Books like Lee Smith

Gertie Nevels has Ivy Rowe’s formidable mixture of practicality, artistic feeling, and resistance to the life others prescribe for her. Arnow begins with Gertie taking desperate action to save her child, immediately establishing both her competence and the cost of being the person everyone depends upon.

Long recognized as Arnow’s masterpiece and a classic of Appalachian literature, The Dollmaker understands that attachment to land is not picturesque nostalgia: it is livelihood, identity, and imaginative freedom. Its wartime displacement of a mountain family is rendered with fierce social insight, while Gertie’s woodcarving gives her inner life a powerful physical presence. Readers who cherished Ivy’s endurance without mistaking it for meekness should not miss Gertie.

Hannah Coulter speaks from old age, looking back over love, loss, farm work, and membership in a rural Kentucky community. Her voice has the same rare authority as Ivy Rowe’s: plainspoken but never plain, shaped by labor and sorrow, capable of turning an ordinary memory into something luminous.

Berry’s Port William novels have inspired unusually devoted readers, and Hannah Coulter is their finest entrance. Its deepest kinship with Fair and Tender Ladies lies in the dignity it grants a whole life—not only its dramatic ruptures, but meals, fields, marriages, absences, and the knowledge acquired by staying attentive. It is a brief novel with the emotional reach of a family history.

Carol Shields also asks how an apparently ordinary woman can tell the truth of her life—and what inevitably escapes the telling. Beginning with Daisy Goodwill’s birth, the novel builds her history through shifting voices, photographs, documents, and contradictory accounts. Like Ivy’s letters, this form makes omissions eloquent: what Daisy cannot say matters as much as what she records.

Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and Canada’s Governor General’s Award, The Stone Diaries earned its stature through warmth as well as formal brilliance. Shields is funny about domestic life, alert to women’s thwarted desires, and skeptical of any neat story imposed on a person. Anyone moved by the way Ivy creates herself in language will find Daisy’s elusive, many-sided life irresistible.