Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Shiner | 2020 | Amy Jo Burns | Buy |
| 2 | Mercury | 2024 | Amy Jo Burns | Buy |
Amy Jo Burns’s two standalone novels are both set in the hills and small towns of Appalachia. Shiner (2020), her fiction debut, takes readers into a mountain community built around snake-handling faith traditions. The novel follows Wren, a young woman caught between loyalty to her father and the need to forge her own life. Mercury (2024) shifts to a small Pennsylvania town where a mother named Marley tries to hold her family together while wrestling with questions about what she really wants.
The two novels are unconnected in plot but share Burns’s interest in women finding agency in isolated, tradition-bound places. Her prose is spare and grounded, with a strong sense of the physical landscape that shapes her characters’ lives.