43 Of Your Favorite Books About Complicated Families
This Riot Recommendation is sponsored by Just Fly Away by Andrew McCarthy.
A debut novel about family secrets, first love, forgiveness, and finding one’s way in the world from award-winning writer, actor, and director Andrew McCarthy. When fifteen-year-old Lucy Willows discovers that her father has a child from a brief affair, she begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her life. Worse, Lucy’s father’s secret is now her own, one that isolates her from her friends, family—even her boyfriend, Simon. When Lucy runs away to Maine to visit her mysteriously estranged grandfather, she finally begins to get to the bottom of her family’s secrets and lies.
The estranged siblings reunited by a will, the parents that micromanage their grown children, the deceptions employed to protect the family unit…show us a book about family and we’ll show you dysfunction.
We asked you to share your favorite books about complicated families, and you responded. Here are 43 of your favorites!
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
Gilded Cage by Vic James
The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn by Betty Smith
Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs
I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
One Half From the East by Nadia Hashimi
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
It Happens All the Time by Amy Hatvany
The Possibility of Somewhere by Julia Day
All the Ugly and Wonderful Things by Bryn Greenwood
Winter Solstice by Rosamunde Pilcher
August: Osage County by Tracy Letts
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Good Night Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian
Surviving the Applewhites by Stephanie S. Tolan
The World According to Garp by John Irving
My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman
Commonwealth by Ann Patchett
Just Listen by Sarah Dessen
Once We Were Sisters by Sheila Kophler
The Vacationers by Emma Straub
Big and Little Questions (According to Wren Jo Byrd) by Julie Bowe
The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving
The Godfather by Mario Puzo
A Million Junes by Emily Henry
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon
You Don’t Know Me by David Klass
This is Where I Leave You Jonathan Tropper
It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover
The German Girl by Armando Lucas Correa
The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
Mom & Me & Mom by Maya Angelou
The Secret Life of Violet Grant by Beatriz Williams
