4.10 avg rating — 9,678 ratings

"The Secret Wisdom of the Earth transports you the mountain hollows of Kentucky, to a community torn between environmental degradation by of mountaintop removal or economic devastation by shutting down the mines that employ a significant portion of the community's residents."

3.87 avg rating — 40,090 ratings

"You can't search the term "rural noir" without coming across Winter's Bone. This is the Ozarks, where outsiders are not to be trusted and where even a knock on the door by distant kin is met with suspicion."

4.09 avg rating — 7,623 ratings

"Here's a town literally built on General Motors, where even the local radio station recognizes the shift change and where the price of groceries increases in line with GM salaries. Imagine the impact of that plant closing on the lives of the community's residents. A devastating read. "

really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 2,758 ratings

"S.M. Hulse's debut novel about a former prison guard returning to rural Montana to bury his wife."

really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 1,118 ratings

"Hulse's second novel to take place in rural Montana, where the town was built on the mining industry and broken on the same."

3.81 avg rating — 15,352 ratings

3.98 avg rating — 2,886 ratings

"Campbell's prose is simple, raw, and driven straight into the heart of the devastated economies of Rust Belt America, where jobs at the foundry or local auto plant have come and gone and where those who stay will face or do the unimaginable in order to survive."

3.91 avg rating — 3,358 ratings

"Ron Rash sets The World Made Straight in the heart of Appalachia. There's tobacco farmers, hidden pot fields, and pills for sale by a former high school teacher. Sprinkle in a little local Civil War history and you've got a hell of setting for this slow and worthy build of a novel. "After the world has its way with you a few years, it'll knock some of the strut out of you. If you live that long." "

3.37 avg rating — 694 ratings

3.88 avg rating — 15,666 ratings

4.17 avg rating — 246,141 ratings

3.68 avg rating — 2,185 ratings

4.03 avg rating — 4,721 ratings

3.93 avg rating — 3,381 ratings

3.89 avg rating — 16,523 ratings