When I started writing my debut novel, Underlake, I had two primary goals: to attain a lyrical, carefully crafted prose, and to create an atmosphere for the book that was immersive, multi-layered, and inextricable from the plot. So much fiction watches its characters and their interactions closely but forgets to place them somewhere in the world. The result can be scenes that feel flat and unfinished.
I grew up in Kentucky and in mostly rural environs, where a person’s possibilities can feel as limited as the borders of the known world: these subdivisions, this strip mall, that winding road swallowed into the hills. But as a child on family road trips, I traversed the country many times and gained a sense of how much one’s environment shapes the life they can envision for themselves. When I left the country for the first time at eighteen, the experience affirmed for me that learning about new cultures and being immersed in new environments—chain of strange syllables, scent of honeysuckle, mottled island offshore—could help me live many lives, many times over.
Books can help you do that too. Great books plunge you not just into human circumstance but into the environments that formed and colored and framed that circumstance. So much of what we feel and desire every day is influenced by the room we’re in, how sunny it is, whether we can smell the ocean or glimpse mountains through the fog. A character’s experience is inextricable from where they live: the economic possibilities or lack thereof, whether they feel trapped in a dark house or a small town, how much they can see before the horizon breaks.
I’ve compiled a list of eight books that feature dreamy landscapes whose atmosphere and texture is inextricable from the lives their characters lead. Each of these has taught me some new way there is to live.
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