Lake Bluff Library Adult Reading Lists: Family Sagas

The bereaved matriarch of a powerful early-20th-century American family makes a fateful decision that reverberates throughout two subsequent generations further impacted by racism, reversed circumstances and disturbing revelations. (Description from NoveList.)

At the beginning of the twentieth century, as America grapples with forces of human and natural violence more powerful than humanity has ever seen, Bessie Holland yearns for the love that she has never known. Watching the vast Texas countryside being destroyed by an oil company and a menacing figure with a violent past, Bessie is prepared to defend her home and her family. But when she accidentally kills an unarmed man to defend her father Hackberry, she must flee to New York.
(Description from NoveList)

A sweeping, achingly beautiful new novel that moves between Germany on the eve of World War II and present day Wisconsin, unspooling a story of love, longing, and the ceaseless push and pull of motherhood.
(Description from catalog)

Crossroads is the first novel in Jonathan Franzen's A Key to All Mythologies. The trilogy tells the story of a Midwestern family across three generations, mirroring the preoccupations and dilemmas of the United States from the Vietnam War to the 2020s.
(Description from catalog)

In present-day Miami, Jeanette is battling addiction. Daughter of Carmen, a Cuban immigrant, she is determined to learn more about her family history from her reticent mother and makes the snap decision to take in the daughter of a neighbor detained by ICE. Carmen, still wrestling with the trauma of displacement, must process her difficult relationship with her own mother while trying to raise a wayward Jeanette.
(Description from catalog)

During England's 17th century civil war, Alinor, a woman without a husband and skilled with herbs, helps a young man on the run and unwittingly brings disaster into the heart of her life. (Description from NoveList.)

Two half-sisters, unknown to each other, are born into different villages in 18th-century Ghana and experience profoundly different lives and legacies throughout subsequent generations marked by wealth, slavery, war, coal mining, the Great Migration and the realities of 20th-century Harlem. (Description from NoveList.)

Sally's brother Ellis goes missing after high school but turns up at Bug Hollow, where a freak accident kills him weeks later; mother and father Sybil and Phil and sisters Katie and Sally each seek their own solace, and after his pregnant girlfriend comes to their door, Sally cares for Ellis's child Eva.
(Description from NoveList)

Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her to Japan. So begins a sweeping saga of an exceptional family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history. (Description from catalog.)

Inspired in part by long-ago stories from her own family's history, this masterful story follows the Cassars over seven decades, starting with patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them, and ending with Chloe, who believes telling her family's buried stories will bring them all peace.
(Description from catalog)

An American GI, two Vietnamese bargirls, and an Amerasian man are forced to make decisions during and after the Viet Nam War that will reverberate throughout one another's lives.
(Description from catalog)

Traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through to the shattering aftermath of Orvil Red Feather's shooting in There There.
(Description from NoveList)

At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves.
(Description from catalog)

When Major Gryffth Hockaday is called to the front lines of the Civil War, his new bride is left to care for her husband's three-hundred-acre farm and infant son. Placidia, a mere teenager herself living far from her family and completely unprepared to run a farm or raise a child, must endure the darkest days of the war on her own. By the time Major Hockaday returns two years later, Placidia is bound for jail, accused of having borne a child in his absence and murdering it. What really transpired in the two years he was away?

While working as divers with the all-female diving collective on a small Korean island, Mi-ja and Young-sook find their friendship challenged by their differences and forces outside their control. (Description from NoveList)

Encompassing two generations and a rich blend of Chinese and American history, the story of four struggling, strong women also reveals their daughter's memories and feelings. (Description from catalog)

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India's Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala's long-existing Christian community is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.
(Description from catalog)

Ebby Freeman's life unravels when her brother is killed and a centuries-old family heirloom is shattered but years later, while fleeing a public breakup, she uncovers how that lost, shattered jar may hold secrets to her future.
(Description from NoveList)