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I have always loved stories about families. I’m sure my therapist is better equipped to explain why, but I assume it’s because I enjoy more character-driven narratives, and am, by nature, a very nosy person. To me, figuring out why Aunt Margaret and Aunt Adelaide had an animated, hushed conversation in the hallway, then gave each other the silent treatment all afternoon is a much more intriguing mystery to be solved than who leaked secret state documents or planted evidence on the Prime Minister.
I love to dissect interpersonal dynamics and find that viewing families through varied author lenses and character perspectives provides insight that’s often impossible to gain in real life. In books, you’re allowed to be a fly on the wall, to make your own judgments and assumptions, and to choose sides without any real-life implications or consequences to consider.
2025 has been an especially great year for family fiction, and I hope my favorites below bring many eye rolls, tears, groans, insights, and laughs as you read and relate. Also, a gentle reminder as we dive head-first into the holiday season, the only thing all families, without fail, have in common is their dysfunction! Happy Reading!
Books you should know about
The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett
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The Road to Tender Hearts has it all. It’s an adventure, coming of age, family drama, and comedy all rolled into one with a magical orange cat sprinkled in for fun. Readers follow along as PJ, a charismatic sixty-three-year-old ne’er-do-well, his estranged, and goth, adult daughter, and his great niece and nephew (newly orphaned and placed under his guardianship) embark on a road trip from New England to Arizona. Yes, its characters make terrible decision after terrible decision, but you can’t help but cheer them on as they cross the country, each hoping for very different, yet life-changing outcomes. It’s chaotic, charming, emotional, and highly enjoyable.
Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson
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Kevin Wilson is one of my favorite authors because his books are never predictable except in that they will always introduce the reader to complex and fascinating characters. Run for the Hills is another road trip story, our participants consisting of newly-introduced half-siblings on their way to confront their runaway father. As they traverse the country in a rented PT Cruiser, the siblings, varied in age and interest, share memories of their dad. The stories are resentful and romantic in equal parts, but they help the siblings realize that while the same man technically helped raise them, his presence and absence had extremely different implications on each of their lives.
Good Dirt by Charmaine Wilkerson
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Good Dirt is a new classic I predict will be popular for years to come. It follows the history of the Freeman family through multiple perspectives in time and place with the help of Old Mo, a stoneware jar created (and adorned with a hidden message) by an enslaved master potter and passed from generation to generation. In the present, thirty-something Ebby Freeman is in France recuperating after a public heartbreak. Left alone with her thoughts and time, she relives and reveals details of the night her teenage brother, Baz, was killed in a home robbery, and how this unsolved tragedy has fractured her tight-knit family unit.
Maggie; Or, A Man and a Woman Walk into a Bar by Katie Yee
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Katie Yee had me hooked from chapter one, when our narrator’s husband takes her to an Indian buffet and promptly confesses that he is having an affair. After a long silence, filled with her own frenzied internal questions, our narrator only replies, “I’m having seconds.” The chapters that follow show the narrator catching her breath, processing this unexpected revelation, and reexamining her own priorities for the first time since becoming a wife and mother. All this emotional heavy lifting is happening in parallel to her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. On paper, it seems like this would be an overly melancholic story, but what makes its telling unique is that Yee decides to keep the emotional breakdowns off the page. She barely allows her narrator to linger in sadness or anxiety but instead focuses on how she is forced to keep moving ahead, treating her cancer, and helping her kids process their emotions through storytelling.
Buckeye by Patrick Ryan
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Buckeye is a vast novel that follows two Ohio families from the 1930s through the 1970s. It features Cal and Margaret, whose paths collide literally during a critical moment in history. The pair meet leaning in close to a hardware store’s radio to listen to a broadcast announcing the end of the Second World War. Overcome by emotions and unclear about their lives to come, the two forge a bond that knocks them each off balance. From this moment, we follow Cal and Margaret back to the beginning of their lives and on to their futures.
Wreck by Catherine Newman
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Catherine Newman writes families so warm and familiar, you’ll feel like you’ve always had a seat on their kitchen couch. In Wreck, Rocky, our narrator, is in a state of mild crisis. It begins with a medical mystery, is spurred on by an accident that kills a young man who was classmate to her children, and is followed by a slow existential doubt that creeps in as she tries to understand her role in caring for her aging father. Rocky’s hilarious and poignant inner monologue is so relatable and represents the time during midlife when women are reevaluating how they interact with their loved ones and the world as a whole.
Bug Hollow by Michelle Huneven
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Bug Hollow takes place across fifty years and around the world as we watch a family fall apart and come back together again in different ways. At the start of the narrative, during a post-graduation road trip with friends, eighteen-year-old Ellis falls in love and decides to spend the remainder of his summer with his new girlfriend at Bug Hollow, a California commune. Ellis’s mother, Sybil, is insistent that the family immediately bring him home, but his father, Phil, knows his son just needs space to have his own experiences. They compromise, driving up to make sure Ellis is all right, but ultimately, returning home without him. Not long after the visit, though, the family receives a call that there’s been an accident and Ellis has died. His death, and all that follows, causes irreparable rifts in the family that span decades. Bug Hollow explores guilt, grief, and the concept that even siblings growing up in the same home are not raised by the same parents.
What Happened to the McCrays? by Tracey Lange
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What Happened to the McCrays? is great for fans of Ann Napolitano and centers around a divorced couple, Kyle and Casey, who have become so buried in their individual grief over a shared loss, that they have disconnected completely. To cope, Kyle chooses distance, running away across the country and Casey, a middle school teacher, pours all her energy into her students. But when his aging father forces Kyle to return to his hometown, he is faced with Casey and all he left undone. While the readers don’t know the couple’s full back story yet, their forced proximity reveals that beneath the years and years of grief, there is still love.
Jane and Dan at the End of the World by Colleen Oakley
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I loved this story because at its core, it’s about a stagnant marriage, but the plot also involves a hostage situation. That’s right, Jane and Dan plan an anniversary dinner at a very pretentious and impossible to book fine dining restaurant experience only to have a ragtag group of “activists” hold the staff and customers hostage. What ensues is a fun ride that’s equal parts suspenseful, awkward, and laugh out loud funny.
Lucky Seed Justinian Huang
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I haven’t read Lucky Seed yet, but I cannot wait to get my hands on it November 11!
From the publisher: The billionaire Sun Clan of Greater Los Angeles is your typical American family, with power-struggling aunties, emasculated uncles, scheming cousins, scandalous secrets and a fortune teller on retainer. But at the end of each combative day, the Suns are chained together with golden handcuffs, whether they like it or not.
Yet strange storms are a-brewing. Their matriarch, Roses Sun, is grappling with an existential crisis: she must produce a male heir that bears the clan’s surname. She fears that if her generation is the one in which their esteemed lineage ends, they will be punished as “hungry ghosts” in the afterlife—an ancient but very real Asian superstition.
Faced with this terrifying fate, Roses summons her favorite nephew, Wayward. Believing him to possess the “lucky seed,” Roses presents Wayward with a mandatory suggestion: to father a baby boy who will inherit everything. When the other members of the Sun Clan catch wind of Roses’s plot, all hells break loose. Wayward’s family will now clash like never before in an epic war over the future of the Suns…if there is a future at all.
Yet through the chaos, Wayward sees opportunity. What if he can leverage all the conflict into a solution for his problematic family? What if he can reunite the Sun Clan by healing them? And what if the tumultuous Suns can finally learn how to love each other for the first time?
If you’re interested in exploring more titles that center around family dramas, you can explore our full Readers’ Advisory List.
For more great lists, check out the Recommended Lists section of the Resource Center, home of all the great lists maintained by OverDrive’s staff librarians. Lists include bestsellers, favorite genres, kids and teens, LOTE content, seasonal favorites, and more!
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About the author: Jane earned her BA in English and Film Studies from Ohio State University and her MLIS from Kent State University. Prior to starting at OverDrive in April of 2018, she worked as a public librarian for ten years. Her love of reading and libraries has been life-long, but really became an obsession when, as a young teen, she discovered all the wonderful YA pulp series of the 90s. Her favorite genres currently include literary fiction, humor, memoir, and narrative nonfiction. In her spare time, when she’s not reading, Jane enjoys pottery, crafting, binge-watching both critically acclaimed and trash tv in equal measures, thrifting, and traveling as much as possible.