Family history
Fleshing out family history
DNA test kits may have been all the rage in recent years, but how much can they really tell us…
Escape from drudgery
Shunned by his father and his peers because of his homosexuality, Édouard Louis (born Eddy Bellegueule in 1992) left his village…
Messy family business
Cressida Connolly’s new novel begins with a couple of endings. It’s spring 1855, and on the battlefields of the Crimea…
That way madness lies
There is a trend for books in which academics write personally about their engagement with literature. Examples include Lara Feigel’s…
Family misfortunes
The journalist and broadcaster Christina Patterson’s memoir begins promisingly. She has a talent for vivid visual description, not least: ‘We…
Variations on a theme
My daunting brief: to tell you about Hanya Yanagihara and her new, uncategorisable 720-page novel in 550 words. It’s the…
Nostalgia for the Ottomans
One of the most depressing vignettes in Michael Vatikiotis’s agreeably meandering account of his cosmopolitan family’s experiences in the Near…
Wealth and misfortune
The potter and author Edmund de Waal revisits familiar terrain at an angle in his third book, Letters to Camondo.…
Ancestral voices
Despite innovative work by younger writers, there remains a prominent strain in Irish literature of what we might call the…
A tissue of lies
Kiss Myself Goodbye. It sounds a bit like a William Boyd novel. It looks likea William Boyd novel, too: the…
A passion for collecting
Every so often the past makes a pass at you. An old school report, a train ticket, a curl from…
A family in a billion
Don Galvin and Mimi Blayney married in December 1944. It was a shotgun wedding. They had been high school sweethearts.…
An intellectual dynasty: the Darwins, Wedgwoods and their notable intermarriages
Readers of Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage will remember that its author set out to write a life of…
The best way to escape my abusive family was to write novels
Early on in Amy Tan’s 1989 bestseller, The Joy Luck Club, a Chinese concubine slices a chunk of flesh from…
Mouldering hats and wedding veils
In deciding to write a book about her forebears and herself, Juliet Nicolson follows in their footsteps. Given that her…
Family divisions
The geological title of this unhappy memoir is an apt metaphor for fissures in the relationships between individuals of David…
Three was a crowd
Mirabel Cecil on Lord Berners’s volatile ménage — as surprising and colourful as his famous dyed doves
Daddy, we hardly knew you
The lefty hereditary peer has few equals as a figure of fun, in life or literature. The late Tony Benn…
Oh, what a tangled web
There aren’t many places you can get shouty about Proust without losing your job. The Lane Bookshop in Perth, Western…
