Family & Heritage

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

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Afterlive

What do we owe the people who need us when we are barely holding ourselves together? Antonia Vega, a recently retired literature professor, is still reeling from the sudden death of her beloved husband when her life begins to unravel further: her unpredictable sister disappears, and a pregnant, undocumented teenager turns up seeking shelter. Accustomed to finding answers in books, Antonia discovers that grief and compassion demand more than words. Set in rural Vermont, this intimate, quietly powerful novel explores sisterhood, immigration, moral responsibility, and the courage it takes to begin again. As Antonia navigates a world fractured by fear and distrust, she must decide how to honour her own needs without turning away from the suffering of others.

Dominican Republic 2020

The Discomfort of Evening

The Discomfort of Evening

Lucas Rijneveld

Ten-year-old Jas lives with her deeply religious family on a dairy farm in the rural Netherlands. Her world is shaped by strict religious beliefs, the rhythms of farm life and the unspoken rules governing her family. When her older brother Matthies dies in an accident, Jas struggles to understand the loss and begins to believe that her childhood prayer may somehow have caused his death. As grief settles over the household, her parents withdraw into their own suffering, leaving Jas and her siblings increasingly isolated. Unable to express her fear and confusion directly, Jas retreats into a disturbing inner world filled with strange fantasies, bodily anxieties and dark imaginings. Through the child’s unsettling perspective, Rijneveld portrays a family gradually disintegrating under the weight of unprocessed grief and religious guilt. The novel’s vivid, often shocking imagery captures the vulnerability of childhood and the desperate search for meaning when familiar structures of belief and family life begin to collapse. Winner of the 2020 International Booker Prize, the novel is a haunting exploration of loss, repression and the limits of understanding.

Netherlands 2020

Sleep Well, Mommy

Sleep Well, Mommy

Sleep Well, Mommy, also published in English as The Only Child, is a psychological thriller that explores the disturbing connections between childhood, violence, and the origins of evil. Seonkyeong, a criminal psychologist, receives an unexpected opportunity when Yi Byeongdo, a notorious serial killer who has refused to speak publicly, agrees to be interviewed by her. At the same time, her husband brings his eleven-year-old daughter, Hayeong, to live with them following the mysterious deaths of the grandparents who had been raising her. Seonkyeong initially tries to welcome the girl into their home, but Hayeong’s unsettling behaviour soon begins to trouble her. As Seonkyeong investigates the pasts of both the killer and her stepdaughter, she discovers disturbing similarities between them. The more she learns, the more she questions what she thought she understood about Hayeong and the circumstances surrounding her family’s deaths. Blending domestic suspense with criminal psychology, Seo’s novel examines the relationship between childhood trauma, family secrets, and the nature of evil.

South Korea 2020

Lost Children Archive

Lost Children Archive

Valeria Luiselli

Lost Children Archive follows a family of four on a road trip from New York to the American Southwest. The parents, both documentarians, are working on separate projects: the father is recording the sounds of disappearing Apache communities, while the mother is researching the stories of migrant children who have crossed the US–Mexico border alone. As they travel through the vast American landscape, their professional interests begin to shape the family’s conversations and expose growing tensions in their marriage. Through the perspectives of the mother and, later, her young son, the novel explores the distance between adults and children, the limits of storytelling, and the moral responsibility of witnessing other people’s suffering. The family’s journey becomes intertwined with the experiences of two migrant children whose fate remains uncertain. Blending documentary fragments, photographs, maps, and literary references, Valeria Luiselli examines migration, displacement, and the ways families preserve or lose their histories. The novel asks how we can listen to stories of suffering without reducing them to distant headlines.

Brightly Shining

Brightly Shining

Ingvild H. Rishøi

In the working-class Oslo neighbourhood of Tøyen, ten-year-old Ronja and her older sister Melissa are trying to hold their family together. Their father, who struggles with alcoholism and cannot keep a job, briefly finds work selling Christmas trees. But when he returns to his old habits, Melissa must take his place at the stall, working long hours before and after school. Ronja joins her, charming customers and selling Christmas wreaths to help keep food on the table. Told through Ronja’s observant, hopeful eyes, Brightly Shining captures the strange mixture of childhood innocence and adult responsibility. As Christmas approaches, the sisters dream of a warmer, kinder world, finding occasional help from strangers while concealing the reality of their home life. Their love for their father remains tangled with the knowledge that they cannot rely on him. With tenderness, quiet humour, and touches of magical realism, Ingvild H. Rishøi explores poverty, addiction, sisterhood, and the fragile hope that kindness can offer even in the darkest circumstances.

Kin

Miljenko Jergović

Spanning the twentieth century, Kin is an expansive family saga that traces generations of one family through the turbulent history of the Balkans. Beginning with forgotten relatives and seemingly insignificant objects—a grandfather’s beekeeping journals, a rusty lighter, an old military raincoat—Miljenko Jergović reconstructs a world shaped by personal memories, family secrets, and historical upheaval. From the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the two World Wars to the Cold War and the Bosnian War of the 1990s, the novel follows the transformations of Sarajevo and the changing identities of the people who call it home. Blending memoir, fiction, and historical reflection, Jergović explores how political violence and shifting borders reverberate through ordinary lives. At its heart, Kin is a meditation on belonging, memory, and the fragile connections between generations—a tribute to a multicultural world threatened by nationalism, intolerance, and forgetting.

Bosnia and Herzegovina 2021

Co-Wives, Co-Widows

Co-Wives, Co-Widows

Adrienne Yabouza

Set in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, Co-Wives, Co-Widows tells the story of Ndongo Passy and Grekpoubou, two women who share a husband and have developed a close relationship despite the complexities of their family arrangement. When their husband, Lidou, a successful building contractor, suddenly dies, his opportunistic relatives accuse the women of poisoning him in an attempt to seize his property and inheritance. Expelled from their home and deprived of their security, the two widows must find a way to protect themselves and their children. As they confront corruption, patriarchal traditions, and a justice system that offers them little protection, they discover that their greatest strength lies in their solidarity with one another and with other women in their community. Combining humour, social satire, and vivid portrayals of everyday life, Yabouza explores women’s rights, economic vulnerability, and the unequal treatment of widows. Against a backdrop of political instability and social change, the novel celebrates female friendship and collective resistance, showing how women can challenge injustice by standing together.

Central African Republic 2021

The Arsonists' City

The Arsonists' City

The Arsonists’ City follows the Nasr family, whose members are scattered across Beirut and the United States but remain connected by their shared history and their ancestral home in Lebanon. When Idris decides to sell the Beirut house following his father’s death, his wife, Mazna, and their three adult children return to prevent the sale. Their reunion brings buried secrets, old romantic entanglements, and unresolved resentments to the surface. Through shifting timelines, Alyan reveals how the family came together and how migration, political conflict, and personal choices gradually shaped their relationships. Each family member has developed a different understanding of home, belonging, and responsibility, creating tensions that threaten to pull them apart. Against the backdrop of Lebanon’s turbulent history, the novel explores intergenerational trauma, cultural identity, and the complicated bonds that connect people to their families and places of origin.

Three Apples Fell from the Sky

Three Apples Fell from the Sky

Narine Abgaryan

Set in the remote Armenian mountain village of Maran, Three Apples Fell from the Sky follows a close-knit community whose inhabitants live according to longstanding traditions, local legends, and a shared understanding of the world. When Anatolia, an elderly woman who has spent her life in the village, becomes convinced that she is about to die, an unexpected visit brings the possibility of a new beginning. Her story unfolds alongside those of other villagers, revealing old rivalries, unexpected affection, and the quiet resilience that sustains their community. Blending humour, folklore, and magical realism, Abgaryan portrays a place where hardship exists alongside everyday tenderness. The novel celebrates the strength of human connection, the importance of preserving cultural traditions, and the small miracles that can transform lives even in a community seemingly forgotten by the outside world.

The Promise

The Promise follows the Swart family, white South Africans living on a farm outside Pretoria, across several decades of political and social transformation. The story begins with the death of Rachel, the family matriarch, who extracts a promise from her husband: that their Black domestic worker, Salome, will receive ownership of the small house where she has lived for years. However, the promise is repeatedly postponed and ultimately neglected, becoming a symbol of the family’s moral failures and the enduring inequalities of South African society. Through the lives of the Swart siblings—Anton, Astrid, and Amor—Damon Galgut examines how resentment, guilt, privilege, and personal disillusionment shape relationships across generations. The novel’s shifting narrative perspective and distinctive structure mirror the family’s fragmentation and the country’s unfinished reckoning with its past. Spanning the final years of apartheid and the decades that follow, The Promise explores the gap between words and actions, revealing how unfulfilled obligations can expose the deepest contradictions within a family and a nation.

South Africa 2021

The Furrows

Namwali Serpell

“I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.” When Cassandra Williams, known as C, is twelve years old, her seven-year-old brother, Wayne, disappears during a swimming accident. His body is never found, leaving C trapped in a grief complicated by guilt and unanswered questions. Their mother refuses to abandon hope and dedicates herself to searching for missing children, while their father eventually leaves the family. As C grows older, the loss refuses to remain in the past: she begins seeing Wayne everywhere, recognising his face in strangers on trains, in cafés, and in crowded streets. Then she meets a man who shares her brother’s name and seems connected to the mystery of her loss. Moving between perspectives and shifting versions of reality, Namwali Serpell explores how grief distorts memory and how the stories we tell ourselves can become inseparable from what we believe to be true. Both intimate and formally adventurous, The Furrows is a haunting meditation on sibling love, racial identity, and the impossible desire to recover those we have lost.

United States 2022

We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I

We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I

In We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I, Palestinian writer and human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh reflects on his complex relationship with his father, Aziz Shehadeh, a prominent lawyer and advocate for Palestinian rights. Through personal memories, family history, and historical research, Raja reconstructs his father’s life and examines the political convictions that shaped their relationship. Aziz believed in pursuing justice through legal means and sought peaceful solutions to the Palestinian struggle, while his son developed his own understanding of resistance, identity, and belonging. Their differences often created emotional distance, leaving unspoken feelings and misunderstandings between them. Against the backdrop of British rule, the creation of Israel, and the continuing transformation of Palestinian society, Shehadeh explores how political conflict enters even the most intimate family relationships. The memoir is both a tribute to his father and an attempt to understand him more fully, asking whether shared experiences and renewed understanding can bridge the distance between generations. It offers a deeply personal meditation on family, history, reconciliation, and the possibility of connection despite profound differences.

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About this theme

Books: 105
Countries: 49

Countries with this theme

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Central African Republic

Dominican Republic