If I had a nickel for every time I’d mentioned my affinity for intergenerational coming-of-age narratives on Lit Hub, I’d… probably still be working here, because Lit Hub is great, but I might also have like, twenty extra dollars (almost enough for a fresh new intergenerational coming-of-age novel!).
I’m recommending two relatively recent novels: Michelle Huneven’s
Bug Hollow, and Eric Puchner’s
Dream State. Both are sprawling family histories with gorgeous sentences, complex relationships that go far beyond “wacky family” fare, and an attention to place that I found particularly moving. The latter is also sneak-up-on you funny, which is always a major bonus for me.
Sticking with the family theme:
Time Will Darken It, by
New Yorker editor William Maxwell follows a small-town lawyer as visiting relatives upend his upstanding life and his efforts to be a Good Man. As you might expect, it’s both riveting and devastating. (But also funny! Albeit in a way that makes you exhale rather than chuckle.)
Since you’re a fiction reader and a history buff, I can’t recommend Wright Thompson’s
The Barn highly enough. The book is about the murder of Emmett Till, so it’s a fairly horrifying read, but it’s also a necessary one, and Thompson, who grew up just 23 miles from the barn where Till was murdered, writes with a novelist’s skill and a historian’s relentless attention to detail. The book is as much about Mississippi itself as it is about any one person, and I came away with a much greater understanding of the place as a whole—about its brutal failures and the forces that created them.
Without overpromising, I think that if you choose any of these books, you’ll be thinking about (and re-recommending) them long after you finish reading.
–Jessie Gaynor, Senior Editor
