Six notable books featuring families

Paul Murray was born in 1975 in Dublin. His novels include An Evening of Long Goodbyes, short-listed for the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award; Skippy Dies, long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Mark and the Void, joint winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and one of Time’s Top 10 Fiction Books of the year; and The Bee Sting, one of The New York Times Top 10 Books of the Year.

At the Waterstones blog Murray tagged six favorite books featuring families. One title on the list:

The Fraud by Zadie Smith

Smith’s ingenious historical box of tricks refuses to be categorised, but one way to read it is as the story of two families. Set in Victorian England and flipping back and forth between the 1830s and 1870s, it’s mostly seen through the eyes of Eliza Touchet, who lives with her cousin William Ainsworth. Ainsworth in the 1830s is a famous novelist who outsells his good friend Charles Dickens; by the 1870s, though, he’s fallen very much out of fashion. Eliza and Ainsworth have a romance of sorts, but then he marries his maid, much to the dismay of his three grown-up daughters, who see their inheritance disappearing. Smith sets the conventional stuff of the nineteenth-century novel – marriage, servants, finagling over property – against a much darker, less familiar story. Andrew Bogle is an enslaved man born and raised in a sugar plantation in Jamaica. His family life exists – or not – at the whim of his masters. After the death of his wife, he throws in his lot with a fraudster (or is he?) claiming to be an aristocrat long thought drowned. That well-meaning Eliza is herself the beneficiary of a slave plantation is just one of the multiple ironies abounding in this novel, as Smith gleefully upends the Victorian image of family as inherently virtuous, showing it instead as a mechanism for laundering the profits of Empire while whitewashing its horrors.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue