“What are the best books about Country Living?” We looked at 13 articles and found 278 unique books to answer that very question.

Rural and country living covers a wide range of books. There are farming books, homestead books, books about leading a nomadic life, history of farming books, instructional agriculture books, and so much more. There is fiction, non-fiction, biography, history, and recipe books.  We found 278 total books, 12 of which appeared on multiple lists. We included images, links, and a summary for those below and a list of the remaining 266 books, along with the sources, at the bottom of the page.

And if for some reason you click on this article and are more of a city person, or simply curious on what that list looks like, you can read our City Living article from earlier in the week.

Happy Scrolling!

Top 12 Country Living Books

12 .) A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck

Lists It Appears On:

• Library Book Lists
• Modern Farmer

Newton Peck weaves a story of a Vermont boyhood that is part fiction, part memoir. The result is a moving coming-of-age story that still resonates with teens today.

Learn More About Book

11 .) Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Lists It Appears On:

• The Daily Beast
• Electric Lit

Nearly 25 years after Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson returns with an intimate tale of three generations, from the Civil War to the 20th century: a story about fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America’s heart. In the words ofKirkus, it is a novel “as big as a nation, as quiet as thought, and moving as prayer. Matchless and towering.” Gilead tells the story of America and will break your heart.

Learn More About Book

10 .) Homestead by Rosina Lippi

Lists It Appears On:

• NPR
• Library Book Lists

Each life has its place, and every variation ripples the surface of the tiny alpine village called Rosenau. Be it a mysteriously misaddressed love letter or a girl’s careless delivery of two helpless relatives into Nazi hands, the town’s balance is ever tested, and ever tender. Here is a novel spanning eighty years — years that bring factories and wars, store-bought cheese and city-trained teachers — weaving the fates of the wives, mothers, and daughters in this remote corner of Austria.

Learn More About Book

9 .) How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

Lists It Appears On:

• Modern Farmer
• The Guardian

“Fifteen-year-old Daisy is sent from Manhattan to England to visit her aunt and cousins she’s never met: three boys near her age, and their little sister. Her aunt goes away on business soon after Daisy arrives. The next day bombs go off as London is attacked and occupied by an unnamed enemy.

As power fails, and systems fail, the farm becomes more isolated. Despite the war, it’s a kind of Eden, with no adults in charge and no rules, a place where Daisy’s uncanny bond with her cousins grows into something rare and extraordinary. But the war is everywhere, and Daisy and her cousins must lead each other into a world that is unknown in the scariest, most elemental way.”

Learn More About Book

8 .) Stoner by John Williams

Lists It Appears On:

• Modern Farmer
• The Guardian

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.

Learn More About Book

7 .) The Backyard Homestead: Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre! by Carleen Madigan

Lists It Appears On:

• Just Peace
• Countryfarm Lifestyles

On just a quarter-acre of land, you can produce fresh, organic food for a family of four — year-round! This comprehensive guide to homesteading provides all the information you need to grow and preserve a sustainable harvest of grains and vegetables; raise animals for meat, eggs, and dairy; and keep honey bees for your sweeter days. With easy-to-follow instructions on canning, drying, and pickling, you’ll enjoy your backyard bounty all winter long.

Learn More About Book

6 .) The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir by Josh Kilmer Purcell

Lists It Appears On:

• The Christian Science Monitor
• Library Book Lists

Michael Perry (Coop, Truck: A Love Story) meets David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim) in this follow-up to Josh Kilmer-Purcell’s beloved New York Times bestselling debut memoir, I Am Not Myself These Days—another riotous, moving, and entirely unique story of his attempt to tackle the next phase of life with his partner… on a goat farm in upstate New York.

Learn More About Book

5 .) The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love by Kristin Kimball

Lists It Appears On:

• The Christian Science Monitor
• Library Book Lists

Single, thirtysomething, working as a writer in New York City, Kristin Kimball was living life as an adventure. But she was beginning to feel a sense of longing for a family and for home. When she interviewed a dynamic young farmer, her world changed. Kristin knew nothing about growing vegetables, let alone raising pigs and cattle and driving horses. But on an impulse, smitten, if not yet in love, she shed her city self and moved to five hundred acres near Lake Champlain to start a new farm with him. The Dirty Life is the captivating chronicle of their first year on Essex Farm, from the cold North Country winter through the following harvest season—complete with their wedding in the loft of the barn.

Learn More About Book

4 .) The Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

Lists It Appears On:

• Library Book Lists
• Modern Farmer

Barbara Kingsolver’s fifth novel is a hymn to wildness that celebrates the prodigal spirit of human nature, and of nature itself. It weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives amid the mountains and farms of southern Appalachia. Over the course of one humid summer, this novel’s intriguing protagonists face disparate predicaments but find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place.

Learn More About Book

3 .) Back to Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills by Abigail R. Gehring

Lists It Appears On:

• Just Peace
• Critical Cactus
• Eco Books

This how-to, user-friendly guide teaches self-sufficiency-covering all of life’s essentials: shelter; alternative energy sources; growing and preserving food; home crafts; directions for making herbal remedies; and even home-grown entertainment.

Learn More About Book

2 .) Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Lists It Appears On:

• Library Book Lists
• NPR
• The Guardian

When the recently orphaned socialite Flora Poste descends on her relatives at the aptly named Cold Comfort Farm in deepest Sussex, she finds a singularly miserable group in dire need of her particular talent

Learn More About Book

1 .) The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery

Lists It Appears On:

• Countryfarm Lifestyles
• Critical Cactus
• Just Peace
• Eco Books

The bestselling resource for modern homesteading, growing and preserving foods, and raising chickens, The Encyclopedia of Country Living includes how to cultivate a garden, buy land, bake bread, raise farm animals, make sausage, can peaches, milk a goat, grow herbs, churn butter, build a chicken coop, catch a pig, cook on a wood stove, and much, much more. This comprehensive resource is the most authoritative guide available to a sustainable lifestyle and living off of the land.

Learn More About Book

#13 to 278 Books About Living In The Country
(Appear On A Single List Each)

Rural Living Book Sources