Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Janie's journey through Florida includes a town's public life and the labouring landscape of the Everglades. Hurston makes the porch, the store, the fields and the storm bear different kinds of power. Community is audible in the language as well as visible in the setting. For a reader interested in inhabited landscapes, the changing relation between pleasure, work and vulnerability is the attraction. Racism, intimate violence and a catastrophic hurricane are part of that world.