KayeGibbons

Ellen Foster

Ellen is an old woman in a child’s body; her frail, unhappy mother dies, her abusive father alternately neglects her and makes advances on her, and she is shuttled from one uncaring relative’s home to another before she finally takes matters into her own hands and finds herself a place to belong.

Rod Gragg

Covered With Glory

The unforgettable story of the 26th North Carolina Infantry at the Battle of Gettysburg. In July 1863 the regiment’s eight-hundred-plus troops–young men from North Carolina’s mountains, farmlands, and hamlets–were thrust into the firestorm of Gettysburg, the greatest battle ever fought in North America.

John Grisham

A Painted House

In rural Arkansas in 1952, it’s harvest time on the Chandler farm, and the family has hired a crew of migrant Mexicans and “hill people”to pick 80 acres of cotton. A certain camaraderie pervades this bucolic dream team. But it’s backbreaking work, particularly for the 7-year-old narrator, Luke.

Allan Gurganus

Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

Lucy Marsden married at the turn of the last century, when she was fifteen and her husband was fifty. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the “War for Southern Independence”, Lucy became a “veteran of the veteran” with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood.

The Mitford Years
(4 volume set)
At Home in Mitford
A Light in the Window
These High, Green Hills
Out to Canaan

Welcome to Mitford, North Carolina, the small mountain town at the center of Jan Karon’s [first four] bestselling novels about rector Father Tim and the heartwarming cast of characters surrounding him.

Scotti Kent

It Happened in North Carolina

From the search for a lost colony to the filming of a television drama in Wilmington, the twenty-seven episodes presented in It Happened in North Carolina take readers of all ages on a lively tour through the history of the Old North State. Get the inside story on such events as the North Carolina gold rush, the Wright brothers’ first real flight, a misplaced Rose Bowl game, and the case of the telltale laundry ticket.

Barbara Kingsolver

Prodigal Summer

The setting is an isolated pocket of southern Appalachia, in a wrinkle on the map that lies between farms and wildness. Kingsolver recounts not one but three intricate stories.

Harper Lee

To Kill A Mockingbird

Set in the small Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Depression, To Kill a Mockingbird follows three years in the life of 8-year-old Scout Finch, her brother, Jem, and their father, Atticus.

Robert Morgan

Gap Creek

…opens with one wrenching death and ends with another. In between, this novel of turn-of-the-century Appalachian life works in fire, flood, swindlers, sickness, and starvation–a truly biblical assortment of plagues, all visited on the sturdy shoulders of 17-year-old Julie Harmon.

Raised on Radio

With just the quote of a jingle or a telling announcer’s phrase, Gerald Nachman evokes a whole era and an important segment of our social history.

T. R. Pearson

A Short History of a Small Place

Young Louis Benfield tells the story of his tiny little North Carolina town. There is the looniness of his family, the town of characters, the charm and naviete that gives us a world unknown, and stories that deserve to be told about how it is to grow up a certain kind of way.

T. R. Pearson

The Last of How It Was

Louis Benfield’s stories ramble like a footpath through the North Carolina hills, with sentences that continue for whole paragraphs and paragraphs that continue for pages, creating a style that seems incomprehensible on the page but which reveals its meaning when read aloud, in all its Southern baroque glory.

Ron Rash

The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth and other stories from Cliffside, North Carolina

A reader writes: I am familiar with the area known as Cliffside; and in Ron Rash’s book, I found it easy to relate to the instances and the people that are described. The stories are humorous, and the book is a good one to pick up after a long day at the mill.

Run With the Horsemen

Stories rich with Southern culture of a bright, sensitive lad growing up on farm in Georgia during the Depression.

Dori Sanders

Clover

Clover is a 10-year old black girl from a small town in South Carolina, whose life changes forever when her father dies and she is forced to forge a new relationship with the white stepmother she hardly knows.

[Dori Sanders live and writes in York County, S.C.]

The Devil’s Dream

…traces the roots of an extended, country-western “singing”’ family from an 1830’s hollow to contemporary Nashville.

Lee Smith

Fair and Tender Ladies

Ivy Rowe may not have much education, but her thoughts are classic, and her experiences are fascinating. Born near the turn of the century in the Virginia Mountains, Ivy’s story is told completely through letters she is forever writing, and that you will forever want to read….

Lee Smith

Family Linen

A childhood memory re-experienced, a funeral that brings about a family reunion, and the excavation of a swimming pool on the site of an old well, uncover family secrets and air the dirty linen in this behind-the-scenes look at life and family, memory and forgetfulness, anger and forgiveness in a small Southern town.

Bailey White

Mama Makes Up Her Mind

Bailey White–whose accounts of Southern eccentricity have enchanted millions of listeners to National Public Radio–offers a humorous, touching, story-filled memoir of her home in south Georgia.