Books like The Whole Town's Talking — picked by fans

Ree Dolly is seventeen, raising her little brothers because her mother is too mentally unwell to do it herself, while her meth-cooking father has gone missing. His disappearance will ruin her already impoverished family if Ree cannot figure out what has happened.

Woodrell's Ozarks are in the same territory as my own debut, in pretty much every way: geographically, culturally, and in terms of the drug epidemic that continues to destroy American communities, especially in the South. Ree and Honey would probably never meet. But the same forces shaped them both, and the same neglect threatens them.

This is the book I would assign as required reading for anyone who is interested in what my book is trying to do.

This is a short book of fiction whose main character I remember by name decades after first reading it: Robert Kincaid, a photographer, a traveler, going it alone.

I’ve thought back on this book while discovering, first-hand, that all sorts of great loves don’t always end in the happy-ever-after we might wish for. But we’ve been blessed to have experienced them nonetheless. His was a haunting dedication: "For the peregrines."

In contrast to his books about the Old West, McMurtry’s contemporary Westerns tell a more unvarnished truth. I read this book for the umpteenth time just prior to beginning my first novel, Where the Hurt Is. My book was a crime novel. McMurtry’s was a coming-of-age story. Nevertheless, his depiction of his book’s quasi-fictional Thalia, Texas rang so many bells and reminded me so much of the small Oklahoma towns where I grew up, I can’t deny being influenced by it.

At times, I would grow short of breath as I was reminded of parallel characters and events from my own childhood. Even today, the claustrophobia of Thalia and its characters’ fear of being unable to escape scares the crap out of me.

When I think of Maine, I think of mill towns. When I think of mill towns, I think of Empire Falls. And to consider Russo’s titular town is to consider what happens to a community when its once-lucrative mills are abandoned.

I have witnessed it repeatedly through the years, all around the state of Maine—first our mills go out of business, then the towns that grew around those mills gradually, inexorably decline. Russo captures this struggle, creating characters as real as the millworkers I grew up with.

He also emphasizes a strange thing that happens in these blue-collar communities: even though the people who live there know their town will never be as it once was, most of them still can’t bring themselves to leave. 

Who knew that the life of a prim and proper midwestern suburban housewife could be so riveting and moving? Written by a man (!) and told in vignettes that act like facets to a many-sided gem that is this novel, Mrs. Bridge is a mind-blowingly beautiful book that centers on the invisible forces of patriarchy that restrict a woman, wife, and mother.

Although this book is many years old, it is forever timely. With humor and clear, satisfying, and exquisite writing, this is a book that I return to often since, like a glittering jewel, it is surprising at every turn.

Let’s face it. Christianity has been used to support slavery, encourage white people to be racist, and send women back to the 1950s.

That’s why I found Jarod Roll’s Spirit of Rebellion refreshing and important. It was a good reminder that faith can also provide the moral courage necessary for change. It can unite people instead of dividing them.

I can’t imagine a place and time more disposed to racist divisions than rural Missouri in the late 19th century. Yet, poor white and Black farmers there found common ground as rebels against the emerging capitalist order. How? Through the Pentecostal revivals that swept the region in this same period. If that’s not a message of hope in these trying times, then I don’t know what is.

When I read this book several years ago, I was just starting out in my writing career, and I remember thinking, If only someday I could write like this! Lisa Wingate has a beautiful way of eliciting emotion and empathy, of creating scenes and situations so true-to-life that she never fails to draw me in. Like all her books, Tending Roses takes a deeply honest look at human relationships—the good, the bad, and the in-between—and always with an underlying current of faith. Kate’s situation may be different from my own, but I could still relate to her feelings and struggles, her questions and doubts. That resonance—that connection—is what makes any story memorable.

I love Lidie Newton. She is a newlywed who accompanies her abolitionist husband from Illinois to Kansas Territory, at a time when the territory is mired in partisan rage and violence. Lidie narrates the story, and her straightforward, often insightful accounts pulled me in immediately. I was right there with her as she forged her way through numerous exploits, some humorous, others heart-breaking. The story is populated with characters who are both colorful and believable, and I came away with a heightened understanding of the role played by events in Kansas and Missouri during the frightening months leading up to the Civil War.

Here's another amazing woman—angry, determined 18-year-old Adair—who travels through Missouri’s brutal Civil War landscape looking for her father. Jailed in St. Louis under horrid conditions for suspected Confederate sympathies, she brawls with a fellow prisoner, strategically worms her way into the prison matron’s good graces, then captures the heart of a Union interrogator who helps her escape.

I am not a horse person, but Jiles’s description of Adair’s relationship with her horse Whiskey is otherworldly and totally converted me. One nightmare scene follows another as Adair makes her way back to her family home, and I love the resourceful lies she concocts to save herself and Whiskey amid guerrilla warfare and martial law.

Beautiful language; Jiles is a poet, and it shows.

This is a very powerful book that takes the city of St. Louis as a case study to illustrate the amount of violence, discrimination, and inequities that have happened across a 300-year period, particularly with respect to race. 

Johnson develops the idea of racial capitalism throughout the book, and notes that “the red thread that runs through this entire book is the historical relationship between imperialism and anti-Blackness.” At the same time, the city has also been home to both communist and Black radical organizing into the 20th century. 

A highly interesting and important case study of American inequality and exploitation.