20 Novels About Family That Literally Anyone Can Relate To

Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney's hilarious debut, The Nest, tells the story of the four Plumb siblings as they come together to confront their eldest brother's destructive habits, as well as to figure out the fate of their joint trust fund, which they're all privately depending on to solve their financial woes.

In J. Courtney Sullivan's Saints For All Occasions, a funeral brings together two estranged sisters — a cloistered nun and the matriarch of a large Irish family — for the first time since they journeyed from their small village in Ireland to Boston 50 years before.

In the legendary Anne Tyler's twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, she explores several generations of the Whitshank family, their Baltimore family home, and all of the secrets and deceptions that they've carefully kept hidden throughout the years.

Set in 1990s Bombay, Rohinton Mistry's Family Matters tells the story of an ageing patriarch whose advancing Parkinson's disease and recent injury leave him entirely dependent on his younger daughter, who must take him into the crowded flat she shares with her husband and two children.

The Heirs by Susan Rieger follows the five Falkes brothers in the wake of their father Rupert's death, which becomes more complicated when a mysterious woman comes forward to claim that part of their estate belongs to her two sons, who were also fathered by Rupert.

Narrated by a shrewd eleven-year-old growing up in a small French village, Camille Bordas' How to Behave in a Crowd follows Dory and his five bookish, oddball siblings as he struggles between fitting in with his misanthropic family or forging his own path.

Angela Flournoy's debut novel, The Turner House, is centreed around a family home on Detroit's East Side, the 13 children who have grown up and moved on from it, and the house's fate when the Turner matriarch's health starts to fail.

Diksha Basu's debut novel, The Windfall, tells the story of a middle-class East Delhi family, the Jhas, who come into a huge lump sum of money when Mr. Jha sells a website, and how this family learns to acclimate to their new riches — and their new social status.

Taiye Selasi's Ghana Must Go brings a mother and her four adult children — estranged and scattered throughout Boston, New Haven, New York, and London — back together in Ghana for the funeral of the father that abandoned them years before.

In The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson, two siblings — the children of eccentric performing artists — are brought back to their family home years later when their parents go missing, hoping to figure out whether their parents are really gone.

Annie Liontas's debut, Let Me Explain You, tells the story of a Greek immigrant and proud diner owner who — believing he only has ten days to live — attempts to settle all of his grievances with his sceptical ex-wife and three adult daughters.

In Kaitlyn Greenidge's We Love You, Charlie Freeman, a family is recruited by a research institute to nurture and train a young abandoned chimp, a task that becomes complicated when the older daughter discovers the questionable nature of the institute's past studies.

Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections follows a family matriarch as she attempts to bring her three adult children home together for Christmas, desperate for something to look forward to in the face of her husband's losing battle with Parkinson's disease.

Spanning five decades, Ann Patchett's Commonwealth tells the story of two families that become intertwined by an affair and the famous author who turns their story into a bestselling novel, exploiting the childhood and the private tragedies of the Keating and Cousins children.

In Lucy Tan's debut, What We Were Promised, a family returns from chasing the American dream in suburban America to join an elite community in a radically transformed Shanghai. It is only when the estranged son returns to the family that they must confront the choices they made to ascend to this life.

Based in San Francisco's Chinatown, Fae Myenne Ng's Bone tells the story of the Leongs, a Chinese-American family of five who struggle to understand what drove the middle daughter, Ona, to jump from the roof of a Chinatown housing project.

Emma Straub's The Vacationers follows the extended Post family during their two-week stay in Mallorca, where they hope to leave the tension developing at home in Manhattan behind, but only end up finding new ways to argue and expose one another.

In Jade Chang's The Wangs vs. the World, a charismatic cosmetics mogul suddenly loses the empire he built due to a financial crisis. And so Charles Wang sets off with his family on a cross-country trip from their repossessed Bel Air estate to upstate New York, where the eldest Wang daughter lives.

Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits follows three generations of the Trueba family and the bond that forms between a proud and tyrannical patriarch and his beloved granddaughter, born as a result of a forbidden love affair.

In the first novel from award-winning Irish novelist Caoilinn Hughes, Orchid & the Wasp, a young, savvy opportunist hustles her way through Dublin, London, and New York trying to save her family from economic collapse, but ends up losing herself in the process.