A Literary Trip Across America: Books Set in Each State

An indie musician reeling from tragedy and a public breakdown reconnects with her father on a weeklong Alaskan cruise in “a pitch-perfect story about the ways we recover love in the strangest places” (Rebecca Serle, author of In Five Years).

The bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife returns with “a bracingly epic and imaginatively mythic journey across the American West” (Entertainment Weekly). Mythical, lyrical, and sweeping in scope, Inland is grounded in true but little-known history. It showcases all of Téa Obreht’s talents as a writer, as she subverts and reimagines the myths of the American West, making them entirely — and unforgettably — her own.

A young woman comes to Bigelow, Arkansas, to start over, far from her haunting past. Sugar moves next door to Pearl, who is still grieving for the daughter who was murdered fifteen years before. Over sweet-potato pie, an unlikely friendship begins, transforming both women’s lives — and the life of an entire town.  

An electric debut novel set against the twilight of the American gold rush, two siblings are on the run in an unforgiving landscape — trying not just to survive but to find a home. Both epic and intimate, blending Chinese symbolism and reimagined history with fiercely original language and storytelling, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a haunting adventure story, an unforgettable sibling story, and the announcement of a stunning new voice in literature. 

A “dazzling, cinematic, intimate, lyrical” (Roxane Gay) epic of betrayal, love, and fate that spans five generations of an Indigenous Chicano family in the American West, from the author of the National Book Award finalist Sabrina & Corina. 

 On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling.

A stunning novel of hopes and dreams, guilt and love — a book that offers a resonant new definition of what it means to be American and “illuminates the lives behind the current debates about Latino immigration” (The New York Times Book Review).

In 1935 three women are forever changed when one of the most powerful hurricanes in history barrels toward the Florida Keys. Over the course of the weekend, the women’s paths cross unexpectedly, and the danger swirling around them is matched only by the terrifying force of the deadly storm threatening the Keys.

A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. It broke the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, narrating the lives of women through their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery. Deeply compassionate and beautifully imagined, Alice Walker’s epic carries readers on a spirit-affirming journey towards redemption and love. 

Elegant, brutal, and profound — this magnificent debut captures the grit and glory of modern Hawai’i with breathtaking force and accuracy. Exploring the deep tensions between local and tourist, tradition and expectation, façade and authentic self, This Is Paradise provides an unforgettable portrait of life as it’s truly being lived on Maui, Oahu, Kaua’i, and the Big Island. 

The first book of the smash-hit Wayward Pines trilogy — from the New York Times bestselling author of Dark Matter, Recursion, and Upgrade — is at once a brilliant mystery tale and the first step into a genre-bending saga of suspense, science fiction, and horror. 

The first book in a new culinary cozy series full of sharp humor and delectable dishes — one that might just be a killer…

An online obituary writer. A young mother with a dark secret. A woman waging a solo campaign against rodents — neighbors, separated only by the thin walls of a low-cost housing complex in the once bustling industrial center of Vacca Vale, Indiana. The Rabbit Hutch is a savagely beautiful and bitingly funny snapshot of contemporary America, a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and longing, entrapment, and, ultimately, freedom. 

The Booker Prize finalist and widely acclaimed author of Real Life and Filthy Animals returns with a deeply involving new novel of young men and women at a crossroads. In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront, and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery. As each prepares for an uncertain future, the group heads to a cabin to bid goodbye to their former lives — a moment of reckoning that leaves each of them irrevocably altered. 

When a group of social activists arrives in a small town, the lives and beliefs of residents and outsiders alike are upended, in this wry, embracing novel. Told with warmth and wit, Under the Rainbow is a poignant, hopeful articulation of our complicated humanity that reminds us we are more alike than we’d like to admit. 

An indelible love story about two very different people navigating the entanglements of class and identity and coming of age in an America coming apart at the seams — this is “an extraordinary debut about the ties that bind families together and tear them apart across generations” (Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House). 

A captivating novel about an immigrant Vietnamese family who settles in New Orleans and struggles to remain connected to one another as their lives are inextricably reshaped. This stunning debut is “vast in scale and ambition, while luscious and inviting … in its intimacy” (The New York Times Book Review). 

At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her. As the townspeople grapple with their problems, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life — sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition — its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires. 

All’s faire in love and war for two sworn enemies who indulge in a harmless flirtation in a laugh-out-loud rom-com from debut author Jen DeLuca. 

The Owens sisters confront the challenges of life and love in this bewitching novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Rules of Magic, Magic Lessons, and The Book of Magic. 

 A romance writer who no longer believes in love and a literary writer stuck in a rut engage in a summer-long challenge that may just upend everything they believe about happily ever afters.

A haunting and unforgettable novel set in World War II-era America. Powerful and wholly original, Prudence is a story of desire, loss, and the search for connection in a riven world; of race and class in a supposedly more innocent era. Most profoundly, it’s about the secrets we choose to keep, the ones we can’t help telling, and whom — and how — we’re supposed to love. 

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Goldfinch comes an utterly riveting novel set in Mississippi of childhood, innocence, and evil. Filled with hairpin turns of plot and “a bustling, ridiculous humanity worthy of Dickens” (The New York Times Book Review), The Little Friend is a work of myriad enchantments by a writer of prodigious talent. 

The “mercilessly entertaining” (Vanity Fair) instant classic “about the nature of identity and the terrible secrets that can survive and thrive in even the most intimate relationships” (Time). 

Blue skies, empty land — and enough wide-open space to hide a horrifying secret. A woman with a past, a mysterious trunk, a town on the edge of nowhere, and an “absorbing, powerful” (BuzzFeed) new vision of the American West, from the award-winning author of The Changeling.

Ántonia Shimerda is the daughter of Bohemian immigrant parents struggling with the oceanic loneliness of life on the Nebraska prairie. Through the eyes of Jim Burden, her tutor and disappointed admirer, we follow Ántonia from farm to town as she survives hardships both natural and human, from poverty to a failed romance — and not only survives, but triumphs.

Ruby’s life glitters with success, but she still must conquer her tragic past and discover what love really looks like. With her uncanny understanding of the hidden lives of women, Elizabeth J. Church captures the iconic extravagance of an era and the bravery of a woman who blazes her own path to freedom. 

In I Have Some Questions for You, award-winning author Rebecca Makkai has crafted her most irresistible novel yet: a stirring investigation into collective memory and a deeply felt examination of one woman’s reckoning with her past, with a transfixing mystery at its heart. Timely, hypnotic, and populated with a cast of unforgettable characters, I Have Some Questions for You is at once a compulsive page-turner and a literary triumph.

The author of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret takes us back to the 1950s and introduces us to the town where she herself grew up, where a community is left reeling after a real-life tragedy when a series of airplanes fell out of the sky.

With depth, heart, and agility, Mira Jacob takes us on a deftly plotted journey that ranges from 1970s India to suburban 1980s New Mexico to Seattle during the dot.com boom. The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing is an epic, irreverent testimony to the bonds of love, the pull of hope, and the power of making peace with life’s uncertainties.

Told through the eyes of Tish, a 19-year-old girl, in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin’s story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions – affection, despair, and hope. In a love story that evokes the blues, where passion and sadness are inevitably intertwined, Baldwin has created two characters so alive and profoundly realized that they are unforgettably ingrained in the American psyche.

The #1 New York Times bestselling worldwide sensation with more than 15 million copies sold, Where the Crawdads Sing is at once an exquisite ode to the natural world, a heartbreaking coming-of-age story, and a surprising tale of possible murder. Delia Owens reminds us that we are forever shaped by the children we once were, and that we are all subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.

Inspired by the lore of her Sioux heritage, this “captivating” (New York Times Book Review) critically-acclaimed novel from Susan Power weaves the stories of the old and the young, of broken families, romantic rivals, men and women in love and at war…

From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner — a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtly and grace.

As an archeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Syd Walker spends her days trying to protect the land’s indigenous past. While Syd is dedicated to her job, she’s haunted by a night of violence she barely escaped in her Oklahoma hometown 15 years ago. When a skull is found near the crime scene of her youth, just as her sister, Emma Lou, vanishes, Syd knows she must return home. She refuses to let her sister’s disappearance, or the remains, go ignored — as so often happens in cases of missing Native women. But not everyone is glad to have Syd home, and she can feel the crosshairs on her. Still, the deeper Syd digs, the more she uncovers about a string of missing indigenous women cases going back decades.

Here is the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a circus-geek family whose matriarch and patriarch have bred their own exhibit of human oddities — with the help of amphetamines, arsenic, and radioisotopes. Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same. 

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community — heaven and earth — that sustain us.

From the award-winning, bestselling author of When I Was Puerto Rican, a powerful novel of family, race, faith, sex, and disaster that moves between Puerto Rico and the Bronx, revealing the lives and loves of five women and the secret that binds them together. 

A classic tale of a man, a boat, and a storm, Spartina is the lyrical and compassionate story of Dick Pierce, a commercial fisherman along the shores of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay. Pierce’s one great passion, a fifty-foot fishing boat called Spartina, lies unfinished in his backyard. Determined to get the funds he needs to buy her engine, he finds himself taking a foolish, dangerous risk. Moving and poetic, Spartina is a masterful story of one man’s ongoing struggle to find his place in the world.

The women who spent their childhood summers in a small southern town discover it harbors secrets as lush as the marshes that surround it…

From the author of Pretty as a Picture, a sensational thriller featuring an unforgettable heroine who just might have murdered her mother…

A spellbinding debut novel tracing three generations of a Southern Black family and one daughter’s discovery that she has the power to change her family’s legacy.

Set in the city of Houston, a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America, Bryan Washington’s brilliant, viscerally drawn world vibrates with energy, wit, raw power, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot explores trust and love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.

In this affecting narrative, a defining masterpiece by the “dean of Western writers” (The New York Times), Wallace Stegner portrays more than three decades in the life of the Mason family as they struggle to survive during the lean years of the early twentieth century.

The New York Times bestselling author of The Invited will shock you with a simmering psychological thriller about ghostly secrets, dark choices, and the unbreakable bond between mothers and daughters.

The mesmerizing English debut from the bestselling author of Meddling Kids — what begins as a gothic ghost story soon evolves into a wickedly twisted treasure hunt.

Set during one of the most conflicted and volatile times in American history, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is an extraordinary story of commitment and enduring hope. In two unforgettable characters, Jamie Ford has created a duo whose story teaches us of the power of forgiveness and the human heart.

A D.C. philanthropist suspects that her seemingly perfect employee is secretly plotting to steal her husband, her reputation — even her life — in this seductive novel of psychological suspense from the internationally bestselling author of The Last Mrs. Parrish.

From the bestselling, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, a novel that is “funny and wise and sumptuously written” (Jonathan Franzen, The New York Times Book Review).

A Wisconsin bookstore owner and cryptozoologist is asked to investigate a series of deaths that just might be proof of a fabled lake monster in this first installment of a new mystery series by USA Today bestselling author Annelise Ryan.

From the two-time Booker Prize finalist Sebastian Barry, “a master storyteller” (Wall Street Journal) and author of Old God’s Time, a powerful chronicle of duty and family set against the American Indian and Civil Wars.