Family Sagas

Try these books if you are looking for:

• Family Sagas
• Literary Fiction
• Strong Characters
• Meaningful Themes

I Capture the Castle
By Dodie Smith
F SMITH
Seventeen-year-old Cassandra, who lives with her family in not-so-genteel poverty in a ramshackle old English castle, strives, over six turbulent months, to hone her writing skills. She fills three notebooks with sharply funny yet poignant entries. Her journals candidly chronicle the great changes that take place within the castle's walls, and her own first descent into love.

The Forsyte Saga
By John Galsworthy
F GALSWORTHY
The story of Soames Forsyte, a solcitor and the wealthy head of a middle-class family in London during the 19th century.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
By Betty Smith
F SMITH
Francie Nolan, avid reader and adroit observer of human nature, has much to ponder in colorful, turn-of-the-century Brooklyn. She grows up with a sweet, tragic father, a severely realistic mother, and an aunt who gives her love too freely--to men, and to a brother who will always be the favored child. Like the Tree of Heaven that grows out of cement or through cellar gratings, resourceful Francie struggles against all odds to survive and thrive.

A Woman of Substance (book 1 in the Harte Family series)
By Barbara Taylor Bradford
F BRADFORD
Emma Harte, an enormously wealthy and powerful self-made woman, learns that her four children are plotting to sell the business that she founded, which leads her to summon everyone to her Yorkshire estate for a showdown.

The Namesake
By Jhumpa Lahiri
F LAHIRI
A portrait of the immigrant experience follows the Ganguli family from their traditional life in India through their arrival in Massachusetts in the late 1960s and their difficult melding into an American way of life.

The Poisonwood Bible
By Barbara Kingsolver
F KINGSOLVER
The family of a fierce evangelical Baptist missionary--Nathan Price, his wife, and his four daughters--begins to unravel after they embark on a 1959 mission to the Belgian Congo, where they find their lives forever transformed over the course of three decades by the political and social upheaval of Africa.

Gilead
By Marilynne Robinson
F ROBINSON
As the Reverend John Ames approaches the hour of his own death, he writes a letter to his son chronicling three previous generations of his family, a story that stretches back to the Civil War and reveals uncomfortable family secrets.