Category
Family Saga / Generational Saga Fiction
Before You Sleep 2001
Through the sublimely unreliable voice of its narrator, Karin, Before You Sleep reaches back from present day Oslo to 1930s Brooklyn to relate the emotional legacies of the Blom family.
Karin is both playful and melancholy—a serial seductress who defines herself in contrast to the women in her...
A family from the United States goes to the remote Sierras in Mexico--the writer-to-be, Susannah; her sister, Magdalena; her father and mother. And there, amid an endangered band of mixed-race Blacks and Indians called the Mundo, they begin an encounter that will change them more than they could...
Just as her father makes the wrenching decision to send her away for a chance at a better life, Claire Limyè Lanmè—Claire of the Sea Light—suddenly disappears. As the people of the Haitian seaside community of Ville Rose search for her, painful secrets, haunting memories, and startling truths are...
Cold Spring Harbor 1987
Evan Shepard was born with good looks, bad luck, and a love for the open road. But it was on one such drive, with his father from rural Long Island into lower Manhattan, that Evan’s life would be changed forever. When their car breaks down on a Greenwich Village street, Evan’s father presses a...
The Condor Passes 2012
Like many people in turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans, Thomas Henry Oliver came to the city to escape a dull life—in his case, a childhood in the backwoods of the Midwest. But few New Orleans immigrants find as much prosperity as Oliver does amongst the city's lively streets, amassing an...
Consequences 2008
"One of the most accomplished writers of fiction of our day" (The Washington Post ) follows the lives and loves of three women--Lorna, Molly, and Ruth--from World War II-era London to the close of the century. Told in Lively's incomparable prose, this is a powerful story of growth, death, and...
Khaled Hosseini, the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, has written a new novel about how we love, how we take care of one another, and how the choices we make resonate through generations. In this tale revolving around not just parents and children...
Early Warning 2016
It’s 1953, and the Langdons are at a crossroads. Walter, their stalwart patriarch, has died unexpectedly, and his wife must try to keep their farm going. But of their five children, only one will remain to work the land. The others scatter to Washington, DC, California, and everywhere in...
East of Eden 1992
Set in the rich farmland of California’s Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. Here is a work in...
1939, Will and Alice are evacuated to a granite farm in north Cornwall, perched on a windswept cliff. There they meet the farmer's daughter, Maggie, and enjoy a childhood largely protected from the ravages of war. But in the sweltering summer of 1943, something happens that will have tragic...
French Braid 2023
The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever leave home, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband, Robin....
Golden Age 2016
It’s 1987, and the next generation of Langdons is facing economic, social, and political challenges unlike anything their ancestors have encountered. Michael and Richie, twin sons of World War II hero Frank, work in the high-stakes worlds of government and finance—but their fiercest enemies may be...
A Good House 1999
Set in a small Ontario town, A Good House follows several families whose lives become quietly intertwined over the course of decades. Through shifting perspectives, the novel traces marriages, friendships, and everyday routines, revealing how ordinary moments—dinners, conversations, small...
So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal...
Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past—including the terrible truth even Helen does...
Lark and Termite 2010
Lark and Termite is a rich, wonderfully alive novel about seventeen year old Lark and her brother, Termite, living in West Virginia in the 1950s. Their mother, Lola, is absent, while their aunt, Nonie, raises them as her own, and Termite’s father, Corporal Robert Leavitt, is caught up in the early...
Latecomers 1990
In Latecomers the author of the bestselling Hotel Du Lac extends her range to produce a glowing masterpiece about the ambiguous pleasures of friendship and domesticity. Hartmann and Fibich are "latecomers" to England, brought over as children from Nazi Germany.
No two men could be more dissimilar:...
The Lowland 2014
Born just fifteen months apart, Subhash and Udayan Mitra are inseparable brothers, one often mistaken for the other in the Calcutta neighborhood where they grow up. But they are also opposites, with gravely different futures ahead. It is the 1960s, and Udayan—charismatic and impulsive—finds himself...
The Moor's Last Sigh 1997
Moraes "Moor" Zogoiby, the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinese spice merchants and crime lords, is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic...
In Dublin, as the eighteenth century nears its end, a musical virtuoso comes of age. John Field, an awkward and sensitive child, is preternaturally gifted, and his family envisions him becoming the next Mozart. His talent takes him far—to England, France, and then Russia, where he becomes a famous...
NW 2013
Set in northwest London, Zadie Smith’s brilliant tragicomic novel follows four locals—Leah, Natalie, Felix, and Nathan—as they try to make adult lives outside of Caldwell, the council estate of their childhood.
In private houses and public parks, at work and at play, these Londoners inhabit a...
On Beauty 2006
On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and...
Pachinko 2017
In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger. When she discovers she is pregnant—and that her lover is married—she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan.
But her decision to...
Palisades Park 2013
Growing up in the 1930s, there is no more magical place than Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey—especially for seven-year-old Antoinette, who horrifies her mother by insisting on the unladylike nickname Toni, and her brother, Jack. Toni helps her parents, Eddie and Adele Stopka, at the stand...
The Prince of Tides 1987
A modern American classic and a sweeping family saga that spans decades, this powerful work of Southern literary fiction is the story of the volatile Tom Wingo, his brilliant but troubled twin sister, Savannah, and the complex and damaging legacy of their dysfunctional family. Moving between the...
The Prospectors 2024
The middle daughter of struggling California fruit farmers, Alice Bush is accustomed to feeling inferior and destitute. But when her elder sister’s husband strikes a vein of gold in the Yukon Territory, Alice joins a wave of white settlers making the dangerous trek to the Klondike, thus beginning a...
The River Is Waiting 2025
Corby Ledbetter is struggling. New fatherhood, the loss of his job, and a growing secret addiction have thrown his marriage to his beloved Emily into a tailspin. And that’s before he causes the tragedy that tears the family apart. Sentenced to prison, Corby struggles to survive life on the inside,...
As I Lay Dying 2026
Faulkner’s fifth novel follows a grim yet darkly humorous pilgrimage, as Addie Bundren’s family sets out to fulfill her final wish: to be buried in her native Jefferson, Mississippi, far from the miserable backwater surroundings of her married life. Told through the perspective of multiple family...
Set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Sent for You Yesterday weaves together the lives of a close-knit community through memory, storytelling, and shifting perspectives. At its center is Doot, a writer who returns to his childhood neighborhood, revisiting the people and events that shaped his...
Some Luck 2015
1920, Denby, Iowa: Rosanna and Walter Langdon have just welcomed their firstborn son, Frank, into their family farm. He will be the oldest of five.
Each chapter in this extraordinary novel covers a single year, encompassing the sweep of history as the Langdons abide by time-honored values...
The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by...
A Spell of Winter 2001
Cathy and her brother, Rob, have forged a passionate refuge against the terror of loneliness and family secrets, but their sibling love becomes fraught with danger. As Catherine fights free of her dark present and haunting past, the spell of winter that has held her in its grasp begins to break.
From Red’s parents, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to the grandchildren carrying the Whitshank legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century, the Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate an indefinable kind of specialness, but like all families, their stories reveal only part...
The Stranger's Child 2012
In the summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge schoolmate—a handsome, aristocratic young poet named Cecil Valance—to his family’s home outside London. George is enthralled by Cecil, and soon his sister, Daphne, is equally besotted by him. That weekend, Cecil writes a poem that, after he is...
Swing Time 2017
Two brown girls dream of being dancers—but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early...
Until I Find You 2006
Until I Find You is the story of the actor Jack Burns – his life, loves, celebrity and astonishing search for the truth about his parents.
When he is four years old, Jack travels with his mother Alice, a tattoo artist, to several North Sea ports in search of his father, William Burns. From...
The Unvanquished 1991
Set in Mississippi during the Civil War and Reconstruction, THE UNVANQUISHED focuses on the Sartoris family, who, with their code of personal responsibility and courage, stand for the best of the Old South's traditions.
The Vagrants 2010
Morning dawns on the provincial city of Muddy River. A young woman, Gu Shan, a bold spirit and a follower of Chairman Mao, has renounced her faith in Communism. Now a political prisoner, she is to be executed for her dissent. Her distraught mother, determined to follow the custom of burning her only...
For seventeen years, a rural community in Kansas has faithfully tended the grave of an anonymous teenage girl christened the Virgin of Small Plains. And some claim that, perhaps owing to the girl’s intervention, strange miracles and unexplainable healings have occurred. Slowly, word of the legend...
John Cheever, best known for his short stories dealing with upper-middle-class suburban life, was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912. Cheever published his first short story at the age of seventeen. He was the recipient of a 1951 Guggenheim Fellowship and winner of a National Book Award for The...
The Wild Palms 1995
In this feverishly beautiful novel—originally titled If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem—William Faulkner interweaves two narratives, each wholly absorbing in its own right, each subtly illuminating the other. In New Orleans in 1937, a man and a woman embark on a headlong flight into the wilderness of...
Powerful and political, with unforgettable characters and timeless themes, The World According to Garp is John Irving’s breakout novel. The precursor of Irving’s later protest novels, it is the story of Jenny, an unmarried nurse who becomes a single mom and a feminist leader, beloved but...
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Music Against the Night October 13, 2026
In Dublin, as the eighteenth century nears its end, a musical virtuoso comes of age. John Field, an awkward and sensitive child, is preternaturally gifted, and his family envisions him becoming the next Mozart. His talent takes him far—to England, France, and then Russia, where he becomes a famous...
As I Lay Dying April 7, 2026
Faulkner’s fifth novel follows a grim yet darkly humorous pilgrimage, as Addie Bundren’s family sets out to fulfill her final wish: to be buried in her native Jefferson, Mississippi, far from the miserable backwater surroundings of her married life. Told through the perspective of multiple family...
The River Is Waiting June 10, 2025
Corby Ledbetter is struggling. New fatherhood, the loss of his job, and a growing secret addiction have thrown his marriage to his beloved Emily into a tailspin. And that’s before he causes the tragedy that tears the family apart. Sentenced to prison, Corby struggles to survive life on the inside,...
The Prospectors October 8, 2024
The middle daughter of struggling California fruit farmers, Alice Bush is accustomed to feeling inferior and destitute. But when her elder sister’s husband strikes a vein of gold in the Yukon Territory, Alice joins a wave of white settlers making the dangerous trek to the Klondike, thus beginning a...
French Braid February 21, 2023
The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever leave home, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband, Robin....
The Farm at the Edge of the World June 14, 2022
1939, Will and Alice are evacuated to a granite farm in north Cornwall, perched on a windswept cliff. There they meet the farmer's daughter, Maggie, and enjoy a childhood largely protected from the ravages of war. But in the sweltering summer of 1943, something happens that will have tragic...
The Hotel New Hampshire April 10, 2018
So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal...
Swing Time September 5, 2017
Two brown girls dream of being dancers—but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early...
Pachinko February 7, 2017
In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger. When she discovers she is pregnant—and that her lover is married—she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan.
But her decision to...
Golden Age June 28, 2016
It’s 1987, and the next generation of Langdons is facing economic, social, and political challenges unlike anything their ancestors have encountered. Michael and Richie, twin sons of World War II hero Frank, work in the high-stakes worlds of government and finance—but their fiercest enemies may be...
A Spool of Blue Thread April 26, 2016
From Red’s parents, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to the grandchildren carrying the Whitshank legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century, the Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate an indefinable kind of specialness, but like all families, their stories reveal only part...
Early Warning January 12, 2016
It’s 1953, and the Langdons are at a crossroads. Walter, their stalwart patriarch, has died unexpectedly, and his wife must try to keep their farm going. But of their five children, only one will remain to work the land. The others scatter to Washington, DC, California, and everywhere in...
Some Luck July 7, 2015
1920, Denby, Iowa: Rosanna and Walter Langdon have just welcomed their firstborn son, Frank, into their family farm. He will be the oldest of five.
Each chapter in this extraordinary novel covers a single year, encompassing the sweep of history as the Langdons abide by time-honored values...
Claire of the Sea Light July 1, 2014
Just as her father makes the wrenching decision to send her away for a chance at a better life, Claire Limyè Lanmè—Claire of the Sea Light—suddenly disappears. As the people of the Haitian seaside community of Ville Rose search for her, painful secrets, haunting memories, and startling truths are...
The Lowland June 17, 2014
Born just fifteen months apart, Subhash and Udayan Mitra are inseparable brothers, one often mistaken for the other in the Calcutta neighborhood where they grow up. But they are also opposites, with gravely different futures ahead. It is the 1960s, and Udayan—charismatic and impulsive—finds himself...
Palisades Park October 29, 2013
Growing up in the 1930s, there is no more magical place than Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey—especially for seven-year-old Antoinette, who horrifies her mother by insisting on the unladylike nickname Toni, and her brother, Jack. Toni helps her parents, Eddie and Adele Stopka, at the stand...
NW August 27, 2013
Set in northwest London, Zadie Smith’s brilliant tragicomic novel follows four locals—Leah, Natalie, Felix, and Nathan—as they try to make adult lives outside of Caldwell, the council estate of their childhood.
In private houses and public parks, at work and at play, these Londoners inhabit a...
And the Mountains Echoed May 21, 2013
Khaled Hosseini, the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, has written a new novel about how we love, how we take care of one another, and how the choices we make resonate through generations. In this tale revolving around not just parents and children...
The Stranger's Child September 4, 2012
In the summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge schoolmate—a handsome, aristocratic young poet named Cecil Valance—to his family’s home outside London. George is enthralled by Cecil, and soon his sister, Daphne, is equally besotted by him. That weekend, Cecil writes a poem that, after he is...
The Condor Passes April 10, 2012
Like many people in turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans, Thomas Henry Oliver came to the city to escape a dull life—in his case, a childhood in the backwoods of the Midwest. But few New Orleans immigrants find as much prosperity as Oliver does amongst the city's lively streets, amassing an...
The Wapshot Chronicle June 28, 2011
John Cheever, best known for his short stories dealing with upper-middle-class suburban life, was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912. Cheever published his first short story at the age of seventeen. He was the recipient of a 1951 Guggenheim Fellowship and winner of a National Book Award for The...
The Vagrants February 16, 2010
Morning dawns on the provincial city of Muddy River. A young woman, Gu Shan, a bold spirit and a follower of Chairman Mao, has renounced her faith in Communism. Now a political prisoner, she is to be executed for her dissent. Her distraught mother, determined to follow the custom of burning her only...
Lark and Termite January 12, 2010
Lark and Termite is a rich, wonderfully alive novel about seventeen year old Lark and her brother, Termite, living in West Virginia in the 1950s. Their mother, Lola, is absent, while their aunt, Nonie, raises them as her own, and Termite’s father, Corporal Robert Leavitt, is caught up in the early...
Consequences May 27, 2008
"One of the most accomplished writers of fiction of our day" (The Washington Post ) follows the lives and loves of three women--Lorna, Molly, and Ruth--from World War II-era London to the close of the century. Told in Lively's incomparable prose, this is a powerful story of growth, death, and...
The Virgin of Small Plains May 29, 2007
For seventeen years, a rural community in Kansas has faithfully tended the grave of an anonymous teenage girl christened the Virgin of Small Plains. And some claim that, perhaps owing to the girl’s intervention, strange miracles and unexplainable healings have occurred. Slowly, word of the legend...
The Kitchen God's Wife September 21, 2006
Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past—including the terrible truth even Helen does...
On Beauty August 29, 2006
On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and...
Until I Find You May 30, 2006
Until I Find You is the story of the actor Jack Burns – his life, loves, celebrity and astonishing search for the truth about his parents.
When he is four years old, Jack travels with his mother Alice, a tattoo artist, to several North Sea ports in search of his father, William Burns. From...
A Spell of Winter December 6, 2001
Cathy and her brother, Rob, have forged a passionate refuge against the terror of loneliness and family secrets, but their sibling love becomes fraught with danger. As Catherine fights free of her dark present and haunting past, the spell of winter that has held her in its grasp begins to break.
Before You Sleep April 1, 2001
Through the sublimely unreliable voice of its narrator, Karin, Before You Sleep reaches back from present day Oslo to 1930s Brooklyn to relate the emotional legacies of the Blom family.
Karin is both playful and melancholy—a serial seductress who defines herself in contrast to the women in her...
By the Light of My Father's Smile August 31, 1999
A family from the United States goes to the remote Sierras in Mexico--the writer-to-be, Susannah; her sister, Magdalena; her father and mother. And there, amid an endangered band of mixed-race Blacks and Indians called the Mundo, they begin an encounter that will change them more than they could...
A Good House August 2, 1999
Set in a small Ontario town, A Good House follows several families whose lives become quietly intertwined over the course of decades. Through shifting perspectives, the novel traces marriages, friendships, and everyday routines, revealing how ordinary moments—dinners, conversations, small...
Sent for You Yesterday April 15, 1998
Set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Sent for You Yesterday weaves together the lives of a close-knit community through memory, storytelling, and shifting perspectives. At its center is Doot, a writer who returns to his childhood neighborhood, revisiting the people and events that shaped his...
The World According to Garp June 23, 1997
Powerful and political, with unforgettable characters and timeless themes, The World According to Garp is John Irving’s breakout novel. The precursor of Irving’s later protest novels, it is the story of Jenny, an unmarried nurse who becomes a single mom and a feminist leader, beloved but...
The Moor's Last Sigh January 14, 1997
Moraes "Moor" Zogoiby, the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinese spice merchants and crime lords, is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic...
The Wild Palms October 31, 1995
In this feverishly beautiful novel—originally titled If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem—William Faulkner interweaves two narratives, each wholly absorbing in its own right, each subtly illuminating the other. In New Orleans in 1937, a man and a woman embark on a headlong flight into the wilderness of...
East of Eden October 1, 1992
Set in the rich farmland of California’s Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. Here is a work in...
The Unvanquished October 29, 1991
Set in Mississippi during the Civil War and Reconstruction, THE UNVANQUISHED focuses on the Sartoris family, who, with their code of personal responsibility and courage, stand for the best of the Old South's traditions.
The Sound and the Fury January 30, 1991
The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by...
Latecomers February 19, 1990
In Latecomers the author of the bestselling Hotel Du Lac extends her range to produce a glowing masterpiece about the ambiguous pleasures of friendship and domesticity. Hartmann and Fibich are "latecomers" to England, brought over as children from Nazi Germany.
No two men could be more dissimilar:...
The Prince of Tides December 1, 1987
A modern American classic and a sweeping family saga that spans decades, this powerful work of Southern literary fiction is the story of the volatile Tom Wingo, his brilliant but troubled twin sister, Savannah, and the complex and damaging legacy of their dysfunctional family. Moving between the...
Cold Spring Harbor August 11, 1987
Evan Shepard was born with good looks, bad luck, and a love for the open road. But it was on one such drive, with his father from rural Long Island into lower Manhattan, that Evan’s life would be changed forever. When their car breaks down on a Greenwich Village street, Evan’s father presses a...