Probably the best-known historical novel set in Virginia is William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner. This story of a slave uprising two decades before the Civil War won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1968.

Thulani Davis’ 1959 and Dennis McFarland’s Prince Edward deal with the effects of the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 on the lives of young people, both black and white.

The eccentric residents of Big Stone Gap are sympathetically portrayed in a series of novels by Adriana Trigiani, beginning with Big Stone Gap, in which the town’s pharmacist (and thirty-five-year-old self-declared spinster), Ave Maria Mulligan, sets out on a quest to discover who her father really was—which results in two marriage proposals. Big Cherry Holler and Milk Glass Moon complete the trilogy.

Many of Lee Smith’s novels are set in Virginia, including Family Linen, about a woman whose recovered memories result in the unearthing of long-hidden family secrets; The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, told from the viewpoint of a young girl; and my particular favorite, Black Mountain Breakdown, the story of Crystal Spangler, who was the most popular girl at Black Rock High, but whose adult life never lives up to the promise of her adolescence.

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• Recommend another book set in Virginia!

Jonathan Dee’s Palladio is set in an artists’ colony run by an eccentric millionaire who made his money in the advertising business. The ending of this powerful novel ought to be predictable, but isn’t.

I have many guilty pleasures when it comes to books, but none more so than Elswyth Thane’s series of historical romances known collectively as “The Williamsburg Novels,” which I seem to reread with appalling regularity. As you can infer from the collective title of the series, the family’s home is in Virginia, but the action, especially in the later novels, moves away from the sleepy town of Williamsburg into New York and, especially, London. Each one takes place during a particular war, from the Revolutionary War to World War II. Here they are, in order: Dawn’s Early Light; Yankee Stranger; Ever After; The Light Heart; Kissing Kin; This Was Tomorrow; and Homing.