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...
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 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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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 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...
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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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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:...