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Books › Lists › Best Books About Family Dynamics
Dysfunction, loyalty, silence, love — the best novels and memoirs about what families do to each other and for each other.
No one knows how to hurt you like family — or how to hold you up. The best literary fiction about families understands both truths simultaneously, which is why it tends to be so emotionally complex and so difficult to put down. The books on this list move between the microscopic (one marriage, one dinner table, one terrible secret) and the panoramic (generations, migrations, the long inheritance of silence). What they share is an unflinching interest in the structures we’re born into and the ways those structures shape, damage, and sometimes save us.
Some of these novels made their authors famous overnight. Others built quiet audiences that have lasted decades. All of them have been reviewed in full by BookBrowse’s editors, who bring the context of literary criticism and broad reading to bear on works that are, at their core, about something almost every reader has felt: the particular intensity of people who are supposed to love you.
by Celeste Ng
Winner of the 2017 BookBrowse Fiction Award
From the bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You, a riveting novel that traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives.
by Celeste Ng
A profoundly moving story of family, history, and the meaning of home, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait.
by Jonathan Franzen
The Corrections brings an old-fashioned world of civic virtue and sexual inhibitions into violent collision with the era of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental health care, and globalized greed.
by Lionel Shriver
Eva never really wanted to be a mother—and certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered fellow high-school friends and staff in a horrific rampage. Two years later, it is time for Eva to come to terms with her life and the decisions she made.
by Ann Patchett
The acclaimed, bestselling author - winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize - tells the enthralling story of how an unexpected romantic encounter irrevocably changes two families' lives.
by Yaa Gyasi
Winner of the 2016 BookBrowse Debut Author Award
A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.
by Elizabeth Strout
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition – its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires.
by Jennifer Egan
A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.
by Amy Tan
Four Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters try to understand each other across an ocean of cultural and generational difference. Tan’s debut — still her most beloved — is about the stories mothers don’t tell their daughters, and what daughters do with what they find out.
by Sally Rooney
A wondrous and wise coming-of-age love story from the celebrated author of Conversations with Friends
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