Berendt, John. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. New York, NY: Vintage, 1999. Well, not exactly fiction but far from completely true, nonetheless this modern classic definitely reads like a novel while remaining one of the unique and readable travelogues of recent times.

Conroy, Pat. The Lords of Discipline. New York, NY: Bantam, 1985. For all practical purposes set at the Citadel, this novel takes you behind the scenes of the notoriously insular Charleston military college.

Conroy, Pat. The Water is Wide. New York, NY: Bantam, 1987. Immortal account of Conroy’s time teaching African American children in a two-room schoolhouse on “Yamacraw” (actually Daufuskie) Island.

Hervey, Harry. The Damned Don’t Cry. Marietta, GA: Cherokee Publishing, 2003. The original Midnight, this bawdy 1939 potboiler takes you into the streets, shanties, drawing rooms, and boudoirs of real Savannahians during the Depression.

O’Connor, Flannery. Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works. Library of America, 1988. For a look into Savannah’s conflicted, paradoxical soul, read anything by this native-born writer, so grounded in tradition yet so ahead of her time even to this day. This volume includes selected letters, an especially valuable (and entertaining) insight.