Q: I am about to go on a road trip through Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana and would welcome some scene-setting fiction.
Ivan Cornford

A: Alex Preston, journalist and author, whose most recent book is As Kingfishers Catch Fire
You must begin with the best novel to come out of the south, perhaps the best American novel, full stop: Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner. You wanted atmosphere and this will take you right into the Spanish moss-draped heart of the deep south. Set in Mississippi during the civil war, Faulkner gives us a kaleidoscopic portrait of the life of Thomas Sutpen, an ambitious plantation owner. It’s one of those books that never leaves you: the intricately layered narrative is both formally inventive and wonderfully gripping.

As you make your way across the south, you’ll probably be struck by how – still – the subject of slavery is either buried or minimised. Don’t make the same mistake. The three best novels about this dark chapter of US history – Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple – are all set further north. Read them anyway. For something more directly relevant, go for Lalita Tademy’s Cane River, which laces fact and fiction to tell the moving tale of the author’s slave-born Louisiana ancestors.

In New Orleans, give yourself a treat and head to Faulkner House Books – one of the world’s great bookshops, located in an atmospheric house where the great novelist once lived. While you’re there, pick up a copy of John Kennedy Toole’s riotous A Confederacy of Dunces. It’ll have you choking on your mint juleps.

If you’ve got a question for Book Clinic submit it below or email bookclinic@observer.co.uk