Here are 60 books that Rum Punch fans have personally recommended if you like
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Not so long ago, I got paid to roam Florida and send back quirky dispatches to waiting newspaper editors. I’m fourth-generation, and like many Floridians, I have a love-hate relationship with my home state. I love the exotic beauty, the tumultuous weather, and the “end-of-the-road” mentality of the Sunshine State, but I hate the sprawl, the traffic and the “everything’s for-sale” greed that’s turning this once-pristine place into a steaming suburban parking lot. I enjoy books that capture the beauty, the strangeness, and the quirky characters who still haunt this pistol-shaped peninsula.
I met Lauren Groff at a book festival soon after this short story collection was released.
I was surprised that these dark and often jarring stories could come from the smiling, friendly women I encountered. As a Florida native, I love that she gets the descriptions and the scenery right. The weather and the wildlife are just as alive in these stories as the struggling humans. I’m thrilled that Groff is now living in Florida and has opened a bookstore in Gainesville.
From the universally acclaimed, New York Times bestselling author of Fates and Furies and Matrix
Florida is a "superlative" book (Boston Globe), "frequently funny" (San Francisco Chronicle), "brooding, inventive and often moving" (NPR Fresh Air) --as Groff is recognized as "Florida's unofficial poet laureate, as Joan Didion was for California." (Washington Post)
In her thrilling new book, Lauren Groff brings the reader into a physical world that is at once domestic and wild—a place where the hazards of the natural world…
Nate Champion might be the most heroic figure of America’s Old West ... and yet one of popular history’s best-kept secrets. Now he finally gets his due in this historical novel duology. His humble beginnings in Texas prepare him for a life with horses and cattle. Though a well-known horse…
Not so long ago, I got paid to roam Florida and send back quirky dispatches to waiting newspaper editors. I’m fourth-generation, and like many Floridians, I have a love-hate relationship with my home state. I love the exotic beauty, the tumultuous weather, and the “end-of-the-road” mentality of the Sunshine State, but I hate the sprawl, the traffic and the “everything’s for-sale” greed that’s turning this once-pristine place into a steaming suburban parking lot. I enjoy books that capture the beauty, the strangeness, and the quirky characters who still haunt this pistol-shaped peninsula.
Russell conjures a Florida where only a gauzy curtain separates vivid reality from a surreal and magical world. Present and past shift and blur.
I liked this book on first read, but struggled a bit with the magical elements of the story. When I reread it late last year, I fell completely under its spell. I can’t resist a story about a shabby Florida theme park, a menagerie of hungry alligators and an engaging 13-year-old who sets out on a journey through the swamp to save her siblings.
New York Times Bestseller | Pulitzer Prize Finalist
"Ms. Russell is one in a million. . . . A suspensfuly, deeply haunted book."--The New York Times
Thirteen-year-old Ava Bigtree has lived her entire life at Swamplandia!, her family’s island home and gator-wrestling theme park in the Florida Everglades. But when illness fells Ava’s mother, the park’s indomitable headliner, the family is plunged into chaos; her father withdraws, her sister falls in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, defects to a rival park called The World of Darkness.
Not so long ago, I got paid to roam Florida and send back quirky dispatches to waiting newspaper editors. I’m fourth-generation, and like many Floridians, I have a love-hate relationship with my home state. I love the exotic beauty, the tumultuous weather, and the “end-of-the-road” mentality of the Sunshine State, but I hate the sprawl, the traffic and the “everything’s for-sale” greed that’s turning this once-pristine place into a steaming suburban parking lot. I enjoy books that capture the beauty, the strangeness, and the quirky characters who still haunt this pistol-shaped peninsula.
Carl was a journalist I got to know during my days roaming the state for The Tampa Tribune and later, the St. Petersburg Times.
A Miami Herald columnist, Carl pretty much invented the modern Florida novel, with his dark and often hilarious first book, Tourist Season. Like many of his other books, this razor-sharp satire is stocked with colorful characters dealing with a state being consumed by greed, corrupt leadership, and overdevelopment.
Take a trip to exotic South Florida with this dark, funny book that established Carl Hiaasen as one of the top mystery writers in the game.
The first sign of trouble is a Shriner's fez washed up on a Miami beach. The next is a suitcase containing the almost-legless body of the local chamber of commerce president found floating in a canal...
The locals are desperate to keep the murders under wraps and the tourist money flowing. But it will take a reporter-turned–private eye to make sense of a caper that mixes football players, politicians, and one very hungry crocodile…
This book is a spy novel with a satirical edge which will take you on a heart-pumping journey through the streets, mountains, jungles, and beaches of Colombia. Our Man in Havana meets A Clear and Present Danger.
Not so long ago, I got paid to roam Florida and send back quirky dispatches to waiting newspaper editors. I’m fourth-generation, and like many Floridians, I have a love-hate relationship with my home state. I love the exotic beauty, the tumultuous weather, and the “end-of-the-road” mentality of the Sunshine State, but I hate the sprawl, the traffic and the “everything’s for-sale” greed that’s turning this once-pristine place into a steaming suburban parking lot. I enjoy books that capture the beauty, the strangeness, and the quirky characters who still haunt this pistol-shaped peninsula.
Tampa is my hometown, and Ace Atkins and I were both reporters for the Tampa Tribune.
He uses the 1955 murder of Tampa mob kingpin Charlie Wall as a peg to tell a story that moves from the cigar factories of Ybor City, downtown Tampa, and even pre-revolution Havana. Atkins gets the setting right and reveals the seamy underbelly of a southern port city where crime and corruption were rampant for much of the 20th century. I can’t resist a novel based around a cynical reporter and a determined cop.
From "a singular voice in fiction" (USA Today) comes a remarkable new novel about one of the most infamous murders in Florida history.
Tampa, Florida, 1955: a city pulsing with Sicilian and Cuban gangsters, smoky clubs, cigar factories, light and voices and rum. The bludgeoning death of mob boss Charlie Wall sends shock waves rippling through the communities, sets cops and reporters and associates, known and unknown, scrambling to discover the truth. And the truth is that there are many more surprises to come.
As the trail winds through rich neighborhoods and poor, enmeshing the innocent and corrupt alike, all…
I love including social issues and controversial topics in my plots. I love underdogs and the downtrodden. I enjoy unique and quirky characters with excellent, appropriate, and sometimes noir-ish voices. Twists and major reveals in genre books and movies are also very important to me. I’m not a subject matter expert in much of anything I write about (thank goodness for the internet), except for one novel yet to be published, which is a major catharsis for me.
According to the story, a certain “double whammy” fishing lure is guaranteed to produce outlandish success in pro bass fishing tournaments. The characters in this water-logged action/murder mystery were wonderful and outlandish, and there were many of them, part of Hiaasen’s appeal as an author.
This is an ensemble of crazy “Florida” people before “Florida man” became a thing. I loved the delivery, the slick prose, the humor, and the plot, and it made me read other novels by Hiaasen. It introduced me to one of the most memorable fictional characters I have ever read: Skink, no last name, a half-blind hermit, a roadkill delicacy aficionado, and an eco-terrorist. He perseveres through a lot on the way to becoming a great character in seven novels in the series.
"Follow the adventures of a news-photographer-turned-private-eye as he seeks truth, justice, and an affair with his ex-wife" (The New York Times) in this hilarious caper from bestselling author Carl Hiaasen.
R.J. Decker, star tenant of the local trailer park and neophyte private eye is fishing for a killer. Thanks to a sportsman's scam that's anything but sportsmanlike, there's a body floating in Coon Bog, Florida-and a lot that's rotten in the murky waters of big-stakes, large-mouth bass tournaments.
Here Decker will team up with a half-blind, half-mad hermit with an appetite for road kill; dare to kiss his ex-wife while…
I’m a fifth generation Miami native, and Miami is my bad boyfriend. The traffic, the construction, the daily drama, and let’s not forget hurricanes—it could all make you crazy. But Miamians are never dull. We are passionate about everything. I kinda love that about us. While you may associate my city with glitz and bling, what’s glamourous about Miami happens naturally. It’s the water, the glorious weather, fresh ripe mangoes and avocadoes right off the tree, and our vibrant multicultural community. With this Shepherd list, and with my cookbook Miami Vegan, I want to give you a delicious taste of the tropics, a taste of my home. Without the hurricanes.
I did not want to love this book. I resisted reading it because everyone told me how great it was, and how the author nailed living in Miami. I’m glad I came around, because they were right.
This is not the glamorous Miami of celebs, this is the real gritty Miami, a city of immigrants like the Jamaican-American family who we come to know and care about in Escoffery’s punchy connected short stories. It explores identity, culture, racism, family, and finding home. It haunts me still. I want to know what’s next for this family, and that the characters are doing okay.
'Kaleidoscopic, urgent, hilarious, revelatory' MARLON JAMES
'An absolute delight to read' DIANA EVANS
'Superb ... A strong, much needed new voice in our literature' PERCIVAL EVERETT
'A compelling hurricane of a book' ANN PATCHETT
A major debut that follows a Jamaican family in Miami navigating recession, racism and Hurricane Andrew.
1979. Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But they soon learn that the welcome in America will be far from warm.
Trelawny, their youngest son, comes of age in a society which regards him with suspicion, greeting him…
I’m a historian who recently started writing historical fiction. A few years ago, while writing my most recent academic book about 19th C Dublin, I became frustrated with the limitations of what I felt I could write about. I had a lot of sense of the atmosphere of the city that didn’t really fit into the way an academic book is constructed. So, I ended up trying my hand at historical fiction, wanting to give a real sense of place that I felt to be true but which was also a product of my imagination. One of my favorite things about reading novels has always been this sense of place.
This book is the definition of atmospheric. You can almost taste the swampy air of the Florida Everglades as you wend your way through a landscape of ruthless chancers and escaped slaves. I love the sense of menace and mystery that Mathieson captures in this, as well as the deep sense of place.
I have never been to the Everglades, but I suspect that if I did, I’d be disappointed that it didn’t live up to the place of my imagination after reading this book. If you liked Where the Crawdads Sing, I urge you to try this book, which is much better written and more interesting!
Drawn from fragments of historical fact, Matthiessen's masterpiece brilliantly depicts the fortunes and misfortunes of Edgar J. Watson, a real-life entrepreneur and outlaw who appeared in the lawless Florida Everglades around the turn of the century.
I grew up (at an early age ) reading what turned out to be classic crime writers: Christie, Hammett, Mac Donald, Leonard, Parker, etc. Growing up in Miami, I lived through the Cocaine Cowboy, crime-infested police department, rogue cops, and Mariel refugee crime spree days. I rode shotgun with a friend of mine who was a P.I. while he did surveillance and stakeouts.
This was one of Hiaasen’s early books before he made it big time. Even though it is a crime book, the chuckles I derived in almost every chapter were hilarious.
Living in South Florida myself, I enjoyed the descriptions of the area and believed the crazy people in this book were actually based on people here.
You want to say: “it can’t be that people act this way” but living here, I have seen it.
Richard's cousin is missing, and his best hope of finding her rests with the wily, one-eyed, ex-governor of Florida. Carl Hiaasen introduces his iconic character Skink to a younger audience in this nail-biting adventure!
A National Book Award Longlist Selection
Classic Malley: her parents are about to ship her off to boarding school, so she takes off with some guy she met online... Poor Richard: he's less of a rebel than Malley, and a lot less trusting. He knows his cousin is in trouble before she does. Wild Skink: he's a ragged, one-eyed, ex-governor of Florida, and enough of a…
I have lived in Florida since 1969, attended public school here, and received my Master’s degree from a state college. My husband, Bob Randall, a photographer and an entrepreneur, and I have written six nonfiction books about Florida. An Ocklawaha River Odyssey is our favorite. Kayaking the 56 miles of winding waterways became less of a research expedition and more of a spiritual journey as the ancient river cast its spell on us. From wildlife, including manatees and monkeys, to wild orchids and pickerelweed, the Ocklawaha provides more than exercise and recreation; it also touches your soul. I hope my writing and Bob’s photography provide that experience for our readers.
Noll and Tegeder wrote the most comprehensive book about the history of the Ocklawaha River and the Cross Florida Barge Canal ever written.
Documenting the story of the Cross Florida Barge Canal, the authors provide the inside story about the longest environmental conflict in Florida history, those who wanted to dig a ditch across the peninsula to connect the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, and Marjorie Harris Carr, the mastermind and "housewife from Micanopy," who founded the Florida Defenders of the Environment.
Nelson West, a former Chicago homicide detective, is hired by wealthy heir Lionel Bing to discreetly help “fix” scandals and legal problems for his father’s wealthy friends.
Bing, a brilliant but troubled investigator, suffers from PTSD symptoms as a result of being kidnapped and witnessing the murder of his mother…
Being a historical fiction writer, I spend much time researching people and places for my novels with my focus being on the South, particularly Florida, where I’m from, as well as Western North Carolina, where I’ve lived for nearly two decades. Family dynamics and character development have always held a special interest for me; particularly the humanness of being flawed, but also the resilience and strength found within us, too. I enjoy creating characters we can identify with, and become emotionally connected to, so much so that when the final page is turned, readers feel a sense of loss at saying goodbye to characters they’ve come to love.
This quintessential historical fiction book on Old Florida was both a nominee of the Pulitzer, and the Nobel Prize in Literature. Rich in history and unforgettable characters, the story follows the MacIveys, as they scrap out a living as dirt farmers, beginning in the mid-1800s, through the 1960s. Not hurricanes, the Civil War, freezes, or near-starvation can staunch the family’s resilience, ultimately allowing them to build a great fortune. This novel truly touches my heart as my family came from Georgia, with little in their pockets, in the early 20th century, seeking to fulfill their own dreams. This is writing at its best, steeped in rich and authentic detail, making this a novel that will live on through the ages.
A Land Remembered has been ranked #1 Best Florida Book eight times in annual polls conducted by Florida Monthly Magazine.
In this best-selling novel, Patrick Smith tells the story of three generations of the MacIveys, a Florida family who battle the hardships of the frontier to rise from a dirt-poor Cracker life to the wealth and standing of real estate tycoons. The story opens in 1858, when Tobias MacIvey arrives in the Florida wilderness to start a new life with his wife and infant son, and ends two generations later in 1968 with Solomon MacIvey, who realizes that the land…
