11 Books Set in Upstate New York

Emma Straub's warm and perceptive family novel unfolds in the fictional Hudson Valley town of Clapham, where everyone seems to know one another's history.

After witnessing a school bus accident, widow Astrid Strick begins questioning the stories she's always told herself about motherhood, marriage, and the choices that shaped her family.

Straub balances humor with genuine emotional depth, creating a portrait of small-town life that feels lived in rather than idealized.

Keru and Nate invite each set of parents on two vacations, five years apart. The second, in a rented Catskills bungalow, becomes an understated study of family, class, expectation, and the strange pressure of trying to host people who never quite feel at home together.

Anyone who's spent a weekend in a rented Catskills house with extended family may recognize the quiet negotiations, unspoken resentments, and fleeting moments of connection that Wang captures so well.

Few places feel more suited to a mystery than an Adirondack summer camp. When thirteen-year-old Barbara Van Laar disappears in 1975, years after her brother vanished from the same woods, the search exposes decades of secrets within both the wealthy family that owns the camp and the community that surrounds it.

Part literary mystery, part family saga, it's one of the standout novels of recent years and a compelling portrait of the Adirondacks beyond their postcard beauty.

The Catskills have always inspired folklore, and John Langan leans fully into that tradition.

Two widowers discover an isolated fishing spot with a story attached to it, only to find that the old legends surrounding Dutchman's Creek may be more real than anyone imagined.

Equal parts grief, ghost story, and cosmic horror, it's a novel that makes the region's reservoirs, forests, and persistent fog feel genuinely unsettling.

Twenty years after leaving Heart Lake School for Girls, Jane Hudson returns to the isolated Adirondack boarding school as a Latin teacher, hoping for a fresh start with her young daughter. Instead, forgotten journals, unsettling messages, and a series of disturbing events force her to confront the tragedy that drove her away.

Carol Goodman combines classical mythology, psychological suspense, and the stark beauty of an Adirondack winter in one of the region's finest gothic mysteries.

Opening a bed-and-breakfast is stressful enough without a murder on opening weekend. Jess Byrne has barely welcomed the first guests to The Pearl, her new Hudson Valley inn, when a body is discovered and her ex-boyfriend becomes the prime suspect.

Fast-paced, funny, and full of local color, this debut mystery has been described as "Schitt’s Creek meets Only Murders in the Building"

A child's disappearance during a Halloween parade continues to shape a fictional Hudson Valley town decades later, even as memories begin to fade and old assumptions are questioned.

More interested in the emotional aftershocks of tragedy than in solving a crime, Donohoe writes beautifully about memory, family, and the ways small towns carry their past with them.

A group of longtime friends gathers at a Hudson Valley estate in the early days of the pandemic, expecting a brief escape that becomes something much longer.

What follows owes as much to Chekhov as contemporary satire: old rivalries resurface, relationships shift, and everyone discovers they're less prepared for isolation than they imagined.

This is one of the sharpest fictional portraits of modern country-house life in the Hudson Valley.

The overnight crew at a Catskills big-box store devises an unusual plan: instead of getting rid of their difficult manager, they'll try to get her promoted. Waldman spent time working retail while researching the novel, and that experience shows in every page.

Funny, compassionate, and remarkably observant, this is one of the best recent novels about work, ambition, and the changing economy of small-town Upstate New York.

Greta spends her days in Hudson transcribing therapy sessions before unexpectedly beginning an affair with one of the patients she's been listening to.

Hudson itself becomes part of the story in Jen Beagin's wildly original novel, that's outrageous, hilarious, surprisingly tender, and impossible to predict. Hudson itself becomes an essential part of the story, its galleries, old houses, cafés, and shifting identity woven naturally into one of the most original novels of recent years.

Set over three summers in a Catskills community inspired by Tannersville, Kaaterskill Falls follows an Orthodox Jewish summer colony as questions of faith, family, independence, and tradition reshape the lives of those who return year after year.

Shortlisted for the National Book Award, Allegra Goodman's novel has become a Catskills classic, admired for its generosity, intelligence, and remarkably vivid sense of place. Few books capture the rhythms of a Catskills summer with such quiet confidence.