The best novels about the families we have and the families we make

This is a novel about loss, family, and reconciliation, and it moved me deeply. It’s set in Minnesota, where I spent about half my childhood, and it deals with personal and family histories, which I find quite compelling. In the novel, Noah’s father, Olaf Torr, lives under the weight of survivor’s guilt. Years earlier, thirty men went out on the ore boat, the Ragnorak, and only three returned. One was Olaf. As the novel begins, Olaf is dying, and he contacts Noah, from whom he’s estranged. But Noah still hasn’t forgiven Olaf for his alcoholism. Also, Noah and his wife, Natalie, are struggling with infertility issues. But Noah and Natalie come to see Olaf, who starts telling Noah what happened on that boat. 

Spare and poetic, this beautiful debut novel explores teenage pregnancy, adoption, and secrets. Addie Lockwood knows Roland Rhodes during high school. They live in a small Southern town and develop a friendship over an appreciation of blues music. But later, in their thirties, when they reconnect in California, Addie falls in love with Roland. When she later realizes she’s pregnant, she makes a critical and heartbreaking decision: she doesn’t tell Roland about the baby, whom she names Byrd, and she gives the child up for adoption. But Addie never stops thinking about Byrd, wondering, hoping one day he will fly back her way. This novel is gorgeously written and what an ending.

This is a slim, poignant, epistolary novel about two women friends, Jane, who is 27, and Imogen, who is 59. It starts in the 1960s because Jane sends a fan letter to Imogen about her columns on island life outside Seattle. But it turns in to a correspondence largely about food and recipes but then also culture, family and marriage, racism and change, trust and hope. This sweet novel explores more than what foods sustain us, but also what kinds of relationships. Love & Saffron includes sad moments, but the novel lives in a place of hope and acceptance, of connections, and of creating family on our own terms. I so enjoyed it. I gave it to my mom to read, and she enjoyed it, too.

Oh, I know this novel has likely appeared on countless lists, but I loved it. Grumpy, lonely, widowed Ove lives a rigid and structured life. He acts like an old man but is only 59. He has little tolerance for people and is annoyed when new neighbors move in and upset his carefully ordered world and its carefully ordered rhythms. What I loved about this novel was how Ove allowed his heart to grow, sort of like the Grinch, to accommodate new people in his life, to create a new family.

The mysteries that I most enjoy are those with strong character development. In Missing, Presumed, Susie Steiner gives us the character of Manon, a British detective who longs for romance and companionship, perhaps because her family relationships are weak. She doesn’t care for her stepmother, her mother passed when she was a child, and she and her sister no longer speak. Against the backdrop of a fantastic puzzle of a mystery, readers get to see Manon reach for more personal happiness, creating a new family on her own terms and in a deeply touching way.