When I was younger and hungry for escape, I was naively surprised to learn that over a third of Americans have never moved away from their hometowns (based on data from 2008, anyway). If you include people who never leave their home state, that percentage jumps to over half of Americans. Time has humbled me – I now live in my husband’s hometown, and increasingly miss my own, many hundreds of miles away.
Considering how many people stick close to their hometowns, it’s amazing what a powerful pull the idea of return has on us. The idea of leaving and then coming back, either triumphantly or in disgrace, either out of obligation or nostalgia, is one that has an enduring hold on our imaginations.
When I sat down to write The Wonder State, I focused, particularly, on the ways a “return to your hometown” story changes based on genre. In the hands of a thriller writer, characters are dragged home against their will, worried about unburied secrets. Their hometowns are places they’ve grown beyond, scratching and clawing their way to the top, and being pulled back threatens every shiny success they’ve hoarded.
In romance, on the other hand, hometowns typically represent familiarity and belonging. A place where you come home and realize that you left the best parts of yourself behind, just waiting for you. Long-buried secrets are less likely to involve murder, more apt to be about long-simmering flames or youthful rivalries transforming, finally, into adult tenderness.
I wanted to play in the space between the thorniness of thrillers and the sweetness of romance. What about a story where your hometown has a lure over you, but it’s not entirely positive? What if returning to the scene of the crime is both a curse and, maybe, a gift?
In honor of this, I’ve collected nine favorite novels about protagonists going back home – both thrillers and more lighthearted stories.
Unlikely Animals by Annie Hartnett
Emma Starling comes home to New Hampshire, ostensibly to look after her ailing father, but also because she’s feeling rudderless – hardly the success story her small town expects her to be. Hartnett uses her warm sense of humor to straddle the line between showing Everton as a town hindered by addiction and celebrating the complexity of the people who live there. Readers even meet the people who die in Everton, a Greek chorus from beyond the grave. Emma’s reckoning with her “unused” potential triggers some beautifully philosophical moments. By the end, I found myself almost wanting to live in this town. Or at least visit.
Whiteout Conditions by Tariq Shah
A funeral serves as the catalyst in this poetic, unapologetic debut about a young man returning to his snowy Chicago-adjacent hometown. But while many stories about hometown funerals deal in gentleness, Shah doesn’t pull back from an intense, painful approach to loved ones’ deaths. Ant, the protagonist, makes himself as blank as the cold landscape, loathe to admit how much the various losses in his life have wounded him. The losses spread even to buildings … Ant learns that his childhood home no longer exists, a particular kind of pain that I personally relate to. Returning to your hometown sometimes means reckoning with heartbreaking changes, whole structures now existing only in memory.
The Good Ones by Polly Stewart
The death of Nicola’s mother sends her back to her Appalachian hometown, intending to sell her mother’s house and swiftly depart again. But the town is irrevocably haunted by Nicola’s previous best friend, Lauren, who went missing under mysterious circumstances. And, as it turns out, the town is haunted by past versions of Nicola, too. In her atmospheric thriller, Stewart deftly explores the ways that our understanding of our younger selves is clouded by the stories we tell, and that others may remember events from entirely different angles.
Jackal by Erin E. Adams
It’s not always loss that triggers a character’s homegoing. Sometimes it’s a celebration of new beginnings … like a friend’s wedding. Don’t be fooled by the nuptials, though, because Adams’ chilling novel is pure horror. Liz’s relationship to her Rust Belt hometown has always been fraught: as one of the few Black residents of the town, she’s always felt more like a visitor. Plus, there have been too many traumatic deaths in the town, always involving Black girls, never receiving the attention they deserve. Adams doesn’t shy away from the ways racism and classism have robbed Liz of belonging.
So We Meet Again by Suzanne Park
In this thoughtful rom-com, Jessie has made good in the challenging field of investment banking, and it seems that she’s left her old life and her interfering parents behind. But even after building her dream life, Jessie runs headlong into the ugliness of the industry, and winds up heartbroken and aimless, right back where she started – in her old bedroom, with her parents hovering. Park takes a scenario most of us would dread and turns it into something funny, comforting, and empowering instead. We should all be so lucky to arrive back in our childhood homes and realize that it’s exactly where we can thrive.
The Dead Romantics by Tara Conklin
Being drawn back by a loved one’s death is a recurring death in return-to-hometown stories, and what’s more painfully relatable than having your adult life shaken up by a loss? In Conklin’s sweetly morbid romance, Florence is a ghostwriter who also quite literally communes with ghosts. Her father’s death requires Florence to plan an elaborate funeral, and along the way, she’s also slowly getting back in touch with her stifled dreams and reigniting her relationship with surviving family members. For a book about ghosts, this one is also full of life, exploring the ways a return can resurrect your focus.
A Madness of Sunshine by Nalini Singh
This aptly named thriller takes place in New Zealand, in a town with endless natural beauty but also the creeping dangers of a small town that can turn a blind eye to poverty and abuse. Anahera has escaped, and she swears she won’t ever return to her hometown’s old wounds. But a death sends her back – not a death in her hometown, in this case, but her husband’s funeral in London. Once she’s flung into her past, Anahera realizes she can potentially help a young woman who’s gone missing, and at the same time solve a long-ago mystery. Even if hometowns aren’t welcome refuges, sometimes your presence there is a necessary piece of a puzzle.
THE FAMILY FANG
The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson
In Wilson’s wryly dark comedy, Annie and Buster, adult siblings, watch their lives fall apart. They come home to the state of Tennessee, and to parents who stray far beyond the usual level of familial dysfunction: their parents are performance artists who treat their offspring less as children and more as cast members in chaotic, unpredictable stunts. Pretty much everyone has grievances with their parents, plus a primal need to question the stories we absorbed as children. But in Wilson’s world, going back to the source of childhood trauma has results as sharp as the family’s surname suggests.
Cottonmouths by Kelly J. Ford
Arkansan-born Ford explores the painfulness of growing up marginalized in a place like Drear’s Bluff, Arkansas, where homogeneity is the highest virtue. Her protagonist, Emily, escapes with the promise of a college degree – but higher education only saddles her with debt and overwhelms her with pressure, powerfully illustrating the ways that routes out of a small town can double back without warning. When Emily realizes her former crush is in town, hiding a dark secret, the two are tugged into a story that combines queer desires, small-town prejudice, and desperate crimes.
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