the Greenwood District, yearning to be free of the day they died…” The story of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, OK (aka Black Wall Street) is more than the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. RELEASE ME, the Spirits of Greenwood Speak anthology focuses on the lives of the citizens of Greenwood. The anthology is a symphony of historic facts about the Greenwood District (before and after the massacre) along with timeless and borderless community building principles wrapped in poetry, short stories, art, essays, and photography. RELEASE ME, the Spirits of Greenwood Speak anthology has contributions from Poet Laureate of…
All of my novels explore, in some way, how the characters are affected by trauma or loss, and how they respond to these difficulties over time. This comes partly from my impatience with the notion of “closure” and with the idea that we can ever truly find it after a traumatic event or a significant loss. I’m drawn to fiction and nonfiction that doesn’t shy away from the messiness of finding a way to live with these difficulties, or trying to. In addition to writing fiction, I’ve spent nearly ten years recommending novels and story collections through my Small Press Picks website.
In every story in this heart-rending collection, the protagonists—all of them Indigenous people—are dealing with some of the most challenging circumstances that can be imagined: the tragic deaths of loved ones, the trials of trying to rebuild one’s life post-incarceration, and the fallout from substance abuse, to name just some of the difficulties the stories address. At the same time, most of the protagonists exhibit some form of resilience in response to these challenges, and I was deeply moved by the variety of this resilience, by the characters’ determination, and by Johnston’s insights into their experiences. I also love the ways in which the stories are connected by place: All of them unfold in Oklahoma, and Johnston brings their settings to life.
In this collection of short stories that focuses on the modern-day experiences of Indigenous people living in Oklahoma, Johnston documents the quiet sorrow of everyday life as her characters traverse the normalized, heartbreaking rites of passage such as burying your grandfather, mother, or husband, becoming a sex worker, or reconnecting with your family after prison; the effects are subtle, yet loud, and always enduring. Whether Johnston's characters are coming of age and/or grappling with complex family dynamics, Johnston delivers the economy of loss and resilience that marks this post-colonial collection with biting, captivating prose that demands to be read from…
I’ve been gay for as long as I can remember. I even told my mother, when I was five years old, that I was going to marry Hoss Cartwright (from the TV show Bonanza). But even knowing yourself that well doesn’t make it easy to actually beyourself, so I still had to come out to friends and family over a span of five or six years in my late teens and early twenties. And coming out is never easy, although it feels like a million bucks once you’ve done it. Also, it’s different for everyone, and having books like these I’ve recommended may not make it easier, but they show us that it can be done and that we’re not alone.
Having grown up gay in a small town in the South, this resonated with me as an out gay man in a big city in my twenties, because it got everything about being gay in a small Southern town right: the tone, the emotion, the terror, and most of all, it got how there are more of us in those small Southern towns than we realize at the time, and how leaving for bigger, “better” places isn’t always the answer.
A lonely eighteen-year-old boy growing up in the working-class town of Pryor, Oklahoma, Charlie Hope struggles to cope with his passionately religious mother, the death of his hard-drinking grandfather, his enigmatic late father, and his own confusion over sexual orientation. A first novel.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I’ve always been fascinated by philosophical ideas, the more radical and counterintuitive the better. But as someone who’s never excelled at abstract thought, I’ve found these ideas’ expression in argumentative nonfiction both dry and unpersuasive, lacking the human context that would alone test the strength of propositions about spirituality, justice, love, education, and more. The novel of ideas brings concepts to life in the particular personalities and concrete experiences of fictional characters—a much more vivid and convincing way to explore the world of thought. Many readers will be familiar with the genre’s classics (Voltaire, Dostoevsky, Mann, Camus), so I’d like to recommend more recent instances I find personally or artistically inspiring.
Morrison’s most ambitious and most underrated novel, Paradise (1997) tells the story of Ruby, a town founded by a group of African-Americans turned away after slavery from other black townships because of their darker skin color. Ruby’s male leaders accordingly establish a patriarchal community devoted to keeping bloodlines pure and youth in line. This stern society inevitably clashes with the inhabitants of a former convent on its fringes where a multiracial group of fugitive women come together amid the tumult of the 1960s. In this intensely written and kaleidoscopically structured violent epic, Morrison rewrites the Biblical Exodus and the American myth of westward settlement, she sets Christianity against Gnosticism, and she strives to do nothing less than reinvent religion for the postmodern world. Reading this as a teenager in the late ‘90s showed me that contemporary fiction could aspire to be as grand and world-changing as the classics.
Four young women are brutally attacked in a convent near an all-black town in America in the mid-1970s. The inevitability of this attack, and the attempts to avert it, lie at the heart of Paradise.
Spanning the birth of the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, the counter-culture and politics of the late 1970s, deftly manipulating past, present and future, this novel reveals the interior lives of the citizens of the town with astonishing clarity. Starkly evoking the clashes that have bedevilled the American century: between race and racelessness; religion and magic; promiscuity and fidelity; individuality and belonging.
