A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor. Though not set in Chapel Hill, O'Connor's dark, funny, deeply strange short stories are the essential starting point for understanding the literary South that this part of North Carolina belongs to. Her grotesque characters and violent grace illuminate a world that Chapel Hill exists in and sometimes against.
The Worst Years of Your Life edited by Mark Jude Poirier. A sharp anthology of college fiction — but more useful here is the broader genre of the campus novel. Chapel Hill has produced writers who understand college-town life as its own ecosystem, and reading fiction about universities helps decode the particular social world you'll find here.
Blood Done Sign My Name by Timothy B. Tyson. The true story of a 1970 racial murder in Oxford, North Carolina, told by the historian-son of the Methodist minister who witnessed it. Tyson grew up in a town much like Chapel Hill and attended UNC. The book is essential for understanding the racial history of the Carolina piedmont — the tensions that Chapel Hill's progressive culture both responds to and sometimes papers over.
Chapel Hill in History and Legend by Adelaide Fries Hoblitzell and others. Local history that reads like local history, but worth it if you want to understand why the university's founding in 1789 mattered — not just as an institution but as a statement about what a new American state thought education was for.