Tara Westover’s journey from an isolated survivalist upbringing in Idaho to earning a PhD at Cambridge, chronicling her first classroom experience at 17 and her transformative quest for education.

Also fulfills: Read a memoir or autobiography.

An American masterpiece and iconic novel of the West by National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner—a deeply moving narrative of one family and the traditions of our national past.

Also fulfills: Read a book that won an award. 

A modern classic, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother.

Also fulfills: Read a book that won an award. 

Ann and Wade have carved out a life for themselves from a rugged landscape in northern Idaho, where they are bound together by more than love. With her husband’s memory fading, Ann attempts to piece together the truth of what happened to Wade’s first wife, Jenny, and to their daughters. Winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award • Winner of the Dublin Literary Award

A National Book Award Finalist presents five interconnected stories spanning centuries, linked by an ancient tale of a man’s dream to become a bird and reach paradise.

Set in Arco, Idaho, in 1970, Val Brelinski’s powerfully affecting first novel tells the story of the seemingly perfect family, whose world is upended when Grace returns from a missionary trip to Mexico and discovers she’s pregnant with—she believes—the child of God.

Yumi Fuller hasn’t set foot in her hometown of Liberty Falls, Idaho—heart of the potato-farming industry—since she ran away at age fifteen. Twenty-five years later, the prodigal daughter returns to confront her dying parents, her best friend, and her conflicted past, and finds herself caught up in an altogether new drama.

A Secret Service agent arrives in a town to investigate the disappearance of two agents but finds himself in a mysterious and dangerous situation where he is unable to contact the outside world and is surrounded by electrified fences.

Two children witness a murder and flee into Idaho woods, pursued by four ex-LA cops. A struggling rancher becomes their unlikely protector in this Edgar Award-winning thriller.

Also fulfills: Read a book that won an award. Read a book with a color in the title.

The little-known true story of a mysterious nuclear reactor disaster — years before Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or Fukushima

Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Book Award. Indian Creek Chronicles is Pete Fromm’s account of seven winter months spent alone in a tent in Idaho guarding salmon eggs and coming face to face with the blunt realities of life as a contemporary mountain man. A gripping story of adventure and a modern-day Walden, this contemporary classic established Fromm as one of the West’s premier voices.

Also fulfills: Read a book that won an award. Read a memoir or autobiography.

Bram Stoker Award winner follows Jade, a horror-obsessed half-Indian outcast who uses slasher films to cope with trauma while predicting real murders in her gentrifying lake town.

Also fulfills: Read a book that won an award.