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Find out moreOur high-quality Family Drama selection offers the heart-breaking and heart-warming conflicts and dramas directly from the hearth, telling the stories of these families that have been struck by tragedy, conflict and drama and their struggle to survive intact.
To all intents and purposes this was Joanna’s first novel and it was the start of a genre labelled ‘aga saga’ – upper-middleclass country families getting into all sorts of messes. Joanna is queen of this type of novel and has grown with each new one. She’s lovely. She actually started her writing career penning historical novels under the name of Caroline Harvey. A "Piece of Passion" from the publisher... ‘A funny, intelligent and wonderfully involving novel for anyone who’s ever thought of leaving the rat race for the peace of village life – or who’s wondered if their present existence really contains all that life has to offer.' Linda Evans, Senior Editorial Director at Transworld
One of Katharine McMahon's favourite books. Highly evocative of time and place this wonderful novel set in the early 20th century is funny, touching and curious. A real treasure of a novel. A "Piece of Passion" from the publisher... Perhaps Penelope Fitzgerald’s finest novel, The Beginning of Spring is the story of Frank Reid, an ex-pat Englishman struggling to run his printing firm and keep his family together in turn-of-the-century Moscow. Written in Fitzgerald’s beautifully light, careful and evocative style and packed with her perfectly observed portraits of human nature (particularly of Frank’s young, but precociously intelligent, children), it is a wonderfully touching novel, about the confusions that life can throw at any of us. April 2010 Guest Editor Katharine McMahon on Penelope Fitzgerald... I was introduced to this author just as I began to be published, and I love her wit, and her quirky approach to plot. The Beginning of Spring is a delicious novel, and it's as if the entire book is pitched towards the very last few lines. This reads like a small, perfectly formed, Russian novel, but amazingly is written by a very English author.
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Whether it’s Barbara Taylor Bradford’s window into the dark secrets of dynastic powerhouses, or the hard realities of Allison Pearson’s writing: the incisively humourous observations of Nick Hornby, or the light touch of Charlotte Bingham: the engrossing passion of Jojo Moyes, or the captivating worlds conjured by Jodi Picoult and Daisy Waugh, the range of fantastic stories in the Family Drama section is almost endless. Luckily our unique expert reviews and hand-picked recommendations are here to help match you with your perfect next read. Sign up to our monthly emails to stay in touch with the latest output from warm, wise Elizabeth Buchan, insightful Kate Atkinson, sensory-stimulating Joanna Harris, huge-scale Sidney Sheldon, magical Alice Hoffman and so many more in the varied family of fantastic authors of the genre.