Family & Heritage

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

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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.

Chitra Demands to Go Home

Chitra Demands to Go Home

Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay

Seventy-five-year-old Chitra is a Bengali widow who has spent much of her life caring for her family and maintaining a beloved home in Kolkata. Now, with her children grown and living their own lives, she looks forward to enjoying her independence and travelling the world. But her plans collapse when she suffers a stroke while visiting her younger son in the United States. After her son also experiences a medical emergency, Chitra finds herself in Tranquil Town, an assisted-living facility in Columbus, Ohio, surrounded by strangers and unfamiliar customs. Determined to return to India, she refuses to accept her new circumstances and relentlessly pressures her sons to take her home. Yet beneath her stubbornness lies a deeper struggle with displacement, ageing, and the loss of control over her own life. With warmth, humour, and emotional insight, Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay explores the complexities of intergenerational relationships, cultural differences, and the meaning of home. Chitra’s story challenges familiar expectations about ageing and family duty, offering a compassionate portrait of a woman determined to live on her own terms.

A House in Sicily

A House in Sicily

Set in postwar Japan in 1959, Twilight in Musashino begins with the discovery of a young Japanese flight attendant strangled on the icy banks of a river. As Detective Fujisawa investigates the murder, his attention turns to a foreign priest and the Guglielmo Church, a charitable Christian mission with an unsettling connection to the victim. What initially appears to be a straightforward criminal investigation gradually reveals a tangled web involving narcotics, postwar relief operations, and international diplomacy. The deeper Fujisawa digs, the more he encounters powerful institutions determined to protect their reputations and conceal uncomfortable truths. Blending meticulous police work with an incisive examination of social power, Seicho Matsumoto constructs a slow-burning mystery in which the pursuit of justice collides with political influence and institutional silence. The novel offers a compelling portrait of a society negotiating its identity in the aftermath of war, exposing the tensions between public morality and private corruption.

My Third Life

Linda once had a life filled with work, family, friendships, and familiar routines. But after the devastating death of her seventeen-year-old daughter, Sonja, and her own cancer diagnosis, everything she once relied on begins to fall apart. Leaving her husband, Richard, and her life in Leipzig behind, Linda retreats to an old farmhouse in the Saxon countryside, where she attempts to live quietly, far removed from the world and its expectations. Her days revolve around tending the garden and caring for the house, but solitude cannot entirely protect her from grief. An unexpected connection with her neighbour, Natascha, and Natascha’s spirited young daughter, Nine, gradually opens a door to renewed human connection. With restrained, perceptive prose, Daniela Krien explores bereavement, motherhood, resilience, and the possibility of beginning again after profound loss. My Third Life is a moving reflection on how life can change irrevocably while still leaving room for hope.

All That Is Left of Life

All That Is Left of Life

Roberta Rossella Recchia

Three generations of the Ansaldo family grapple with the aftermath of a tragic murder in this sweeping, cinematic debut set in 1980s Rome, for fans of Elena Ferrante and Liz Moore. It’s a sultry August night when sixteen-year-old Betta Ansaldo convinces her cousin Miriam to sneak out to the local beach for a party. Only Miriam returns. Traumatized by the violence she’s witnessed, she remains silent. The small community is riven with grief, none more so than the Ansaldos, who search for answers they cannot find. Who did Betta cross paths with on that fateful night? What was she doing there? And how could such a horrific crime happen in such a peaceful place? As the years pass, and Betta’s murder goes unsolved, the Ansaldo family fractures under the weight of their loss. When Miriam meets Leo, a sweet-natured young man with a dark past, their romance seems to turn her life around. But when Leo starts to pull loose the threads of Betta’s story, determined to find out what really happened, his search for the truth risks unraveling everything.

Favorita

Michelle Steinbeck

When Fila receives a mysterious phone call informing her that her estranged mother, Magdalena, has been murdered, she must confront a family history she has spent years trying to escape. Raised by her grandmother in Switzerland, Fila has barely seen her mother since Magdalena scandalised the family by advertising her brothel in a newspaper. Now, carrying her mother’s ashes, Fila travels to Italy to retrace Magdalena’s turbulent life and discover the truth about her death. Her journey becomes a surreal, feverish odyssey populated by feminist revolutionaries, ghosts, fascist deserters, and forgotten victims of violence. As Fila investigates her mother’s past, she uncovers a wider history of patriarchal oppression and violence against women. Blending magical realism, dark humour, historical fiction, and feminist revenge, Favorita explores the complicated inheritance between mothers and daughters, the persistence of trauma across generations, and the struggle to reclaim women’s stories from the forces that seek to silence them.

Switzerland 2026

The Clinging Thing

The Clinging Thing

Munira Tabassum Ahmed

After the loss of a pregnancy, Iqra returns to her mother’s home in the place where she grew up, seeking a way forward while struggling with grief and the weight of memory. As she revisits the stories of her parents and the generations of women who came before her, the boundaries between past and present begin to blur. Memories, dreams, and uncertainties intertwine as Iqra confronts the complicated ties that bind families together. Set within a Bangladeshi-Australian cultural context, The Clinging Thing explores motherhood, inherited expectations, faith, and the obligations we feel toward those who shaped our lives. Through Iqra’s return to her roots, Munira Tabassum Ahmed examines the tension between honouring family history and finding the freedom to define one’s own future. Poetic and introspective, the novel reflects on grief, intergenerational relationships, and the possibility of discovering wonder even when the future remains uncertain.

Nothing to My Name

Nothing to My Name

Kangkang Li Kovacs

Nothing to My Name is a multigenerational family saga following three Chinese women whose lives are shaped by political upheaval, social expectations, and the enduring bonds between mothers and daughters. Inspired by the author’s family history, the novel spans four decades of modern Chinese history, from the Communist Revolution to the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. In 1948, twelve-year-old Ah Xue grows up in a small fishing village in Zhoushan, where her mother earns a modest living combing the hair of wealthy women. As the civil war approaches, their already precarious existence becomes increasingly uncertain. Her daughter, Mimosa, later comes of age during the Cultural Revolution, when political tensions threaten to tear her family apart. In the next generation, Fei struggles with questions of gender identity under the influence of her activist father, whose expectations are shaped by China’s turbulent recent history. Through these intertwined stories, Kovacs explores the lasting effects of trauma, the sacrifices women make to protect their families, and the ways history echoes across generations. The novel is a portrait of resilience, identity, and the complicated love that binds families together despite profound change.

The End of Romance

The End of Romance

Maria Takolander

Set in a dystopian future devastated by environmental collapse, The End of Romance follows a mother and her son as they struggle to survive in a world where nature has become hostile and human society is crumbling. Thorn-bearing plants dominate the landscape, toxic fogs make life increasingly dangerous, and communities face relentless hardship. While some people attempt to survive independently, others remain trapped within increasingly authoritarian systems. The woman’s son attends a military school, like all boys his age. When he reaches sixteen, he will be sent to a distant planet known as the Promised Land to fight in a colonising war presented as humanity’s only hope for survival. Determined to protect her child, his mother begins questioning the world she has accepted. Her encounter with a mysterious young man who has somehow escaped conscription offers a possible route to sanctuary. Combining dystopian fiction with unsettling social commentary, Takolander explores motherhood, sacrifice, environmental destruction, and the myths societies create to justify violence. The novel asks what it means to remain human when survival demands extraordinary moral compromises.

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Books: 105
Countries: 49

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Bosnia and Herzegovina

Central African Republic

Dominican Republic