Brace your shelves!
We’re celebrating West Virginia’s independent bookstores, so here’s a shopping list to take when you visit them. We reached out to friends and readers across the state asking for titles to include—and then we got to pare down a much-too-long list of really good books. Our final list includes must-reads, lesser-known works by acclaimed authors, critical histories, the stories behind Mountain State icons, and perspectives that have reshaped our understanding of West Virginia. Some of you will lament the omission of this author or that book. Fair enough—narrowing our list to 51 titles led to some spirited debate among us. Avid readers know that’s part of the fun!
Buy these books through your local independent bookstore or check them out of your public library, but then don’t stop—use our list to inspire your literary ramblings through these West Virginia hills.
Fiction, including historical fiction
- Allegheny Front by Matthew Neill Null
- The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart by M. Glenn Taylor
- Crum by Lee Maynard
- Dogs of God by Pinckney Benedict
- Follow the River by James Alexander Thom
- A Killing in the Hills by Julia Keller
- Life in the Iron Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis
- The Mothman Prophecies by John Keel
- The Night of the Hunter by Davis Grubb
- Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips
- O Beulah Land by Mary Lee Settle
- Potted Meat by Steven Dunn
- Rednecks by Taylor Brown
- Snakehunter by Chuck Kinder
- The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake by Breece D’J Pancake
- Storming Heaven by Denise Giardina
- Strange as This Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake
- Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries by Melville Davisson Post
Nonfiction, including memoir
- Afflicting the Comfortable: Journalism and Politics in West Virginia by Thomas F. Stafford
- Another Appalachia: Coming up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place by Neema Avashia
- Black Huntington: An Appalachian Story by Cicero M. Fain III
- The Buffalo Creek Disaster: The Story of the Survivors’ Unprecedented Lawsuit by Gerald M. Stern
- Colored People by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
- Crapalachia: A Biography of Place by Scott McClanahan
- Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight Against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic by Eric Eyre
- The Devil is Here in These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom by James Green
- Don’t Tell’em You’re Cold: A Memoir of Poverty and Resilience by Katherine Manley
- The Exile by Pearl S. Buck
- The Feud: The Hatfields and McCoys, The True Story by Dean King
- The Fifth Border State: Slavery, Emancipation, and the Formation of West Virginia, 1829–1872 by Scott MacKenzie
- The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
- The Great Wildcatter: The Story of Mike Benedum by Sam T. Mallison
- Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains by Cassie Chambers
- Making Our Future by Emily Hilliard
- Removing Mountains: Extracting Nature and Identity in the Appalachian Coalfields by Rebecca R. Scott
- Rocket Boys by Homer H. Hickam Jr.
- So Much to be Angry About by Shaun Slifer
- They’ll Cut Off Your Project: A Mingo County Chronicle by Huey Perry
- Transforming the Appalachian Countryside: Railroads, Deforestation, and Social Change in West Virginia, 1880–1920 by Ronald L. Lewis
- What You’re Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte
- Witches, Ghosts, and Signs: Folklore of the Southern Appalachians by Patrick W. Gainer
Poetry
- All That Feeds Us: The West Virginia Poems by Marc Harshman
- The Book of the Dead by Muriel Rukeyser
- The Logan Topographies by Alena Hairston
- Vivid Companion by Irene McKinney
- Gauley Mountain: A History in Verse by Louise McNeill
For Kids
- Counting on Katherine: How Katherine Johnson Saved Apollo 13 by Helaine Becker, illustrated by Dow Phumiruk
- John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads adapted and illustrated by Christopher Canyon
- The King of Little Things by Bil Lepp, illustrated by David T. Wenzel
- Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
- When I Was Young in the Mountains by Cynthia Rylant, illustrated by Diane Goode
5 Books You Didn’t Know Were Set in West Virginia
1632
Eric Flint
Dropped down in Europe’s Thirty Years’ War, the coal mining town of Grantville, West Virginia—based on Mannington—changes history. The first book in the alternate history 1632 series.
The Good Lord Bird
James McBride
When abolitionist John Brown argues with a slaveholder in the Kansas Territory, an enslaved boy disguises himself as a girl and travels with Brown all the way to the raid at Harpers Ferry.
Too Many Cooks
Rex Stout
Jealousy and murder at a gathering of the greatest chefs in the world, at the Kanawha Spa. Gourmet cook, keynote speaker, and detective Nero Wolfe has to solve the crime to save himself.
Sleeping Beauties
Stephen King and Owen King
Dooling, West Virginia, is ground zero for the aurora flu: When women fall asleep, they become cocooned in a waxy gauze. All but one woman. Who is she? Will the men survive?
Zero Day
David Baldacci
When Colonel Matthew Reynolds and his family are murdered in Drake, West Virginia, U.S. Army investigator John Puller works with a local homicide detective—and the body count rises.
READ MORE ARTICLES FROM WV LIVING’S FALL 2024 ISSUE
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