It took me writing a whole novel to finally understand that the biggest factor shaping my thematic obsessions is my familial experiences, both the good and the bad. Leo Tolstoy wrote that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. Tola Rotimi wrote that family is “everyone’s first war.” It would seem that the question of family is most compelling when there is unhappiness involved. My own interest as a writer is in rifling through that unhappiness to reach healing and wholesomeness. As my own life experience has shown me, this is not only possible but necessary.
A mysterious plague known as the Grey grips the small village of Pilam, which the world has quarantined without pity. Laying waste to Pilam’s residents, the sickness saps its victims of strength, drains the color from their eyes, and kills all promise. Only the young are immune. But beyond the barricades and walls of soldiers, there are rumors of a cure. Dunka, the eldest son of a family reeling from the Grey, takes on the daunting task of leaving Pilam to find that cure for his siblings before it’s too late.
His brother and sisters, however, have plans of their own. Navigating the chaos of violence, hunger, and death, each of them tries to make sense of the bleak circumstances, forging new bonds with other juvenile survivors left to their own devices.
Thisstory about a man and his son travelling across a vile, wasted America is stark, spare, and brutal. It’s also spare in its idea of family by casting a sickly man and his boy against a brutal, inhumane world as they depend on each other to survive. They are each other’s reason for remaining tethered to a life that has lost all meaning; but they are also each other’s reason for refusing to give in to the selfishness and inhumanity of a world that demands that of everyone trying to stay alive. This is the novel that cleaves my life as a writer into two unequal halves. After I had read it for the first time, I knew that something had to change about my writing because I saw how much was possible with so little.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive, this "tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living master. It's gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful" (San Francisco Chronicle).
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if…
Another landmark in my life as a reader-writer, I often describe this book as the one that set me free. It freed my understanding of what a novel could be, showing me how a story could be both whimsical and serious at the same time. It’s also expansive in its idea of family, weaving a tapestry of complex, colorful individuals bound variously to each other by blood or love but uniformly to one location – the House – across the great span of time.
One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, and alive with unforgettable men and women -- brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul -- this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.
A propulsive, elegant novel that goes back and forth in time remembering the progressive scattering of a family across the globe because of a singular decision by its patriarch – to leave – and then charting their coming back together. It moved me, putting its finger on the meaning of family in a way that felt true and specific to my own experiences as a son and a brother.
A "buoyant" and "rapturous" debut novel (The Wall Street Journal) about the transformative power of unconditional love
Electric, exhilarating, and beautifully crafted, Ghana Must Go introduces the world to Taiye Selasi, a novelist of extraordinary talent. In a sweeping narrative that takes readers from Accra to Lagos to London to New York, it is at once a portrait of a modern family and an exploration of the importance of where we come from to who we are.
A renowned surgeon and failed husband, Kweku Sai dies suddenly at dawn outside his home in suburban Accra. The news of his death…
This mountainous whirlwind of a book is many things and does many things. A dazzling compendium of styles and genres, it’s probably the most ambitious debut I’ve ever read. It charts three family lines across a century as their respective trajectories meet and separate in a kaleidoscope of meaning, fleeting coincidence, and pure ecstasy. It made me think of how we never get to choose our ancestors and how we are stuck, for better or worse, with who they were and with who we are as a result.
“A dazzling debut, establishing Namwali Serpell as a writer on the world stage.”—Salman Rushdie, The New York Times Book Review
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Dwight Garner, The New York Times • The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • The Atlantic • BuzzFeed • Tordotcom • Kirkus Reviews • BookPage
WINNER OF: The Arthur C. Clarke Award • The Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award • The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction • The Windham-Campbell Prizes for Fiction
1904. On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the…
Ian McEwan’s first novel, it’s about a family of siblings left to their own devices after they lose both parents in a matter of weeks, hiding the fact from the authorities and subsisting in a strange existence of their own making. A disturbing coming-of-age tale that explores teenage angst and discontent, while toeing the line of that most forbidden of family taboos that shall remain unnamed, since it’s so easy to reduce this novel to being about just that. There is tenderness and deep emotion here, for sure, but it’s played quietly and between the lines. I’ve read it many times, and with each read, I feel more strongly that it’s really a damning critique of a society that could push children to such extents, making the larger point that no family can exist sustainably in a vacuum of its own making.
In the arid summer heat, four children - Jack, Julie, Sue and Tom - find themselves abruptly orphaned. All the routines of childhood are cast aside as the children adapt to a now parentless world. Alone in the house together, the children's lives twist into something unrecognisable as the outside begins to bear down on them.
I became fascinated with 16th-century and 17th-century Europe after reading Don Quixote many years ago. Since then, every novel or nonfiction book about that era has felt both ancient and contemporary. I’m always struck by how much our environment has changed—transportation, communication, housing, government—but also how little we as people have changed when it comes to ambition, love, grief, and greed. I doubled down my reading on that time period when I researched my novel, Dulcinea. Many people read in the eras of the Renaissance, World War II, or ancient Greece, so I’m hoping to introduce them to the Baroque Age.
Dolça Llull Prat, a wealthy Barcelona woman, is only 15 when she falls in love with an impoverished poet-solder. Theirs is a forbidden relationship, one that overcomes many obstacles until the fledgling writer renders her as the lowly Dulcinea in his bestseller.
By doing so, he unwittingly exposes his muse to gossip. But when Dolça receives his deathbed note asking to see her, she races across Spain with the intention of unburdening herself of an old secret.
On the journey, she encounters bandits, the Inquisition, illness, and the choices she's made. At its heart, Dulcinea is about how we betray the people we love, what happens when we succumb to convention, and why we squander the few chances we get to change our lives.
10,000+ authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them.
Browse their picks for the best books about
family,
survival,
and
Ghana.
