Seven intergenerational novels about family lore

Maria Kuznetsova was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and moved to the United States as a child. Her first novel, Oksana, Behave!, was published in 2019. She lives in Auburn, Alabama, with her husband and daughter, where she is an assistant professor of creative writing at Auburn University. She is also a fiction editor at The Bare Life Review, a journal of immigrant and refugee literature.

Kuznetsova's newest novel is Something Unbelievable.

[Q&A with Maria Kuznetsova; The Page 69 Test: Something Unbelievable]

At Electric Lit the author tagged seven books about the burdens and blessings of ancestral legacy, including:

City of Thieves by David Benioff

David Benioff’s City of Thieves begins with a frame of the writer-narrator, David, preparing to write down his grandfather’s story of surviving the devastating Siege of Leningrad during WWII. As the story goes on, the reader can’t help but wonder which love interest from the past is the current grandmother from the present—after the story is over, the reader finally learns who is who, though what matters more is how the narrator will make sense of his family’s story. At first, the narrator is concerned that his grandfather doesn’t remember every part of it because he wants to make sure he gets it right. But his grandfather doesn’t care. “You’re a writer,” he tells him. “Make it up.”

Read about the other entries on the list.

City of Thieves is among Thomas Dolby's six best books.

--Marshal Zeringue