Inspired by real-life events, Wiley Cash’s novel The Last Ballad (hardcover, digital) tells the fictionalized story of, as he explains it, “a young, single mother named Ella May Wiggins who’s swept up in a violent textile mill strike in the Appalachian foothills in the summer of 1929.” But in talking to Cash about this book, he revealed that it while it was inspired by history, it was also influenced by musicality.