Disfunctional families - fiction

[Deathraystare]

Any recommendations - fiction only please. Non of those real life misery books please!

this is one of my all time favourites. brilliantly written, heartbreakingly sad too. We Were the Mulvaneys is amazing also, joyce carol oates

Oh gosh and The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks too, but I couldn't finish it.

The Red House - Mark Haddon

Ballet shoes?

Pride and Prejudice

Aren't all books basically about dysfunctional families ? I've just read David Copperfield (tick) and the Poisonwood Bible (tick).

Following so I can write some of these down.

Flowers in the Attic springs to mind! :o

Agree re: the Red House

I would highly recommend amongst women by john mcgahern. It's about a family in rural Ireland with a father figure who is the ultimate narcissist and dominates the whole family. The character was based on mcgaherns own father.

I leant it to a friend who loved it, it's so beautifully written as well as being emotionally affecting. one of the best things about it, is that - as in real life - there is love there too as well as the anger, which makes it that much messier.

Mcgaherns such a great writer and is at his best with difficult relationships - you'll enjoy it

Yeuch! Flowers in the attic was the incest one wasn't it? Had to wash my brain in bleach after reading that!

Loved loved loved Wasp Factory! My first by him!

Thanks all!!

Colm Toibin : The Blackwater Lightship ... beautifully written

Seconding McGahern's Amongst Women and The Blackwater Lightship. But also seconding posters who said that virtually all fictional families are deeply dysfunctional!

I also recommend Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows trilogy.

If you want something which is very funny, cheerful, elegantly-written and clever about an eccentric dysfunctional family, Laurie Colwin's Family Happiness is brilliant. Eccentric old-money New York Jewish clan and a dutiful perfect daughter, married to a perfect man with two perfect children, who has a secret affair with a reclusive painter.

Helen Cresswell's Bagthorpes books. [aimed at about age 10-12, iirc, but worth reading at any age].

The Bagthorpes are absolutely self-interested, each pursuing their own (self-proclaimed) genius, and are consistently brutal to each other. This Guardian review pins down the attraction neatly

Deathraystare I'll give The Wasp Factory another go then, it's not.very long after all and I don't like giving up on books.

Agree that most families in books are somewhat disfunctional, that's why I thought hard and came up with the 2 most disfunctional ones I could!

Watching The Durrells on Tv has reminded me how disfunctional they were: My Family and Other Animals is a great book, can't remember whether it's classed as fiction or non-fiction.

Yes to the Bagthorpes, even for adults!

The Shellseekers, Coming Home, September and Winter Solstice all by Rosamunde Pilcher.

J K Rowling's The Casual Vacancy - full of dysfunctional families/relationships.

Ooh! Just read Mother Mother - by Koren Zailckas

Brilliant! One of those books that if you leae it for a while you can come back to it and remember what went on.

Normally I am reading three books at once and typically lose at least one of them for a while (putting it in a bag when I do the washing, or take it with me on the way to work. Normally I pick up the book again when found and can't remember half of what happend. e.g Who is this John they are all talking about? What happend in the garden? etc etc

However I managed to pick up where I left off. It was a brilliant book. The mother was really disturbed!

Just reading Commonwealth by Ann Pratchett, which is focussed on a dysfunctional fractured family- it follows them through the decades and is quite epic but also gripping and easy to read.

Gillian Flynn's three major novels all focus on dysfunctional families but for the most dysfunctional try sharp objects...brilliantly dark