Themes
Books About Family
Novels that put the family at the centre — its bonds, fractures and legacies.
20 books · ranked
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1
In Cold Blood
A Kansas farm-family murder reconstructed in novelistic detail; the book that created the true-crime genre.
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2
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Seven generations of one family in a town where the magical is everyday; the defining novel of magical realism.
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3
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Sharp, cool essays on 1960s America; the book that set the standard for the personal essay.
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4
Beloved
A formerly enslaved mother is haunted, literally, by the past she escaped; a towering, harrowing masterpiece.
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5
Maus
Spiegelman recounts his father Vladek's experience as a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz, told through interviews in the present day and rendered as comics in which Jews are mice and Nazis are cats. The two-volume work won a Pulitzer Prize and is one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust in any medium, as well as a meditation on the act of bearing witness.
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6
Sophie's World
A teenager receives mysterious lessons that walk through the whole history of Western philosophy; a story and a course in one.
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7
Sense and Sensibility
Elinor and Marianne Dashwood embody two opposing temperaments — sense and sensibility — as they navigate love, heartbreak and financial precarity after their father's death leaves them dependent on others' goodwill. Austen's first published novel is a sophisticated study of what it costs women to feel and what it costs them not to.
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8
The Stranger
A man feels nothing at his mother's funeral and drifts toward catastrophe; the cornerstone of existential fiction.
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9
The Shining
A family caretakes an empty winter hotel that wants the father for itself; King's masterclass in dread.
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10
Between the World and Me
A letter to a son about being Black in America; urgent, lyrical and unflinching.
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11
Educated
A woman raised off-grid by survivalist parents finds her way to a PhD; an astonishing memoir of self-invention.
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12
Exhalation
Beautifully reasoned science-fiction stories about time, free will and meaning; cerebral and humane.
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13
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
An orphan learns he is a wizard and finds a home at a school of magic; the book that made a generation read.
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14
Great Expectations
A blacksmith's boy, a mysterious fortune and the question of what really makes a gentleman — Dickens at his most personal.
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15
The Road
A father and son walk through a dead, ash-grey world; stripped-bare, unbearably tender post-apocalyptic fiction.
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16
A Tale of Two Cities
In the years before and during the French Revolution, the fates of the Manette family, the emigre Charles Darnay, and the dissolute English lawyer Sydney Carton converge in Paris and London. Dickens's novel is about resurrection, self-sacrifice and the terror that accompanies revolutions that began with idealism. It contains one of the most famous opening sentences and one of the most famous final lines in English fiction.
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17
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou's memoir of her childhood and adolescence in the American South and in California — the racism, the trauma and the gradual emergence of her voice through literature. One of the most widely assigned and most challenged memoirs in American education, it announces one of the great literary voices of the 20th century.
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18
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Journalist Mikael Blomkvist teams up with the brilliant, damaged hacker Lisbeth Salander to investigate a 40-year-old disappearance from a wealthy Swedish family — and uncovers something far darker. Larsson's novel launched the Millennium series and introduced one of the most compelling anti-heroines in crime fiction.
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19
The Goldfinch
When a bomb destroys the museum where he is visiting, thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives but his mother does not. In the chaos, he takes a small Dutch painting — The Goldfinch — which will haunt his life for the next decade and a half, through foster care, antiques, addiction and a criminal underworld. Tartt's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a meditation on art, loss and the things we carry.
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20
The Corrections
The three grown children of Alfred and Enid Lambert return home for a final Christmas as Alfred's Parkinson's progresses and Enid refuses to accept what is happening to her marriage and family. Franzen's National Book Award-winning novel moves between the Lambert children's separate American lives and their parents' Midwestern home in a portrait of family, decline and the late-20th-century United States.