Reading List

Authors Like Eliza Griswold

Q: What should I read after Amity and Prosperity?

Beth Macy's Dopesick (2018) for another Appalachian community harmed by an industry, or Arlie Russell Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land (2016) for the politics. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) is the classic behind both.

Q: Does Eliza Griswold have a new book?

Her most recent book is Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church (2024), a finalist for the National Book Award. She directs the journalism programme at Princeton University.

Q: Which Eliza Griswold book should I read first?

Amity and Prosperity (2018) is the usual start. The Tenth Parallel (2010) gathers her reporting on Christianity and Islam in Africa and Asia, and If Men, Then (2020) is her poetry.

Q: Is Eliza Griswold a poet?

Yes. Her poetry collections include Wideawake Field (2007) and If Men, Then (2020), and her translations of Pashto landays, I Am the Beggar of the World (2014), won a PEN award for poetry in translation.

In 2011 Eliza Griswold wrote about Stacey Haney for The New York Times Magazine. Haney was a single mother in Amity, a town in south-western Pennsylvania near a gas-drilling site; she and her children tested positive for high levels of arsenic, and she and her neighbours sued Range Resources. Griswold spent seven years reporting and writing Amity and Prosperity (2018), which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2019. She is also a poet, the daughter of a presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, and the director of Princeton's journalism programme. The Tenth Parallel (2010) follows Christians and Muslims along a line across Africa and Asia; I Am the Beggar of the World (2014) translates the two-line Pashto poems called landays; Circle of Hope (2024), a National Book Award finalist, follows a Philadelphia church in crisis. The ten writers below share her method: stay a long time, listen to people with something to lose, and write it plainly.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Narrative nonfiction · Faith, land and conflict · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you like Eliza Griswold, start with Arlie Russell Hochschild, whose Strangers in Their Own Land (2016) came from five years among Tea Party supporters in Louisiana's petrochemical country. For an American place harmed by an industry, read Beth Macy's Dopesick; for years of reporting inside one poor community, read Katherine Boo. Further down are two poets of witness and a historian of American evangelicals.

10 authors like Eliza Griswold

Before Amity: the poisoned land

Rachel Carson

American · The Sea Around Us (1951), Silent Spring (1962)

Carson was born in Springdale, Pennsylvania, in 1907 and worked as a biologist and writer for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Silent Spring documented the effects of synthetic pesticides such as DDT on birds, water and people, and was fiercely attacked by the chemical industry. She died of cancer in 1964; DDT was banned for agricultural use in the US in 1972.

Carson is where Griswold's subject begins: an industry's chemicals in a community's water and bodies, told by a writer from western Pennsylvania. Silent Spring is the ancestor of Amity and Prosperity.

— Lisanne

Every book by Rachel Carson →

The poet as witness

Carolyn Forché

American · The Country Between Us (1981), What You Have Heard Is True (2019)

Forché was born in Detroit in 1950. She spent time in El Salvador in the late 1970s, on the eve of its civil war, and The Country Between Us, including the prose poem ‘The Colonel’, came out of it. She edited the anthology Against Forgetting (1993) and is closely associated with the term ‘poetry of witness’. Her memoir of those years, What You Have Heard Is True, was a National Book Award finalist.

Forché is the clearest model for Griswold's double life as poet and reporter: both went to places at war and wrote about them in verse as well as prose. Read The Country Between Us alongside If Men, Then.

— Lisanne

Voices, barely edited

Svetlana Alexievich

Belarusian · The Unwomanly Face of War (1985), Voices from Chernobyl (1997), Secondhand Time (2013)

Alexievich was born in 1948 in Ivano-Frankivsk, in Soviet Ukraine, and grew up in Belarus. She builds her books from hundreds of interviews arranged as monologues: Soviet women who fought in the Second World War, people who lived near Chernobyl, people living through the end of the Soviet Union. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015.

Alexievich shares Griswold's patience with ordinary witnesses but steps further back, letting them speak almost uninterrupted. Voices from Chernobyl is the book to read after Amity and Prosperity: an invisible poison, and the people who lived beside it.

— Lisanne

Every book by Svetlana Alexievich →

Afghanistan and women at war

Christina Lamb

British · Farewell Kabul (2015), Our Bodies, Their Battlefield (2020)

Lamb was born in London in 1965 and is chief foreign correspondent of The Sunday Times; she has reported from Afghanistan and Pakistan since the late 1980s. She co-wrote I Am Malala (2013) with Malala Yousafzai. Our Bodies, Their Battlefield is about rape as a weapon of war.

Lamb and Griswold have both spent years reporting on Afghanistan and on women in conflict. Lamb is a war correspondent first, and her books show the war that sits behind the landays Griswold translated.

— Lisanne

Every book by Christina Lamb →

Years inside one community

Katherine Boo

American · Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012)

Boo's reporting for The Washington Post on group homes for people with intellectual disabilities won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2000. Behind the Beautiful Forevers follows families in Annawadi, a settlement beside Mumbai's airport, over more than three years, and won the National Book Award.

Boo and Griswold both report by staying: years with one community, then a book that reads like a novel but is sourced like an investigation. Boo suits readers who want the closeness of Amity and Prosperity far from America.

— Lisanne

Every book by Katherine Boo →

The other side of the fence

Arlie Russell Hochschild

American · The Second Shift (1989), Strangers in Their Own Land (2016), Stolen Pride (2024)

Hochschild was born in Boston in 1940 and taught sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. For Strangers in Their Own Land, a National Book Award finalist, she spent five years with Tea Party supporters in Louisiana, many of whom lived beside polluting plants and still opposed environmental regulation. Stolen Pride moves to a town in Kentucky's coal country.

Hochschild asks the question that Griswold's Pennsylvania raises from the other side: why people harmed by an industry support less oversight of it. She complicates any simple story of victims and villains, and suits readers who want to understand everyone in Amity.

— Lisanne

Appalachia and the opioid trade

Beth Macy

American · Factory Man (2014), Dopesick (2018), Raising Lazarus (2022)

Macy grew up in Urbana, Ohio, and reported for The Roanoke Times in Virginia for decades. Dopesick traces the opioid epidemic from Purdue Pharma's marketing of OxyContin to the families of Appalachia, and was adapted as a Hulu series in 2021.

Macy's Appalachia sits next to Griswold's Pennsylvania: towns where a company's product arrived as opportunity and turned into harm. She writes as a local reporter close to the families, and suits readers who want the same story told about drugs instead of gas.

— Lisanne

Every book by Beth Macy →

The powerful, documented

Patrick Radden Keefe

American · Say Nothing (2018), Empire of Pain (2021)

Keefe was born in 1976 and grew up in Boston. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where Griswold is also a contributor. Say Nothing is about a murder during the Troubles in Northern Ireland; Empire of Pain is a history of the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma.

Keefe builds his books, as Griswold does, from years of documents and interviews about a powerful institution and the people it harmed. Empire of Pain follows the money behind a crisis; read it next to Amity and Prosperity for the corporate side.

— Lisanne

Every book by Patrick Radden Keefe →

The history behind the faith

Frances FitzGerald

American · Fire in the Lake (1972), Cities on a Hill (1986), The Evangelicals (2017)

FitzGerald was born in New York in 1940. Fire in the Lake, about Vietnam and the American war there, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America is a history of white evangelical Protestants from the Great Awakenings to the religious right.

FitzGerald supplies the history behind Griswold's religious reporting, from The Tenth Parallel to Circle of Hope. Both write about faith as a political force without mocking the believers.

— Lisanne

The same questions, as fiction

Barbara Kingsolver

American · The Poisonwood Bible (1998), Flight Behavior (2012), Demon Copperhead (2022)

Kingsolver was born in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1955, grew up in rural Kentucky and trained as a biologist. The Poisonwood Bible follows an American missionary family in the Belgian Congo in 1959; Demon Copperhead, a retelling of David Copperfield set during the opioid crisis in Appalachia, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023.

Kingsolver is the novelist of Griswold's subjects: American Christianity abroad, rural communities and damage to the land. She suits readers who want those questions explored in fiction.

— Lisanne

Every book by Barbara Kingsolver →

Where to start if you loved Eliza Griswold

If you want the original environmental exposé, read Rachel Carson.

Silent Spring: pesticides, water and the people downstream.

If you want the other side of Amity, read Arlie Russell Hochschild.

Strangers in Their Own Land: why people living beside pollution oppose regulation.

If you want poetry of witness, read Carolyn Forché.

The Country Between Us: poems from El Salvador on the eve of war.

If you want voices instead of narration, read Svetlana Alexievich.

Voices from Chernobyl: people who lived through a disaster, in their own words.

If you have only read Amity and Prosperity, try Circle of Hope (2024).

Griswold's account of a Philadelphia church in crisis over love, power and justice, a National Book Award finalist.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Eliza Griswold

Who writes like Eliza Griswold?

Katherine Boo, Beth Macy and Arlie Russell Hochschild share her long immersion in one community. Carolyn Forché is the closest match for her poetry, and Svetlana Alexievich and Christina Lamb report on war and disaster outside America.

What should I read after Amity and Prosperity?

Beth Macy's Dopesick (2018) for another Appalachian community harmed by an industry, or Arlie Russell Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land (2016) for the politics. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) is the classic behind both.

What is Amity and Prosperity about?

It follows Stacey Haney, a single mother in Amity, Pennsylvania, and her neighbours after gas drilling arrives near their homes, and their legal fight with Range Resources. It won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

Does Eliza Griswold have a new book?

Her most recent book is Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church (2024), a finalist for the National Book Award. She directs the journalism programme at Princeton University.

Which Eliza Griswold book should I read first?

Amity and Prosperity (2018) is the usual start. The Tenth Parallel (2010) gathers her reporting on Christianity and Islam in Africa and Asia, and If Men, Then (2020) is her poetry.

Is Eliza Griswold a poet?

Yes. Her poetry collections include Wideawake Field (2007) and If Men, Then (2020), and her translations of Pashto landays, I Am the Beggar of the World (2014), won a PEN award for poetry in translation.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

Authors Like Eliza Griswold

10 authors like Eliza Griswold

Rachel Carson

Carolyn Forché

Svetlana Alexievich

Christina Lamb

Katherine Boo

Arlie Russell Hochschild

Beth Macy

Patrick Radden Keefe

Frances FitzGerald

Barbara Kingsolver

Where to start if you loved Eliza Griswold

Frequently asked questions about authors like Eliza Griswold

Who writes like Eliza Griswold?

What should I read after Amity and Prosperity?

What is Amity and Prosperity about?

Does Eliza Griswold have a new book?

Which Eliza Griswold book should I read first?

Is Eliza Griswold a poet?

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