12 Literary Families to Invite Over for Thanksgiving

Simultaneously mourning the death of his father and the demise of his marriage, Judd joins his dysfunctional family as they reluctantly sit shiva and spend seven days and nights under the same roof. This Is Where I Leave You is a humorous, emotional novel about the ties that bind—whether we like it or not.

No one explores the often rocky relationship between mothers and daughters, and what it means to be lifelong friends, better than Rebecca Wells. Poignant, funny, and outrageous, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood is a classic you’ll want to read again and again.

The Piper family is steeped in secrets, lies, and unspoken truths. At the eye of the storm is one secret that threatens to shake their lives. By turns menacingly dark and hilarious, this is an epic tale of five generations of sin, guilt, and redemption.

Through friendships and love affairs, marriage and divorce, parenthood and family holidays, the modest calamities and triumphs of ordinary days, Carry the One shows how one life affects another, and how those who thrive and those who self-destruct are closer to each other than we’d expect.

Freedom follows Walter and Patty Berglund as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world. This award-winning novel comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of liberty, the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, and the heavy weight of empire.

Finbar Dolan, employee of a mildly successful Madison Avenue ad agency, is forced to cancel a long-postponed vacation to work on a Super Bowl commercial for his diaper account just a few days before Christmas. But when his estranged father falls ill, Fin must reevaluate the choices he’s made and finally tell the truth about his life and his past.

Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, son Lowell, daughters Fern and Rosemary. Nothing exceptional here—except that Fern is a chimpanzee raised as another Cooke sister. This award-winning novel is a tale of loving but fallible people whose well-intentioned actions lead to heartbreaking consequences.

When renowned surgeon and failed husband Kweku Sai dies suddenly at his home in suburban Accra, the news of his death brings together the family he abandoned years before. Ghana Must Go charts their circuitous journey to one another and teaches us that the truths we speak can heal the wounds we hide.

When tragedy unexpectedly comes to call on his family, thirteen-year-old Frank Drum finds himself thrust into a world of secrets, adultery, and betrayal. Set in 1961, Ordinary Grace is the story of what a shocking murder does to a boy standing at the door of adulthood and the fabric of a small Minnesota town.

Though Rita Carmichael works more than one job, she and her teenage daughter Ruthie teeter on the edge of poverty. Faced with the prospect of homelessness, Rita reverts to survival mode, and the price she pays to keep them out of poverty changes their lives forever.

In 1964, eleven-year-old Fin and his glamorous, worldly, older half sister, Lady, have just been orphaned, and Lady, whom Fin hasn’t seen in years, is now his legal guardian and his only hope. This is an enchanting novel of a brother and sister who must form their own unconventional family in increasingly unconventional times.

Generations after their forebears went into exile on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, the MacDonalds still face seemingly unmitigated hardships and cruelties of life. No Great Mischief is a story of a fiercely loyal family and the tradition that drives it.