I live in “flyover country”, far from America’s metropolitan coasts. I wouldn’t have it any other way. For me, there is great value in clean air, clean water, dark night skies, wildlife and room to roam. Nothing against cities – I love to visit them and I enjoy their diversity, fashion, culture and haute cuisine. But I prefer the quiet of the countryside, watching my neighbour’s herd of buffalo, working in my garden or just sitting on my porch drinking a cold beer and listening to the birds.

I’m always ill at ease defining midwestern literature. To define, in many ways, is to limit, and the last thing I want readers and critics to do is have a preconceived notion of what midwestern literature can look like. I have been influenced by Jim Harrison and Daniel Woodrell, but I was taught by Sam Chang and Jim McPherson. I portray the rural landscapes of small-town Wisconsin – but I also read the big-shouldered Chicago fiction of Nelson Algren and Rebecca Makkai. So for purposes of this list, I am thinking of fiction from the area stretching from Minnesota in the west to Ohio in the east, from northern Michigan down south to Missouri, taking in Wisconsin, Iowa, Indiana, and Illinois.

Here are 10 of my favourite works of fiction from my heartland, the American midwest.

1. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

In fiction, we often talk about “what is at stake” in a story: what propels a reader through a narrative, and why should they care? It is through the eyes of Robinson’s 77-year-old minister John Ames that we understand the stakes here are essentially time. He’s running out of time and every action he makes, every feeling and every perception he has, is that much heightened.

2. The Road Home by Jim Harrison

Harrison might be my favourite writer; a mythic sort of man, legendary for his appetite, affection for the outdoors and big-hearted writing. I generally prefer his poetry and food writing to his prose, but this novel is an epic and may be his crowning achievement.

3. So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell

This classic transcends time and geography and, to my mind, represents the best of American literature. Devastating in its depiction of regret and bittersweet in its sympathy for characters, it is a small gem that still shines brightly in my memory, years after I first read it.

Louise Erdrich, pictured in her bookshop Birchbark Books, south Minneapolis. Photograph: Eric Miller/AP

4. The Round House by Louise Erdrich

When Erdrich publishes a new book, you can almost hear the midwestern stampede towards bookstores. She’s a Minnesota treasure, writing both realistically and lovingly about the realities of a being a 21st-century First Nations American. I love her books for their humour, candour and darkness. And should you ever find yourself in Minneapolis, I highly recommend visiting her bookshop, Birchbark Books.

5. In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien

Readers frequently miss this O’Brien title because The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato are so celebrated. But In the Lake of the Woods might be his best. The narrative has an original and unnerving structure, and a Hitchcockian atmosphere.

6. Hunger by Lan Samantha Chang

It is not an overstatement to say that Chang, as director of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, has shaped the landscape of 21st-century American letters. And because she’s such a gifted and tireless educator and administrator, I feel that her own artistry is at times overlooked. Hunger is a brilliant collection of fiction; a quiet classic with complex meditations about race, ambition and love.

The real McCoy ... Tom Drury. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

7. The Driftless Area by Tom Drury

Drury is the real McCoy: a writer’s writer and the kind of artist who resists the easy impulse, the facile sentence or plot-point. Drury’s midwest is a misty place where reality blurs at the edges. There’s a Coen brothers-type appeal to his fiction, where things are just a little off-kilter and unexpected. The Driftless Area is my favourite of his many brilliant books.

8. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Cather may be the bard of the midwest. I find deep comfort in returning to her books, like touchstones, to understand what this region once was and where its spirit derived from. There is an austerity to her work, but also a magical gleam, like a huge rainbow bent over the prairie.

Willa Cather, in 1926. Photograph: New York Times Co./Getty Images

9. Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson

It pains me that more folks don’t read McPherson. He was the first African American man to win the Pulitzer prize in fiction, a graduate of Harvard Law, a MacArthur “genius” grant winner, and a Guggenheim recipient. McPherson was also a celebrity in his day, hanging out with Richard Pryor and Ralph Ellison. But knowing the man, as I did before he died in 2016, you understood that all the accolades and celebrity in the world meant nothing to him – it was human relationships that mattered, a legacy of decency and goodness.

10. Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson

Although Johnson called Idaho home for many years, it is impossible to walk around the streets of Iowa City and not feel his spirit. Mercy Hospital, the Dey House, the Foxhead Bar … Johnson left an indelible mark on 20th and 21st-century US literature and his short story collection Jesus’ Son is his best work.

• Little Faith by Nickolas Butler is published by Faber & Faber in April (£12.99)