If you are looking for books about children and parents, or how our ancestors affect the current generations, then you are in the right place. Here’s a short list of multigenerational family stories that will ignite your curiosity about your own family history.
Hak Jeong has been preserving her family’s name for 105 years, through Japanese colonialism and the Korean War. She even sent her daughter-in-law to America to cover an illegitimate birth. Then she receives the letter. It’s a letter from her grand-niece in America, asking for help paying for her son’s wedding. Outraged at the name of his betrothed, Hak Jeong dies ten days later. In the afterlife, she discovers the curse that haunts her entire family tree, and attempts to thwart its fruition.
Emily lives in contemporary America, so she has to piece together the details of the epic that follows three generations of Chinese women through love affairs, folktales, and myths. In 1949, Yunhong’s brother destroys her marriage on the night of her wedding, and her daughter Yuexin as a result never knows her father. Her own daughters become women after Mao’s death and have to navigate political tensions on their own. It’s a 100-year saga of children and parents.
This one’s sort of a reverse-epic: multiple generations provide perspective on the single person of Ever Geimausaddle. They all have different ideas of who he is and who he should be. His Cherokee grandma wants to move the family across Oklahoma for safety. His grandfather tries to unite him with his ancestry through gourd dances, and his Kiowa cousin takes another approach. It’s up to Ever to figure out the best way forward, the way that will save himself and his descendants.
Everyone remembers her daringly short, silver lamé dress. It was iconic photo capturing an electric moment, where emerging American designer Astrid Bricard is young, uninhibited, and on the cusp of fashion and feminism’s changing landscape. Yet she can’t escape the shadow of her mother, Mizza Bricard, infamous “muse” for Christian Dior. Astrid would give anything to take her place among the great houses of couture–on her own terms.
But then Astrid disappeared…
Now Astrid’s daughter, Blythe, holds what remains of her mother and grandmother’s legacies. Of all the Bricard women, she can gather the torn, painfully beautiful fabrics of three generations of heartbreak to create something that will shake the foundations of fashion. The only piece missing is the one question no one’s been able to answer: What really happened to Astrid?
This book is a chronology of five generations of women and bison, written like a Métis jig. Vignettes immerse the reader in a nonlinear narrative that gradually paints the portrait of the family tree and the animals they subsist on.
Pirhabi is a teenager looking for work in 1898 when he’s taken from his home in India to work for the British on the East African Railway. Wile there, he commits a crime to survive that washes over four generations of his descendants and over four continents.
As late summer 1951 descends on Elmira, New York, Myra Larkin, thirteen, the oldest child of a large Catholic family, meets a young man she believes to be Mickey Mantle. He chats her up at a local diner and gives her a ride home. The matter consumes her until later that night, when a triple homicide occurs just down the street, opening a specter of violence that will haunt the Larkins for half a century.
As the siblings leave home and fan across the country, each pursues a shard of the American dream.
Myra serves as a prison nurse while raising her son, Ronan. Her middle sisters, Lexy and Fiona, find themselves on opposite sides of class and power. Alec, once an altar boy, is banished from the house and drifts into oblivion. As he becomes an increasingly alienated loner, his mother begins to receive postcards full of ominous portent. What they reveal, and what they require, will shatter a family and lead to devastating reckoning.
When Sunja tells her lover that she’s pregnant, she discovers that he’s married, and he tries to buy her off. She won’t have it—instead, she accepts a proposal from a gentle, sickly minister who is passing through her home in Korea on his way to Japan. Her rejection of her child’s powerful father starts a chain reaction that affects every forthcoming generation.
Mary Kay McBrayer is the author of America’s First Female Serial Killer: Jane Toppan and the Making of a Monster. You can find her short works at Oxford American, Narratively, Mental Floss, and FANGORIA, among other publications. She co-hosts Everything Trying to Kill You, the comedy podcast that analyzes your favorite horror movies from the perspectives of women of color. Follow Mary Kay McBrayer on Instagram and Twitter, or check out her author site here.
