Family & Heritage

Sagas of lineage, tradition, and the ties that bind generations.

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Mothersick

When sisters Mara and Nell watched their parents’ marriage fall apart, they made a pact: no husbands, no babies, and no repeating their family’s mistakes. For years, their bond was the one thing they could count on. But when Mara unexpectedly falls in love and becomes a mother, the sisters find themselves on opposite sides of a life-changing divide. While Mara struggles with the overwhelming contradictions of motherhood, Nell throws herself into a relationship that threatens the independence she has fought to protect. Meanwhile, their absent mother and their aunt Jean hold the key to family secrets that refuse to stay buried. An intimate, sharply observed novel about sisterhood, motherhood, and the complicated inheritance of family, Mothersick asks whether love can survive when the lives we choose lead us in different directions.

United Kingdom 2027

Wet Ink

London, 1969. Trapped in a loveless marriage and the monotony of suburban motherhood, Mitzy Barlow discovers an unexpected escape: writing steamy stories inspired by classic novels. When she begins secretly distributing them inside Tupperware containers at her parties, her private passion becomes a sensation among local housewives. Writing under the pseudonym Queen B, Mitzy sparks a quiet revolution in female desire, friendship, and freedom. But as rumours threaten her family’s reputation and livelihood, she must decide how much she is willing to risk to rewrite her own story.

United Kingdom 2027

Strange Harm

Ainslie Hogarth

When teenager Janie Yearling vanishes from the small town of Gold River, her grieving parents become the centre of a media frenzy. Her mother, Annette, turns her pain into a carefully maintained public image, while her father, Calvin, becomes a figure of suspicion. Fifteen years later, a podcaster with a troubled past offers to reopen the case, stirring up old rumours about a mysterious spirit said to haunt the nearby woods. As the investigation unfolds, the boundaries between truth, superstition, and spectacle begin to blur. A chilling, darkly comic novel about grief, obsession, and the stories we tell to make sense of tragedy.

Somewhere, Something Incredible

Somewhere, Something Incredible

San Diego, 1969. As America prepares to land a man on the moon, Gwen is struggling to keep her family together. After a head injury transforms her eighty-year-old mother, Lucille, into a bold, unpredictable woman who invites a much younger man into her home, Gwen fears that her mother is being taken advantage of. Meanwhile, Gwen’s eighteen-year-old daughter is grieving a friend lost to the Vietnam War. As the world stands on the threshold of an extraordinary achievement, three generations of women must confront grief, control, and the courage it takes to let go.

United States 2027

Three Sisters

Three estranged sisters reunite at their wealthy father’s villa on the sun-drenched Italian island of Capri, nearly a decade after their family fell apart. Cora, Diana, and Kiki have built very different lives, but their unpredictable father has summoned them for a reason none of them expects. When his shocking announcement exposes old wounds and deepens their mistrust, the sisters must confront the secrets that have kept them apart. A witty, emotional family drama about sisterhood, betrayal, forgiveness, and the possibility of starting over.

Eye Spy

Waiting for the Eurostar in Paris, Mark is travelling home to London with his four-year-old daughter, Molly, and teenage stepdaughter, Freya. During a game of “Eye Spy,” Molly suddenly identifies a stranger as a “Bad Man.” Mark initially dismisses her words as a child’s imagination, but when he spots the same man boarding their train with a suspicious-looking suitcase, unease turns to fear. As the train speeds through the Channel Tunnel, Mark begins to suspect that the stranger poses a genuine threat. Trapped in a confined space with hundreds of passengers and no easy way to escape, he must work out who the man is and what he wants. But as unsettling connections to Mark’s past emerge, the danger becomes increasingly personal, and protecting his daughters becomes a race against time. Unfolding over a tense train journey, Eye Spy combines claustrophobic suspense with an emotional story about parenthood, trust, and the lengths someone will go to protect their family. C. M. Ewan transforms an ordinary trip into a terrifying ordeal where a child’s innocent observation could be the only warning that matters.

France United Kingdom 2026

A Spy in the Blood

A Spy in the Blood

Mark Wolfe was once one of Britain’s greatest spies. Now working behind a desk at MI6 headquarters in London, he has settled into a quiet life as a civil servant, keeping his dangerous past hidden from his family. His routine changes when he discovers that his daughter, Jody, shares his ambition to join the intelligence service. But MI6 has recruited her without his knowledge, and Mark soon begins to suspect that something is wrong. When Jody disappears during a mission in Afghanistan, the intelligence service appears unwilling to help. Worse, officials suggest that she may have betrayed her country. Refusing to accept their explanation, Mark returns to the world of espionage he thought he had left behind. With limited support and enemies he cannot easily identify, he sets out to find his daughter and uncover the truth. Moving between London and Afghanistan, A Spy in the Blood explores the cost of secrecy, the fragile bonds between parents and children, and the moral compromises of intelligence work. Paul Warner combines the tension of a contemporary spy thriller with a deeply personal story about how far a father will go to protect his family.

Afghanistan United Kingdom 2026

Abundance

Set in suburban Miami, Abundance follows the Bharwani family, a Muslim Indian American family navigating ambition, faith, sacrifice, and the complicated pursuit of the American Dream. Sixty-year-old Sakeena Bharwani co-owns a Dunkin’ franchise with her husband, Ramzan. Thirty years earlier, she left Rawalpindi, Pakistan, to build a new life in the United States. Over the years, she has made difficult compromises between her religious belief in naseeb—the idea of destiny—and her desire to shape her own future. Now facing a life-threatening liver condition, Sakeena refuses a potentially life-saving transplant, believing that she should accept her fate rather than intervene in what she sees as God’s plan. Desperate to save his wife, Ramzan tries to bring their adult children together. Their eldest daughter, Fareen, is consumed by her ambitions in the competitive world of finance, while their son, Adnan, is entangled in questionable international business dealings that prevent him from returning home. Their daughter Kawal, meanwhile, must navigate her own responsibilities and family expectations. As Sakeena’s condition deteriorates, the family is forced to confront years of compromises, unspoken resentments, and conflicting ideas about what makes a life meaningful. Through their struggles, Lakhani examines the tension between individual ambition and family duty, the immigrant experience, and the question of how much control people truly have over their destinies. With a nuanced portrayal of a multigenerational immigrant family, Abundance explores the costs of success and the sacrifices people make in pursuit of security, belonging, and happiness.

United States 2026

Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter

Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter

In 1963, Ada Ferrer’s mother fled Cuba with her infant daughter, leaving behind her nine-year-old son, Poly. What began as a desperate family decision became a separation that shaped generations. Decades later, Ferrer draws on letters, family memories, and historical archives to reconstruct the lives of those who left and those who stayed. Tracing her family’s story through the Cuban Revolution, migration, and the legacy of slavery, she explores how political upheaval enters the most intimate corners of family life. Both a personal reckoning and a powerful work of history, this moving memoir examines the enduring bonds of kinship, the meaning of home, and the stories we inherit.

A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing

A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing

Alice Evelyn Yang

Spanning three generations and moving between Japanese-occupied Manchuria, the Cultural Revolution, and contemporary America, A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing is a dark, magical-realist family saga about inherited trauma, historical violence, and the stories families carry across generations. Twenty-five-year-old Qianze has not seen her father, Weihong, since he abandoned her on the night of her fourteenth birthday. Eleven years later, he reappears at her childhood home in Virginia, aged beyond recognition and struggling with dementia and alcoholism. Haunted by a half-forgotten prophecy, he begins recounting his past, including his violent experiences as a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution and the hardships endured by his mother under Japanese occupation. As Qianze listens, she discovers a family history far more disturbing than she imagined. Strange visions begin to invade her everyday life: fox spirits follow her through the city, and a terrifying mythical creature stalks her nightmares. Blending Chinese and Japanese folklore with historical fiction and supernatural horror, Yang explores how colonialism, political violence, and family secrets shape successive generations. The novel asks whether understanding the past can offer a path toward forgiveness—or whether some histories continue to haunt the living.

Unraveling Threads

Unraveling Threads

In Unraveling Threads: Essays on Inheritance, writer and literary translator Brenda Lin explores the intricate connections between family, cultural identity, language, and the objects that carry memories across generations. Through a collection of personal essays, Lin reflects on her relationship with her mother, whose passion for antique textiles and embroidered baby carriers becomes a window into women’s work, family traditions, and the preservation of cultural heritage. She considers the physical traces that connect parents and children, including the symbolism of an umbilical cord, and examines how language itself can preserve histories that might otherwise disappear. Her reflections extend to her father’s heart surgery, her own experience of motherhood, and her return to Taiwan after decades away. Weaving together personal memories, Taiwanese history, and the material culture of textiles, Lin investigates what we inherit beyond possessions: gestures, stories, responsibilities, and ways of understanding home. Intimate and richly observed, this memoir-in-essays considers how family bonds endure through distance and change, and how returning to one’s roots can become a process of rediscovering oneself.

The Imitation Englishman

The Imitation Englishman

In 1916, as the First World War reshapes the world, Madhusudan Chandra Joshi, a young Indian clerk from the Himalayan town of Almora, travels to Heidelberg to study law and secure a better future. His plans take an unexpected turn when he meets Amir Farooqui, a mysterious revolutionary who draws him into the Hindu–German Conspiracy, an international effort by Indian nationalists in exile to overthrow British colonial rule. As the war makes Germany increasingly dangerous for Indian students and activists, the two men embark on separate journeys: Madhusudan heads to London to continue his education, while Amir travels to San Francisco to reconnect with fellow revolutionaries. In London, Madhusudan encounters the racism and inequalities underpinning the British Empire, forcing him to question his ambitions and his understanding of identity. Moving between India, Europe, and America, Devki Pande’s historical novel explores the complicated relationship between colonialism, education, belonging, and resistance. Inspired by the author’s own family history, it is a story of political awakening, personal transformation, and the search for freedom in an unequal world.

About this theme

Books: 105
Countries: 49

Countries with this theme

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Central African Republic

Dominican Republic