Best Damn Little-Known Novels

by

Kat Warren

My daddy was born on a scrappy ranch in the Okanogan Highlands of Washington State in the first decade of the last century. It’s from him I inherited a number of laudatory and/or reprehensible traits, such as, well, swearing, hence this damn fine list below.

It’s a commonly-heard refrain: “I just want to read a good novel.” There are tens of thousands terrific novels out there but some of the best run silent, below the radar, not much reviewed, not particularly promoted, not much discussed, hence little known. Here are some of those titles. All will satisfy anyone with an appetite for finest-kind fiction.

God’s Favorite by Lawrence Wright
If the author’s name rings a bell, it should. He won the 2007 Pulitzer for non-fiction (The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11) and writes for The New Yorker. His Al Qaeda book is excellent to be sure, yet Wright’s novel, God’s Favorite, is a special treat and a terrific read. In brief, a priest doubts his calling as dictator/drug smuggler Noriega (AKA Cara de Piña, which explains the cover) holes up in the Vatican embassy in Panama after the U.S. invasion known as “Just Cause.”

Breakfast with Scot by Michael Downing
Don’t you love a book that makes you laugh out loud? Lord, I do and this one does that in spades, or should I say, hearts? A gay couple in Cambridge (Mass., that is) blunders into parental obligation. The bright wit here keeps vinegar in the mix so there’s little twee and much humanity.

Burning Marguerite by Elizabeth Innes-Brown
This novel unfolds in surprising directions. It’s difficult not to spoil the story but it’s a multi-generational novel about a woman who raises her nephew; she has secrets having to do with why she left then returned to her island village off the coast of New England. She traveled far fetching up in New Orleans where she made a home for a time. Meanwhile, her nephew has an obligation to his aunt that will get him into all sorts of trouble, legal as well as defying convention, which may, in fact, be exactly what his aunt intended.

The Season of Open Water by Dawn Clifton Tripp
Set firmly on the coast of Massachusetts, this exceptionally fine novel covers a lot of time and tide—from rum-running during Prohibition with the mob to boat-making, early-in-the-century seal hunting, a doctor devastated by WWI, the young woman who recalls the doctor to life and more. Exceptional reading, an especially fine love story.

The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill
This one’s a different cup of tea, boy howdy. After all, how often do you dine at a steakhouse with a bull slicing the meat, eh? Toss in horns, the Lucky-U trailer park, car repair, a few classical Greek allusions and you’ve got a taste of the line-cook protagonist in Sherrill’s brilliant novel.

Jujitsu for Christ by Jack Butler
Set in Mississippi in the early 1960s, this novel is about race but so much more. It’s one of those books that leaves the reader richer in heart and mind. Bad paraphrasing, but I recall being drawn to this novel by the blurb brazenly emblazoned on its paperback cover, something to the effect that “only a brie-chewing Yankee sapsucker wouldn’t love this book.” Who could resist that?   

God’s Country by Percival Everett
Yeah, yeah, you don’t read westerns. Nobody reads westerns. Well, aren’t you all going to be sorry because this bitingly funny novel does some real interesting loop-dee-loops. Everett spoofs the genre which I happen to hold dear but he’s respectful so that’s ok. The protagonist is a black cowboy with a deadly draw not to mention a conscience that won’t quit much as he’d like it to. If you liked Charles Portis’ True Grit, then this one’s in your corral all saddled up.  If you haven’t read True Grit, put it on the to-be-read stack after Everett.

For Rouenna by Sigrid Nunez
This is the novel we wanted to read years ago but wasn’t to be found then. Now we have it and it’s better than we hoped. A nurse serving in Vietnam during the war comes home—and this is what happens. It’s a quiet book that’s very loud.

Canarino by Katherine Bucknell
I started to give away why I liked this novel so much but to do so would be to ruin it. From Paris to the posh Virginia countryside in the U.S., a rare and sophisticated tale is rendered here with wit aplenty and at least one surprise.

Winter Range by Claire Davis
A failing ranch in Montana, its starving cattle and horses, the small town nearby, its sheriff and his wife, their relatives and the populace thereabouts—this brilliant book braids the threads of their stories into one bang-up amazing culmination. In this novel, the weather is an omnipresent, overbearingly effective presence, even a character.

The Ice Chorus by Susan Stonich
It’s a rare novel that moves the reader from Mexico to Canada to Ireland but that’s what this one does with extraordinary grace and favor. It’s the story of a Canadian wife who accompanies her archeologist husband to Mexico where she falls in love and lust with a painter. She returns home where she dithers a bit before taking off to live solo in a seaside cottage in Ireland where she is saved in more ways than one.


Kat Warren is a corporate librarian in Northern California who lives with a fuchsia hybridist, their two elderly cats and too many books to count. Her preferred exercise workout is turning the pages of a good tome whilst guzzling champagne. She loves Bach (particularly the unaccompanied cello suites), beaches, books and a good bacchanal now and again. Kat can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it