Family & Heritage

1

Palace Walk

Naguib Mahfouz

The first volume of the Cairo Trilogy follows the al-Jawad family in a Cairo alley during the British occupation of Egypt after World War I, centred on the tyrannical patriarch al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad. One of the greatest works in Arabic literature.

Egypt 1956

2

The God of Small Things

Arundhati Roy

Fraternal twins in Kerala, India, are scarred by a childhood tragedy shaped by caste, colonial history, and forbidden love. Roy's Booker Prize-winning debut, written over four years, is celebrated for its lyrical, unconventional prose.

India 1997

3

The House of the Spirits

Isabel Allende

Four generations of the Trueba family in an unnamed South American country, from the early 20th century through a coup modelled on Pinochet's 1973 takeover of Chile. Allende began the novel as a letter to her dying grandfather.

Chile 1982

4

Buddenbrooks

Thomas Mann

The decline of a wealthy merchant family in Lübeck over four generations as bourgeois values give way to artistic temperament and physical decay. Mann's debut novel, written when he was 25, won him the Nobel Prize in 1929.

Germany 1901

5

Pedro Páramo

Juan Rulfo

Juan Preciado travels to the Mexican village of Comala to find his father Pedro Páramo, only to discover it populated entirely by the dead. This 112-page novel, once rejected by two publishers, became one of the most influential in Latin American literature.

Mexico 1955

6

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel García Márquez

Seven generations of the Buendía family in the fictional town of Macondo, Colombia, from its founding through war, plague, and eventual erasure. The novel that defined magical realism and won García Márquez the Nobel Prize.

Colombia 1967

7

The Sound and the Fury

William Faulkner

The decline of the Compson family in the American South is narrated four times from different perspectives, including that of Benjy, a man with an intellectual disability, and told through extreme shifts in chronology. Faulkner's breakthrough novel.

United States 1929

8

East of Eden

John Steinbeck

Two families in California's Salinas Valley across several generations re-enact the Cain and Abel story. Steinbeck called it his magnum opus and the book he had been preparing to write his whole life.

United States 1952