Family Drama

Kunstlers in Paradise

Few authors could pull off what Cathleen Schine does in Kϋnstlers in Paradise: creating a seamless, multilayered saga about family dynamics and relationships, immigration, the early days of Hollywood and the often disturbingly cyclical nature of history.

The Queen of Dirt Island

By Donal Ryan

This story of four generations of Irish women fractiously sharing their village home in modern-day County Tipperary has a gentle heart and a spine of steel, its appeal enhanced by Donal Ryan’s understated yet evocative prose.

Hello Beautiful

By Ann Napolitano

This bighearted domestic novel reaches comforting highs and despairing lows as Ann Napolitano sharply examines the many ways that families pull each other together and apart.

Our Best Intentions

By Vibhuti Jain

Crime and prejudice mark Our Best Intentions from the beginning, building to a story of human nature at its most vulnerable and manipulative.

Paper Names

By Susie Luo

Susie Luo’s debut novel is a well-woven tale about the legacies that are passed down through generations, even when family members upend their lives in search of distance from one another.

The Last Animal

By Ramona Ausubel

Ramona Ausubel crafts this moving story with wit and depth, allowing readers to witness a family drawn together by both loss and a sense of wonder at an ever-changing planet.

Between Two Moons

By Aisha Abdel Gawad

In Aisha Abdel Gawad’s powerful novel, although family and faith tie its characters together, such bonds can also be used to restrict and smother.

The Half Moon

By Mary Beth Keane

Mary Beth Keane’s down-to-earth characters in Gillam are reminiscent of Anne Tyler’s wonderfully authentic Baltimore personalities.

Blue Skies

By T.C. Boyle

Ever the maximalist, T.C. Boyle inflicts one disaster after another to show the perils of climate change in his novel Blue Skies.

Ever the maximalist, T.C. Boyle inflicts one disaster after another to show the perils of climate change in his novel Blue Skies.

Signal Fires

By Dani Shapiro

Signal Fires is mainly a meditation on families—the secrets we keep, the hurts we don’t mean to inflict—and how those secrets and hurts play out over time.