19 Books Set in Florida to Spark Your Wanderlust

Florida holds a reputation for being quite beautiful if a bit crazy. Its contemporary cities and sunny beaches stand in stark contrast to the rural areas where Florida’s true beauty reigns in all its natural glory. I love seeing new places in Florida. I love discovering their secrets and their history and peeling back their layers like turning a fresh page in a new book.

Few places in the United States are home to as many quirky novels and surreal stories as Florida. From award-winning classics to off-beat detective novels, the best books set in Florida mirror the state’s many personalities. Yet, no matter what genre you prefer – romance, mystery, nonfiction, or children’s books – you’ll find a book to love.

Wander Florida is fully reader-supported. For that reason, this article may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase through one of the affiliate links, I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. This revenue helps keep Wander Florida free and updated. I only recommend products or services that I would use myself. Read the full disclosure here.

This list of 19 books that take place in Florida transports you to the Sunshine State. From it’s earliest days to the present time, in made-up towns and in actual places, each of these books has contributed to the fabric of Florida’s identity. And each of them will spark a desire to explore the uniqueness of the state in which they take place.

Classic Books Set in Florida

Classics offer a sense of newness or awe no matter how many times we read them. They provide exemplary contributions to literature and are read decades or even hundreds of years after publication. These classic Florida books were contemporary best sellers and have continued to hold a place in the Florida literature.

1. Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston)

Set in Eatonville, the first incorporated all-black city in the United States, Their Eyes Were Watching God was first published in 1937. From the first page, it grabs readers and pulls them into Hurston’s world. The book follows a fair-skinned black woman who marries three times and toils through poverty. Remarkably poetic from page one, it’s a book you’ll want to read if Florida history interests you. Or just because it’s a good read.

“The people all saw her come because it was sundown. The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgement.”

2. The Yearling (Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings)

This book set in Cross Creek, Florida won the Pulitzer Prize in 1939. It is an adventurous story about a boy and a young, abandoned fawn he finds and cares for. It’s often required reading at the schools near Cross Creek.

The Yearling takes the reader through the hardships of living in Florida’s rural areas in the early part of the 20th century – alligators, wolves, bears, and subsistence farming. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ home in Cross Creek, from which she experienced this life first-hand. is now a state park. The nearby Yearling Restaurant serves modern dishes as well as throwbacks to dishes popular in the 1930s in that area.

3. A Land Remembered (Patrick Smith)

Widely considered one of the most historical fiction books about Florida, A Land Remembered follows the lives of three generations of the MacIveys family. The book follows the fictional family from their move to Florida’s backwoods to real estate tycoons. It covers nearly a century of Florida history. Locations in the book range from the Ocala area in central North Florida to Punta Rasa in the Fort Myers area.

“The first two years in Florida had been a time of near starvation. He cleared a garden and planted his precious seeds, but the poor sandy soil offered little in return. And the wild animals were a constant problem when the plants did break through into the sunlight. Deer, turkey, and hogs were plentiful in the woods, but shells were so hard to come by that he could kill only when it was an absolute necessity to survive. Also during the first year, panthers killed the guinea cow and left only a pile of shattered bones.”

4. To Have and Have Not (Ernest Hemingway)

Written from two earlier short stories and a novella, this is the only one of Hemingway’s books based in Florida written while he lived in Key West. To Have and Have Not follows Harry Morgan, a fishing boat captain, as he plunges into a criminal world in Depression-Era Key West and Cuba.

The book has been adapted to film three times (1944, 1950, and 1958. It was also adapted into an Iranian version which took the events from the Caribbean to the Persian Gulf. And, it’s the basis for Season 1, Episode 12 of the TV series, Cheyenne, in which the setting is Mexico. Hemingway spent a great deal of time in Key West starting in 1928. Visitors to the island can walk through the historic Hemingway House on Whitehead Street.

Best Novels Set in Florida

Some of my favorite Florida books show the state’s natural beauty juxtaposed with the gaudy neon lights and raunchy side of humanity that seems to be found in every Florida man story ever written. From romance to horror to murder, these books showcase the worst and the best of Florida.

5. Carl Hiaasen Novels

Born and raised in South Florida, Carl Hiaasen taps into South Florida’s quirky nature to bring humor and intrigue to his Florida novels. Twenty have landed on the New York Times best-sellers list, while two have been short-listed for book awards (Razor Girl and Hoot).

Three of Hiaasen’s novels have been made into movies or TV series. Strip Tease was adapted into Striptease, a 1996 movie starring Demi Moore and Burt Reynolds. Bad Monkey was adapted into an Apple TV series starring Vince Vaughn for release in 2023. Hoot was made into a movie in 2006 starring Logan Lerman, Brie Larson and Luke Wilson.

6. Stiltsville (Susanna Daniel)

Stiltsville portrays 30 years of a marriage and romance set against Miami’s sultry waterfront. Author Susanna Daniel grew up in Miami and spent summers at her family’s stilt house. From that personal history, she wove this story

The novel took me back to all the years on our sailboat, passing by Stiltsville on the outskirts of Biscayne Bay, fascinated by stories of the houses’ origins and all the stories they could tell. This novel recounts one of those (fictional) lives, that of Frances, and follows her life from the 1960s to the 1990s, through romance, marriage, motherhood, and illness.

“There was nothing there but sea and sky, but then a few matchbox shapes formed on the hazy horizon. They grew larger and I saw that they were houses, propped above the water on pilings. I counted fourteen of them. As we neared, I saw that some were painted, some were two stories high, some had boats moored at the docks, and some were shuttered and still. They stood on cement pillars, flanking a dark channel along the rim of the bay, as if guarding it from the open ocean.”

7. Florida Roadkill (Tim Dorsey)

The first novel in the Serge Storm series, Florida Roadkill pairs the unlikely – criminals with overly kind-hearted people – and takes the reader on a trivia-laced road trip through Florida.

Much like Hiaasen, Dorsey’s characters come across as the most misfit of Florida man people, and while the plot races around in a somewhat disjointed manner, it eventually makes sense and ties everything together at the end. If you’re looking for another humorous eye of Florida with spot-on descriptions of people and places, this is one book you want to read next.

8. Rum Punch (Elmore Leonard)

A masterful crime writer, Leonard set this second book in the Ordell Robbie & Louis Gara series in West Palm Beach and Miami. Rum Punch follows a low-budget airline stewardess as she attempts to get herself out of trouble with the law and with her drug-smuggling employer. This fiction set in Florida was adapted into the 1997 Tarantino movie, Jackie Brown.

9. Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom (Cory Doctorow)

What happens when you combine romantic comedy with cyberpunk science fiction? You get this genius novel set far in the future.

Young Jules (just a hundred years old) finally realizes his dream to live at Disney World. Here he uncovers a plot to replace the still-functioning Hall of Presidents with illusions (or delusions). And he finds the perpetrators have killed him. If futuristic, super creative writing is your thing, pick up Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom for your next trip to Disney.

“I lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the Bitchun Society; to learn ten languages; to compose three symphonies; to realize my boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World; to see the death of the workplace and of work.”

10. Naked Came the Manatee (Multiple Authors)

This isn’t your typical novel. Nor your typical anthology. Naked Came the Manatee is 13 of Florida’s most revered writers playing a game of pass the potato.

Dave Barry starts it off in his wild way with a 102 year old environmentalist and a manatee. Then he passes his one chapter on to Les Standiford who writes one chapter and passes the two chapters to Paul Levine. And so one and so forth until there were 13 chapters, each written by a different author.

Originally published as a serial novel in the Miami Herald’s magazine, Tropic, this parody-filled mystery thriller welcomes the reader to all of Florida’s quirkiness.

11. Swamplandia! (Karen Russell)

In this book, readers jump into the exuberant, colorful, and somewhat macabre world of a nearly defunct theme park on an island in the Ten Thousand Islands region of Florida.

Originally written and published as a short story, Swamplandia! explores more of the Bigtree family’s circumstances and their spiral into grief which separates them from each other and from the reality of their family business’s doom.

Far from constantly sad, this novel brings comic relief and a bit of the tall-tale telling found in Southern Gothic. It’s hard to pin down a genre for this book, but if you like magic realism or gothic style books, give this one a try.

12. Tangerine (Edward Bloor)

This young adult novel received a number of award nominations, including the Rebecca Caudill Young Reader’s Book Award in 2001. The story follows the Fisher family who move to Tangerine, Florida from Texas and the ensuing chaos that overtakes the lives of the two Fisher sons, Erik and Paul.

As we’ve seen in several books about Florida, one of the most popular themes authors use is the state’s propensity towards the bizarre. And Tangerine is no different. A sinkhole swallows part of Paul’s school. Fires burn underground for years. And lightning strikes in the same place every day. Despite these strange occurrences, Paul presents readers with a smart, underdog hero we want to cheer for.

“Then the gears ground, the tires squealed, and the car leaped forward at an impossible speed. I swiveled back, terrified, and pedaled as hard as I could. I heard the roar of the car closing in on me, louder and louder, like it had smelled its prey. I shot a glance into my bike mirror, and there it was-half a block behind, then ten yards, then one yard. The man in the ski mask leaned farther out the window. He pulled the bat back and up. Then he brought it forward in a mighty swing, right at my head. I dove to the right, landing on my face in the grass, just as the baseball bat smashed into the mailbox, exploding it right off its pole.”

13. Darkly Dreaming Dexter (Jeff Lindsay)

Attention Dexter fans! Did you know the TV series is based on a book series? It is! And this is the first novel in the series.

I often find in film or TV show adaptations that the book is better than the movie, so to speak. Dexter, for me, is the exception that proves this rule. I love the books (though I haven’t read them all) and the show and can’t wait to finish the book series.

If you haven’t read the book or seen the TV show, and if you love crime or crime horror, grab a copy of this one. Darkly Dreaming Dexter follows the macabre “second life” of Dexter Morgan, a forensic specialist with the Miami-Dade Police Department. By day he helps solve crimes with the police. By night he becomes a vigilante serial killer.

14. Duma Key (Stephen King)

Yes, Stephen King ventured into writing a novel set in Florida, this one his first. Though I love the popularity and writing prowess of Stephen King, I can’t read his books so haven’t read this one. Horror simply isn’t my genre. It keeps me up at night and not in a good way.

Duma Key reaches back to some of King’s best books in it’s style and pace. Set on fictional Duma Key, psychic revelations come to life progressively through a number of paintings. If you’re a Stephen King fan, here’s your Florida vacation reading, especially if you happen to vacation somewhere in the Florida Keys.

Nonfiction Books Set in Florida

Florida’s unique history and ecological systems lend themselves to spectacular nonfiction books. The following books include real life events as well as one of the most comprehensive writings about Florida’s most unique environment, The Everglades. If you want to learn more about Florida or love true crime or historical novels, be sure to check out these nonfiction books about Florida.

15. The Orchid Thief (Susan Orlean)

A true story of intrigue, The Orchid Thief leads author Susan Orlean through the flower subcultures chasing Florida’s elusive and endangered ghost orchid as she investigates the arrest of horticulturalist, John Laroche . A bit obsessed myself (see my own excursion to photograph the only publicly-known ghost orchid at Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary), I found this book riveting and humorous. It was also adapted into a movie called Adaptation starring Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep.

16. The Everglades: River of Grass (Marjory Stoneman Douglas)

If you haven’t seen The Everglades for yourself – or have only driven through at 70 mph on I-75 – it’s hard to express the unique beauty of this part of Florida. In The Everglades: River of Grass, Douglas expresses it well and explains the importance of the hydrology of the river of grass to the environment and to the animals and people who call South Florida home.

Douglas spent five years researching the book. When it was published in 1947, it played a large part in changing the way the public viewed The Everglades. To this day, River of Grass is one of the best books about Florida ever written.

“The truth of the river is the grass. They call it saw grass. Yet in the botanical sense it is not grass at all so much as a fierce, ancient, cutting sedge. It is one of the oldest of the green growing forms in this world…It grows fiercely in the fresh water creeping down below it. When the original saw grass thrust up its spears into the sun, the fierce sun(…)then the Everglades began. They lie wherever the saw grass extends: 3500 square miles, hundreds and thousand and millions, of acres, water and saw grass.”

17. Last Train to Paradise (Les Standiford)

This book calls out to train aficionados and history buffs. It recounts Henry Flagler’s building of the train that connected Key West to mainland Florida, a feat considered impossible when it began in 1904.

Through human ingenuity and engineering advances, the railroad was completed and operated for 22 years until the Great Hurricane of 1935 destroyed it. Fast-paced and gripping, it’s hard to put Last Train to Paradise down, especially considering when all of these events occurred.

18. The Nickel Boys (Colson Whitehead)

Based on the real story of one of the nation’s worst reform schools, Florida School for Boys, The Nickel Boys is set against the backdrop of the school’s 111 year history of torture, abuse, rape, and murder which was exposed by a university investigation in 2014.

This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel follows the lives of two fictional characters at the school, Jack Turner and Elwood Curtis. The effects of one devastatingly fateful night ripple into the coming decades and ends with an astonishing reveal and testimony about the school.

“In recent years, some of the former students organized support groups, reuniting over the internet and meeting in diners and McDonald’s. Around someone’s kitchen table after an hour’s drive. Together they performed their own phantom archaeology, digging through decades and restoring to human eyes the shards and artifacts of those days. Each man with his own pieces. He used to say, I’ll pay you a visit later. The wobbly stairs to the schoolhouse basement. The blood squished between my toes in my tennis shoes. Reassembling those fragments into confirmation of a shared darkness. If it is true for you, it is true for someone else, and you are no longer alone.”

19. Devil in the Grove (Gilbert King)

In Lake County, Florida in 1949, four black boys were accused of raping a white girl. This Pulitzer Prize winner tells the true story of the trial of these four boys. From Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense defense of them to the violence initiated by the Ku Klux Klan including the murder of two defendants and one of their attorneys, Devil in the Grove leaves the reader angry and completely horrified at the things that once took place in our country. Another must-read for true crime junkies and anyone who believes in justice.

Closing: Books Set in Florida

As the third most populous state in the United States, there are many movies and books set in Florida. It’s a popular location for book settings, and the state’s bizarre and sometimes cult-like reputation add color to many fiction novels. Even Florida’s history and the stories that shaped it contribute to great reading, as we’ve seen in the nonfiction books.

Next time you’re heading to Florida on vacation, or if you live here and want to experience more of the state from a different perspective, pick up one of these books and let your imagination take flight.

Do you love monthly subscription boxes or book clubs? Check out my review of The Wordy Traveler Book Club.