Jazz and good food inevitably come to mind when you think about the city known as the Big Easy, but you’d be well advised to make a mental note to add “fiction” when you’re thinking of New Orleans, as it’s the setting for some great reads.

The Awakening, Kate Chopin’s short and tragic story of Edna Pontellier’s attempt to break away from the constrictions imposed on her as a woman by her Creole society, remains as moving today as when it was published in 1899, and it’s impossible to read without asking yourself just how much—really—has changed for women today who dare to be different.

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My two favorite New Orleans–set novels are The Moviegoer, Walker Percy’s National Book Award–winning novel of disconnectedness, and Nancy Lemann’s elegiac novel of family dysfunction, Lives of the Saints. But the best known and probably best beloved (as well as the novel with the most interesting publishing history) is John Kennedy Toole’s raucous tragicomedy A Confederacy of Dunces, the adventures (often mis-) of Ignatius J. Reilly.


Two (very different) historical novels set in 1830s New Orleans are Edna Ferber’s Saratoga Trunk (the main character must decide between marrying for love or money) and Barbara Hambly’s A Free Man of Color, the first in a series of historical mysteries featuring Benjamin January, a Creole physician and music teacher who returns home to New Orleans after many years of living abroad and takes on the job of investigating the death of a high-class octoroon prostitute.

Other mysteries set in New Orleans include Julie Smith’s series about detective Skip Langdon (New Orleans Mourning is the best) and James Lee Burke’s series about Cajun detective Dave Robichaux (my favorite is A Morning for Flamingos).

In John Gregory Brown’s Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery, the collapse of a bridge is the catalyst for the unveiling of the Eagen family’s long-suppressed secrets.

Only parts of Burning Marguerite by Elizabeth Inness-Brown and Hello to the Cannibals by Richard Bausch take place in New Orleans, but the authors evoke the sense of the city remarkably well.