Genre
Best Multi-Generational Family Sagas
The family saga is the literary form that the contemporary American novel keeps returning to because it is the form best suited to writing about inheritance — what gets carried forward, what gets edited out, what one generation refuses to discuss with the next. These eight are the multi-generational sagas our editors recommend most, from one chapter per generation to seven hundred patient pages of one family.
8 books on this list.
Pachinkoby Min Jin Lee
5.0“Pachinko by Min Jin Lee 2017 review. Four generations of a Korean family in twentieth-century Japan, beginning with Sunja's pregnancy by a married Korean gangster in 1933 Busan. The Apple TV+ adaptation source and one of the canonical contemporary Korean-American literary novels.”
Homegoingby Yaa Gyasi
5.0“Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi 2016 review. Seven generations of two half-sister bloodlines, one in Ghana and one in America, from eighteenth-century Fanteland to present-day Stanford. Gyasi's debut and one of the canonical contemporary American diaspora novels.”
The Covenant of Waterby Abraham Verghese
5.0“The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese 2023 review. Three generations of a Christian family on the Malabar Coast of Kerala, connected by a generational drowning condition. Verghese's second major novel.”
Demon Copperheadby Barbara Kingsolver
5.0“Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver 2022 review. A Dickensian retelling of David Copperfield in the opioid-crisis Appalachia of the 1990s and 2000s. Pulitzer Prize and Women's Prize 2023 and Kingsolver's defining late-career novel.”
North Woodsby Daniel Mason
5.0“North Woods by Daniel Mason 2023 review. Three centuries of one house in the western Massachusetts forest, told through a chain of inhabitants whose lives connect across time. National Book Award finalist.”
The Vanishing Halfby Brit Bennett
5.0“The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett 2020 review. Identical twin sisters from a small light-skinned Black Louisiana town diverge in the 1960s: one returns with her daughter, the other passes for white in California. Bennett's second novel and one of the canonical 2020s American literary novels.”
A Little Lifeby Hanya Yanagihara
4.0“A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara 2015 review. Four college friends in New York, slowly narrowing onto Jude St. Francis and what childhood trauma does to the rest of an adult life. Man Booker Prize shortlist and the most-discussed contemporary American doorstop.”
Bring Up the Bodiesby Hilary Mantel
5.0“Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel 2012 review. Thomas Cromwell engineers the fall of Anne Boleyn and the rise of Jane Seymour. Booker Prize 2012, the second volume of the Cromwell trilogy, and the rare novel that exceeds an already-canonical predecessor.”