North Carolina Books: The Best Books Set in the Tar Heel State

Book Summary

Avery’s past includes a devasting period that she keeps a secret. She knows that she should be happy to have a fresh start with widow Jude, his two young sons, and his teenage daughter, Elle. However, when he proposes, Avery is wary that happy endings aren’t really possible.

An urgent phone call comes saying that she needs to return to her childhood home, a farm in the North Carolina mountains. This forces her to face her tragic history. While she intends to make this dreaded journey alone, she has a stowaway, Elle, who is grappling with the loss of her mother and the complicated emotions of first love. While plan A is for Elle to fly home to her father ASAP, she ends up joining Avery in the small farm town.

Will this trip be what they both need in order to move forward in life?

Book Summary

Book Lovers is about a literary agent named Nora. When Nora’s younger sister, Libby, begs her to take a month-long summer trip to a small town in North Carolina, she envisions all the possible romance novel tropes that could happen in her own life. Why couldn’t she run into a handsome country doctor and find her happily ever after?

Instead, Nora runs into Charlie, a brooding editor she has encountered several times back in the city. While neither of them is the ideal heroine or hero, they kept being thrown together in unlikely situations and must confront the stories they’d told themselves about who they are.

Book Summary

Young Kya, who was left to fend for herself in the North Carolina marsh in the 1950s, will steal your heart from the beginning.

Locals know Kya as the “Marsh Girl.” She lives away from other humans and has only attended one day of school, but finds companions in nature all around her. While traditional school was not a good fit, she is always eager to learn. Eventually, she finds a friend who agrees to help her read.

The book has a split timeline between Kya’s formative years in the 1950s and an incident in 1969. A handsome boy from town is found dead, and the locals immediately suspect Kya.

Book Summary

Ivy Hart lost her parents at just fifteen years old and was left to care for her aging grandmother, her mentally ill older sister, her nephew, and even the tenants on the family’s small tobacco farm. It’s too much for any teenager, but especially one who also struggles with her own epilepsy. Who will care for Ivy?

Jane Forrester takes a job as the new social worker for Grace County and quickly becomes invested in the lives of the residents she works with, including the Hart women. Maybe even too invested, according to her boss and her husband.

Soon, Jane begins to uncover some of the dark secrets of small-town life in rural North Carolina. A decades-long Eugenics sterilization program in the state sought to determine which people were fit to reproduce. Once Jane learns the truth, she must decide whether standing up for what she believes is right is worth the risk.

Book Summary

A Land More Kind Than Home is part family drama and part suspenseful mystery. In this case, the main character is Jess, who is very protective of his mute older brother, Christopher. Their mom is involved in church, but this isn’t a normal church and the boys aren’t allowed to go inside. 

When Christopher, who is called Stump, is caught snooping and sees something he isn’t supposed to, Jess is thrust into adulthood before he’s ready. Suddenly danger, evil, freedom, and deliverance are all within his grasp.

Book Summary

On the surface, Bright Leaf, North Carolina seems like a technicolor paradise. When Maddie Sykes arrives in this tobacco capital to assist in her aunt’s sewing business, she’s overwhelmed by the beauty and wealth of the region. War rations and shortages are clearly behind them.

However, when Maddie unexpectedly becomes the lead dressmaker, she’s soon spending time with the town’s most influential women. Although she assumes these wealthy ladies have it all, the truth is bleaker. Many are hiding struggles with their health. Could those struggles be related?

Book Summary

It’s October, the temperatures are dropping, and the leaves are changing in North Carolina. Claire Waverley has started a successful new venture, Waverley’s Candies. She loves the way her specialty products heal others, but along the way, she’s losing herself.

Sydney Waverley has also lost balance in her life as she’s become singularly focused on having a baby. When a mysterious stranger shows up and challenges the very heart of the Waverly family, each of them must make choices they have never confronted before. Along the way, romance is in the air.

Book Summary

Keaton needs a fresh start, so she jumps at the chance to travel to Beaufort, North Carolina to put her mom’s childhood home on the market. Keaton’s never seen the home, as her grandparents died in 1976, in a tragic car accident. When she arrives in Beaufort, she soon has more questions than answers, even with help from her charming next-door neighbor, his precocious ten-year-old son, and a flock of endearingly feisty town busybodies.

In a second timeline told through journal entries, we see the life of Keaton’s grandmother, Becks. For forty years, she’s been the best hostess in North Carolina, with locals and out-of-towners clamoring for invitations to her stunning historic home. But in 1976, she faced a major dilemma and was forced to make a decision she didn’t want to make.

Book Summary

We all know the names Wilbur and Orville Wright, but what about Katharine? She may just be one of the most important and overlooked women in history, and this historical fiction novel finally gives voice to her story.

Before becoming obsessed with flying, the Wright brothers jumped on the popular new fad of bicycle riding, opening a bike shop in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio. Repairing bikes led to tinkering and building, and eventually a new dream took shape. But their younger sister knew they couldn’t do it without her.

As the brothers began obsessing over blueprints and testing models on the beaches of North Carolina, Katharine became the mastermind behind the scenes. She sourced materials, managed communications, and kept the brothers focused on their goal even when it seemed that hope was lost.

When they finally achieved the first controlled, sustained flight, it resulted in both fame and fortune. The siblings traveled the world demonstrating their invention, training pilots, and building new models that could fly higher and further. But then, a tragedy tore the family apart and forced Katharine to make an impossible choice that would haunt her for the rest of her days.

Book Summary

For Mae’s whole life, her late father flew back to North Carolina each year for the annual Townsend family barbecue. She always dreamed of going with him and finally meeting the Black side of her family that looked like her, but a rift that she never understood always caused her father to leave her home.

With her father now gone and her wedding drawing closer, she feels more compelled than ever to meet finally meet the Townsends. When she learns that her paternal grandmother has passed away, she decides to head to North Carolina for the funeral.

When she arrives, she finds the Townsend family in turmoil. A long-standing grudge, a lost mac and cheese recipe, and a family barbecue heading for disaster are causing stress. Not willing to give up on her life-long dream, she’s determined to help them throw a party no one will ever forget—for better or worse.

Book Summary

If the Creek Don’t Rise is set in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina.

Sadie Blue quickly realizes that her marriage is a mistake, but doesn’t see a way out until a stranger arrives in town.

Some readers find the local dialect distracting or difficult, but once they are absorbed into the story find it hard to put down.

Book Summary

Ruby McTavish Callahan Woodward Miller Kenmore lived a life as large as her name implies. As a child, she was the victim of a famous kidnapping. As an adult, she married and was widowed four times over. By the end of her life, she was not only North Carolina’s richest woman but also its most notorious. When she died, she left everything to her adopted son, Camden, including her estate in the Blue Ridge Mountains, her nine-figure fortune, and her complicated legacy.

Cam wants nothing to do with the house or the money, so he rejects the inheritance and instead takes a teaching job in Colorado. There, he marries a woman named Jules, who is just as eager to escape her own messy past.

When his uncle dies a decade later, Cam finally returns home to North Carolina, only to be quickly reminded of all the reasons he left. Jules, however, thinks it’s finally time for Cam to claim everything that Ruby wanted him to have all those years before.

But they quickly learn that it’s not as simple as claiming the home and the money. Cam and Jules are quickly confronted with many rumors and questions about Ruby. What really happened to all of her husbands who died under mysterious circumstances? And how did she come to adopt Cam in the first place?

Book Summary

This non-fiction read tells the story of the Biltmore Estate, a spectacular 175,000-square-foot European-style estate on 125,000 acres of North Carolina wilderness, and the Vanderbilt family who built it. However, it wasn’t just a lavish home, it provided for the surrounding community. This meant that when fortunes shifted, it was important to save Biltmore for more than the Vanderbilt family.

Some readers find the book extremely compelling, while others say it was a more dry read. However, most agree that it’s an educational look at North Carolina history as the side stories in the book go beyond the estate.

Book Summary

When thirteen-year-old Jubie and her family, including three siblings, her mother, and the family’s black maid, Mary Luther, headed from North Carolina to Florida on vacation, she had no idea how the summer trip would change her life forever.

As the family drives further south, Jubie starts noticing more anti-integration signs and racial tension. Soon, her mother finds it more difficult to find a safe place for Mary Luther to use the restroom. But Jubie still never predicted the shocking turn their trip would take. She’s left confronting her parents’ failings and wondering where her own convictions lie.

Book Summary

Living in a beautiful home with a white picket fence in North Carolina, teenager Lorraine seems to have the perfect life. She has a wonderful boyfriend, but she has big ambitions and dreams of more for her life.

When Lorraine ends up pregnant, her family sends her away to a maternity home in order to shield themselves from the “shame.” But what is supposed to be a secluded safe haven is instead a house of dark secrets and suffocating rules.

As Lorraine begins to piece together a new vision for her future, she has to decide if she can fight against those who plan to take her child away or whether to bend to the rules of society.

Book Summary

Esme feels like she’s failing. Fired from her NYC publishing job, divorced, and with piles of unfinished manuscripts in her broken down car, she returns home to Asheville, North Carolina.

Before she died, her late grandmother Adele had begged Esme to come home. Now that she’s back, she discovers that the family’s once-charming lakeside retreat is quickly falling into financial ruin. Determined to help her grandfather save it, with help from her estranged mother and a travelling chef.

While cleaning out the attic, Esme discovers a trove of museum-worthy quilts and begins to learn about a chapter of her grandmother’s life she knew nothing about.

This story is told from the point of view of both grandmother and granddaughter, alternating between the past and present timelines.

Book Summary

This dual-timeline novel is set in Nags Head, North Carolina. In the present day timeline, Ivy has inherited a beachfront cottage from her grandmother. However, returning home to Nags Head means facing those who betrayed her. To avoid that, she hopes to clean up the cottage’s clutter, sell it, and return to New York. However, something happens that leads her to believe the house is full of secrets.

In the 1950 timeline, you’ll follow 12-year-old Ruth (Ivy’s grandmother). She works at her parent’s small resort, and between cleaning rooms, she’s always up for an adventure with her cousin Tally. This summer is full of surprises, like a shipwreck uncovered during a storm and the arrival of a new entertainer for the resort, the beautiful Carlotta.

The two timelines are woven together as you slowly learn how the events of the 1950 summer still affect Ivy today.

Book Summary

At the age of 17, Samuel Sooleymon, got the chance of a lifetime. He and his South Sudanese teammates took a trip to the United States to play in a basketball tournament. It was his first time away from home, his first time on an airplane, and a dream opportunity to be seen by scouts and college coaches.

During the tournament, a civil war breaks out back in South Sudan, and Samuel’s village is attacked. His father was killed, his sister is missing, and the rest of his family is in a refugee camp. Samuel is desperate to get home, but it’s not possible.

Despite his speed and vertical leap, his game needs a lot of work and the American coaches aren’t impressed. However, given the circumstances, the coach of North Carolina Central offers him a scholarship. Samuel moves to Durham and joins the team, prepared to sit out his freshman season. He’s determined to improve, shooting baskets in an empty gym at dawn each morning. If he gets called off the bench, can success help him to save his family?

Book Summary

Azalea “Knot” Centre loves moonshine, literature, and the company of men. But in the early 1940s, living in the rural African American town of West Mills, North Carolina, this lifestyle is not held in high regard. In her 20s, Knot discovers that she’s pregnant and that her father has left town for the military.

Ostracized by her relatives and cut off from her hometown, Knot is determined to go it alone. However, her neighbor, Otis Lee, is committed to helping Knot because he could not help his own sister.

This is a story of family, friendship, love, and redemption spanning four decades.

Book Summary

True crime podcaster Rachel has become someone that families turn to as a last hope when the authorities haven’t been able to solve their case. Her latest season is focused on a rape trial in a small town, where the town’s star athlete has been accused of attacking the police chief’s granddaughter. 

As Rachel heads to the town to conduct her own investigation, a mysterious note appears on her windshield begging for help with something that happened 25 years earlier. A young girl, Jenny, reportedly drown, but the person leaving the notes insists that she was murdered. As more notes appear, Rachel is unsettled but also intrigued as the past and present of this small town begin to collide.

Book Summary

Ninety-one-year-old Ira crashed his car into an embankment. He’s injured, stranded, and struggling to retain consciousness. Suddenly, he sees his wife Ruth beside him. He knows she can’t really be there because she passed away nine years earlier, but her presence is a comfort to him as she keeps him alert with stories of their life together. He recalls both the joyful and sorrowful moments, from how they met and the art they collected to the dark days of WWII.

A few miles away, Sophia meets a young cowboy at a local rodeo. Luke has little in common with the frat boys she’s met during her four years at Wake Forest College. She thought she had her future planned out, but as she gets to know Luke and is introduced to his daily life and death world, she begins imagining a whole different future. But Luke is keeping a secret.

Book Summary

Mitford is a charming village and the home of Father Tim, a bachelor rector. Although the town is lovely and full of interesting characters, Father Tim is lonely. Throughout the series, you’ll see his daily misadventures in life and, eventually, love.

This beautiful series is the perfect pick if you like clean fiction or are just in the mood for pleasant, heart-warming, great stories. The books have such a following that the author has opened The Mitford Museum in her hometown.

Book Summary

Spring weddings are fun, unless perhaps it’s your ex-husband getting married! Annajane thinks she has totally moved on, but seeing Mason at his wedding makes her reconsider. But, her unexpected feelings aren’t the only secret in this small town.

Book Summary

This beachside cozy mystery series is set in the town of Charm, North Carolina on the Outer Banks. Everly Swan has recently returned to her hometown following a breakup and opened a sweet tea shop and cafe on the beach.

In the first book in the series, Live and Let Chai, a grumpy customer is found dead on the boardwalk with one of her tea jars lying nearby. When the autopsy says he was poisoned, Everly fights to prove that she didn’t do it, but the townspeople turn their backs on her. Between attacks on her and her business and a too-handsome detective, Everly is in trouble.