10 Literary Houses That Host Family Stories and Buried Secrets

Tara Conklin’s debut novel alternates storylines between Josephine, an enslaved 17-year-old in 1852 Virginia, and Lina, a modern-day NYC lawyer working on a slavery reparations case. A beautifully written dive into history, morality, and secrets, this tale really takes off once Josephine takes her fate into her own hands by leaving home in search of freedom.

Accolades including National Book Award finalist, Oprah Book Club pick, #1 New York Times bestseller, and inspiration for an Oscar-nominated film—are all reason enough to grab this gripping portrait of American realism. In it, a picturesque bungalow becomes the fighting ground for a colonel trying to restore his family’s dignity, a woman desperate to hold on to her home, and the man willing to do anything to win her love.

The house in the meticulously penned HAUSFRAU isn’t so much the building itself—it’s the emotional prison that the titular wife builds for herself after starting a family with her Swiss husband in the less-than-warm embrace of Zurich. She tries to escape through German classes, love affairs, and therapy, but her situation begins to spiral out of control. A totally engrossing read for anyone who wants a modern MADAME BOVARY.

An orphaned, white indentured servant straddles dangerously different worlds in her plantation home between the enslaved black family who raised her in the kitchen and a place in the big house given by virtue of her skin color. With torn loyalties, rich history and a stirring plot, it’s easy to see why this is a regular book club pick.

Many people haven’t actually read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s stories of growing up in the 19th-century Midwest—they’ve probably had the series read to them. LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE is actually the third of eight novels fictionalizing Wilder’s childhood growing up in a pioneer family, and it features the first house the family builds after leaving Wisconsin looking for bigger and better opportunities.

In Charles Dickens’s most complex and well-plotted novel, one of its unforgettable characters is the house itself, where an illegitimate daughter is raised in the shadow of a seemingly never-ending court case that criticized the English Chancery court system. First published as serialized chapters, reading them together was basically the 19th-century equivalent of binge-watching.

In this masterful debut novel, 13 siblings must decide the fate of their mother’s Detroit home, which housed the family for 50 years before mirroring the disarray and crisis of the city around them by falling into debt and misfortune. Secrets, addiction, and even a malevolent spirit all work against the siblings, but in the end Angela Flournoy shows how it takes more than walls to keep a family together.

In the summer of 1924, at a glittering society party held at the Riverton House, a young poet shoots himself. Only three witnesses—the Hartford family’s servant, Grace, and the Hartford sisters, Hannah and Emmeline—know the truth. Kate Morton’s gorgeous debut is full of secrets, some revealed, others hidden forever.

Spanning from the 1930s to the present day, from the Wharton Park estate in England to Thailand, this atmospheric and poignant novel tells the tale of a concert pianist and the aristocratic Crawford family, whose shocking secrets are revealed with devastating consequences.

Helen and Rose are more than best friends: sisters-in-law in a two-family house with their husbands and growing brood of children (Helen’s four boys and Rose’s three daughters), their lives intertwine on a daily and intimate basis as they share everything from holidays to their innermost hopes and dreams. When both become pregnant and even go into labor on the same snowy night, there seems to be more cause for celebration between them. But something happened when the blizzard babies were born, and the longer the two families live together in the brownstone, the more it haunts everyone.