4.10 avg rating — 9,753 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."

3.88 avg rating — 42,734 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 — 7,689 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 — 2,771 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 — 1,134 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 — 15,394 ratings

3.98 avg rating — 2,900 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 — 3,414 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." "

3.38 avg rating — 699 ratings

3.88 avg rating — 16,236 ratings

4.17 avg rating — 256,629 ratings

3.68 avg rating — 2,197 ratings

4.03 avg rating — 4,932 ratings

3.93 avg rating — 3,408 ratings

3.90 avg rating — 16,904 ratings