The Best Southern Books of the Year 2018

To buy: $26.95, amazon.com, indiebound.org

An American Marriage is Atlanta author Tayari Jones’ unforgettable fourth novel. It tells a poignant story about love, loss, and the aftershocks of a wrongful conviction, which has life-altering impacts for Celestial and Roy, a young couple with lives full of possibility before them.

Also by Tayari Jones: Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, Silver Sparrow

To buy: $18, amazon.com, indiebound.org

This essential collection from South Carolina-born poet Terrance Hayes reckons with deep personal, political, and moral realities through poetry that rings with the languages of love and grief. 

Also by Terrance Hayes: Lighthead, How to be Drawn, Wind in a Box, Hip Logic, Muscular Music

To buy: $26.99, amazon.com, indiebound.org

These engrossing stories by Tennessee writer Kevin Wilson are bursting with humor and heart, including the title tale, which is about a narcissistic rock star who moves home after an unexpected career development, and “Wildfire Johnny,” which involves a time-traveling razor.

Also by Kevin Wilson: The Family Fang, Perfect Little World, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories

To buy: $24.99, amazon.com, indiebound.org

In this important, previously unpublished work, the late writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston travels to Plateau, Alabama, in 1927 to interview Cudjo Lewis, the last living survivor of the Atlantic slave trade.

Also by Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, Mules and Men, Seraph on the Suwanee

To buy: $26.99, amazon.com, indiebound.org

James A. McLaughlin’s vivid debut novel Bearskin tells the story of a man working on a preserve in the Appalachian region of Virginia who becomes embroiled in conflict with poachers, locals, his bosses, and the lurking dangers of his past.

To buy: $27, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-Class Metropolis is an entertaining and kaleidoscopic look at the history of Oklahoma City, from the ups and downs of the city’s Thunder basketball team to the area’s unpredictable weather to the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.

To buy: $26, amazon.com, indiebound.org

The latest from Mississippi-born Catherine Lacey is a moving collection of stories that finds ordinary people grappling with complex questions surrounding love, grief, and meaning.

Also by Catherine Lacey: The Answers, Nobody Is Ever Missing

To buy: $26.95, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Anne Tyler’s Clock Dance is set in Baltimore, Maryland, where Willa Drake finds herself taking care of a stranger, a nine-year-old, and a dog, while simultaneously finding a second chance at the family she’s always wanted.

Also by Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread, Vinegar Girl, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Breathing Lessons

To buy: $40, amazon.com, indiebound.org

This new book is the first dual biography of Houston-based art collectors Dominique and John de Menil, who traveled the world collecting art and championing artists, and whose legacy includes such storied institutions as the Menil Collection and the Rothko Chapel.

To buy: $28, amazon.com, indiebound.org

This dynamic collection is a tribute to celebrated chef and author Edna Lewis, who published some of the country’s most-loved cookbooks and who helped defined Southern cooking as we know it. The book is edited by Sara B. Franklin and is comprised of essays by Mashama Bailey, Patricia E. Clark, John T. Edge, John T. Hill, Alice Waters, Caroline Randall Williams, and many more.

To buy: $27, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Lauren Groff’s latest is a marvelous collection of stories that takes its name from the state where the author resides. It’s composed of complex tales that flicker with wonder, danger, insight, and surprise.

Also by Lauren Groff: Fates and Furies, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Delicate Edible Birds: Stories

To buy: $24, amazon.com, indiebound.org

An affair is at the center of Fire Sermon by Georgia-based writer Jamie Quatro; it’s a meditation on longing, faith, and morality that is complicated by the complexities of desire and the bonds of loyalty.

Also by Jamie Quatro: I Want to Show You More

To buy: $25, amazon.com, indiebound.org

From poet and novelist Jennifer Clement comes the inventive, evocative new book Gun Love. It’s set in Central Florida, where a single mother and her daughter become dangerously familiar with the world of guns, gun violence, and gun trafficking.

Also by Jennifer Clement: Prayers for the Stolen, Widow Basquiat

To buy: $26, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Mississippi writer Kiese Laymon’s lyrical, layered new memoir delves deeply into the complexities of his experience and explores the myriad ways that family, love, violence, weight, race, and grief have touched and shaped his life.

Also by Kiese Laymon: Long Division, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America

To buy: $26, amazon.com, indiebound.org

In Monument, poet Natasha Trethewey—former U.S. Poet Laureate and former Poet Laureate of Mississippi—has written a powerful new collection that's also her first retrospective. It investigates memory, history, and the ways in which remembering—or choosing to forget—shapes individual experience as well as wider cultural narratives.

Also by Natasha Trethewey: Native Guard, Congregation, Bellocq’s Ophelia, Thrall, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast

To buy: $26.95, amazon.com, indiebound.org

An urgent road trip from Tennessee to Key West is at the heart of this hopeful novel by Kentucky writer Silas House. It’s a story about faith, morality, and acceptance that finds life changing rapidly for an evangelical preacher named Asher Sharp and his son, Justin.

Also by Silas House: Eli the Good, The Coal Tattoo, A Parchment of Leaves

To buy: $25, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Mississippi native Nick White’s sublime collection Sweet & Low is filled with compelling stories set across the Southern landscape that will make you look at the world a little closer and a little more creatively.

Also by Nick White: How to Survive a Summer

To buy: $26, amazon.com, indiebound.org

This new novel from Mississippi author Michael Farris Smith is set in the delta of his home, where a bare-knuckle fighter named Jack struggles to settle his scores, pay his debts, and find redemption in an unforgiving landscape.

Also by Michael Farris Smith: Desperation Road, Rivers, The Hands of Strangers

To buy: $27, amazon.com, indiebound.org

North Carolina writer David Joy sets his propulsive new novel The Line That Held Us in his home state. It’s the suspenseful story of a hunting accident, a cover-up, and a subsequent quest for revenge that puts friends Darl Moody and Calvin Hooper in grave danger.  

Also by David Joy: Where All Light Tends to Go, The Weight of This World

To buy: $26.95, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Tennessee writer William Gay’s posthumous novel is a wonder of Southern Gothic storytelling; it follows Billy Edgewater as he hitchhikes home to East Tennessee, encounters a dangerous cast of characters, and navigates the perils of the road at every mile.

Also by William Gay: I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, Provinces of Night, Twilight, The Long Home, Little Sister Death

To buy: $29.99, amazon.com, indiebound.org

In Unsheltered Barbara Kingsolver, a prolific writer born in Kentucky and now based in southern Appalachia, weaves a captivating dual narrative that connects two families through the home they share at different, but not dissimilar, moments in the precarious turns of history.

Also by Barbara Kingsolver: The Poisonwood Bible, The Bean Trees, Flight Behavior, Prodigal Summer, The Lacuna, Homeland and Other Stories

To buy: $25, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Hannah Pittard’s Visible Empire is a fictionalized account of a true event, the 1962 Air France aviation disaster at Orly, which caused the deaths of many Georgians and which left its mark on the city of Atlanta.

Also by Hannah Pittard: Listen to Me, The Fates Will Find Their Way, Reunion

To buy: $27, amazon.com, indiebound.org

The coast of North Carolina is the setting for Where the Crawdads Sing, a suspenseful coming-of-age story about a young woman growing up alone in the marshes who finds her solitude unexpectedly interrupted.

Also by Delia Owens: Cry of the Kalahari, The Eye of the Elephant, Secrets of the Savanna

To buy: $25, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Brandon Hobson’s Where the Dead Sit Talking is an absorbing novel set in the 1980s in rural Oklahoma, where a Cherokee teenager named Sequoyah is placed in foster care and forms a deep bond with Rosemary, a Native American teenager with a past as troubled as his own.

Also by Brandon Hobson: Desolation of Avenues Untold, Deep Ellum

To buy: $27, amazon.com, indiebound.org

This moving debut novel from Kentucky native Leesa Cross-Smith is told through three distinct voices. It’s set in present-day Louisville, where the lives of three people—Evi; Eamon, her husband; and Dalton, his adopted brother—are forever changed by a tragic loss.

Also by Leesa Cross-Smith: Every Kiss a War