The best books about really complicated families

Vera and Nadezhda are sisters who must set aside their differences to ward off an interloper: a gold-digging “fluffy pink grenade” who gets her claws into their exceedingly difficult emigre father. The ensuing battle uncovers hidden chapters of a dark family history, and Lewycka is both masterful and unflinching in her treatment of traumatic history. I was expecting a light read from start to finish, and while the book is very funny, it is also disarmingly profound.   

When August’s grandfather—the bedrock of a multi-generational Wiradjuri family—dies, she must return to Australia, and to the town of Prosperous. There, she comes face-to-face with the things that have driven her out, a process that began long before her birth. The book’s three narrators chart the casualties of colonialism: the loss of indigenous culture, the stamping out of language, the land that is taken and forever altered. But the book is so much more than a catalogue of losses, and Winch’s song is ultimately one of identity—and history—reclaimed.  

For Katya Geller’s mother, mathematics is the key to all things, a lesson she effectively imparts to her daughter. But when Katya learns that her mother is sick, she is transported into a past that no longer adds up. Her father’s death and her mother’s subsequent undoing, her childhood in the USSR, her arrival in the US, and her own restless history of love combine for a ride that is wild, hilarious, and deeply affecting. The novel is also a stylistic marvel by a writer unafraid to move in brave and unexpected ways.   

Pramesh, a hostel manager, lives a quiet life with his wife and daughter. His job is to help guests who have traveled to the city of Banares in the hope of good deaths. But when a body is pulled from the Ganges, a complicated family history surfaces alongside it, one that threatens the joyful stability of the present. Champaneri’s prose is stunning. Reviewers have aptly called the book “transcendent”, and I found myself entirely transported by this meditation of life, death, and things past.    

Nobody writes complicated families the way that Fox does. The novel describes a going-away party that is an emotional crime scene of unvoiced (and voiced) resentments by neglected, grown-up children. The book (along with Fox’s memoir, Borrowed Finery) is not just an examination of dysfunction, it is a journey into the dark heart of family, and a portrayal of the damage that is perpetuated and never undone.