Family drama

Tana French - Faithful Place

Otherwise gripping drama suffers from inconsistencies

12 Aug 2010

As much a sprawling family drama as a crime novel, Tana French’s character-driven mystery has more of the life stuff – heart, family, class – than the average genre work. In following the trials of undercover Irish cop and estranged son, brother and…

Quiet Chaos

19 Mar 2009

FAMILY DRAMA When his wife collapses and dies on their lawn surrounded by chopped melon and a traumatised young daughter, Pietro (Nanni Moretti) is saving an ungrateful woman from drowning. It’s just one of several delicious ironies during a movie in…

Peter Murphy - John the Revelator

22 Jan 2009

FAMILY DRAMA That old chestnut, the dysfunctional family saga told from the point of view of a watchful youngster, is energetically revived here by debutant Peter Murphy. The titular character is John Devine, a shy adolescent who dreams of escape…

Marilynne Robinson - Home

18 Sep 2008

FAMILY DRAMA With its groaningly slow pace and scriptural debate-heavy prose, labouring through Marilynne Robinson’s thick-set third novel – a companion piece of sorts to 2005’s Pulitzer Prize winning Gilead – is an experience recommended only to the…

Bethan Roberts - The Good Plain Cook

3 Jul 2008

FAMILY DRAMA (Serpent’s Tail) In the mid-30s, the American heiress and philanthropist Peggy Guggenheim set up house in the Sussex countryside with her daughter, her poet lover, his daughter, and a young local girl to cook for them. Bethan Roberts has…

Véronique Ovaldé - Kick the Animal Out

22 May 2008

FAMILY DRAMA (Portobello) For this French writer’s fourth novel (but first in translation), we are in the head of 15-year-old Rose, a girl who spends much of her time on her apartment’s roof terrace wearing a cape and playing with her rabbits. Rose…

Richard Mason - The Lighted Rooms

8 May 2008

FAMILY DRAMA (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) The Lighted Rooms takes on a vast array of human experience from Boer War concentration camps and townships of modern-day Bloemfontein to commodities trading crises and antiseptic nursing homes in 21st century…

Sadie Jones - The Outcast

31 Jan 2008

The Outcast (Chatto & Windus) Sadie Jones’ postwar tale of one boy’s cruel alienation from family and community might be able to beat a handful of Valium as a downer, yet there’s still something achingly compelling about it that keeps the pages…

Self Help

18 Jun 2007

FAMILY DRAMA Evidently written with one eye on the literary prizes, Edward Docx’s second novel is an ambitious, cultured affair, but one dragged down by the weight of its own ideas. Set in St Petersburg, London, New York and Paris, it rings with…

When We Were Bad

Charlotte Mendelson

9 Apr 2007

FAMILY DRAMA Charlotte Mendelson returns with a sweeping familial drama charting the decline and fall of a well-to-do, very Jewish London family funnelled through the revolving narrative ciphers of three characters in crisis. Rabbi Claudia, son Leo…

Death of a Murderer

Rupert Thomson

26 Mar 2007

FAMILY DRAMA With artworks, dramas and songs having been created about and around Myra Hindley, there is no particular reason for Rupert Thomson’s eighth novel to be inherently offensive. What genuinely upsets here is the paucity of much of the…

Charlotte's Web

(U) 96min

29 Jan 2007

As a farmyard community story, EB White’s much loved kids story fits somewhere between cutesy fantasy Babe and Orwell’s bleak political parable Animal Farm, with cheery talking animals sugar-coating a bittersweet finale that touches on practical matters…