10 of the most dysfunctional families in Booker Prize-nominated novels

We all know of one – some of us, if we’re honest, might even belong to one – but one thing is certain: dysfunctional families have featured heavily in some of the most memorable works of fiction ever published, from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov to Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. 

More recently, several Booker-nominated authors have explored the defective dynamics between siblings, parents and children. Among them are Edward St Aubyn, shortlisted for the Booker in 2006 for Mother’s Milk, the fourth of his Patrick Melrose novels, and Oyinkan Braithwaite, longlisted in 2019 for My Sister the Serial Killer, a ballet adaptation of which will be touring the UK this spring. In some cases, they have taken inspiration from their own lives in order to weave together colourful accounts of fraught relationships, messy arguments and long-held grudges. 

This list of Booker-nominated novels reveals a wide range of complex, chaotic and maladjusted households, where rivalries, estrangement, secrets and betrayals are commonplace – some of which might spark an awkward pang of familiarity among readers. Just remember: while we can’t choose our families, at least we can choose which of these superb books to pick up next.

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016, My Name is Lucy Barton follows the titular character – a successful writer, separated from her husband and daughters – as she recovers from surgery and receives an unexpected visit from her estranged mother. The two women reminisce about people from their Illinois hometown, but with so much left unsaid, they skirt around the topics that have kept them apart for so many years – the pain and damage caused by an impoverished and lonely childhood, the abuse experienced at the hands of Lucy’s father, and the absence of love and protection she craved from her stoic and aloof mother. In the New York Times, Booker-nominated author Claire Messud said that ‘Strout articulates for her readers – albeit often circumspectly, perhaps the only way – the Gordian knot of family, binding together fear and misery, solace and love’.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

A million-copy international bestseller, We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves revolves around the Cooke family: Rosemary (the book’s narrator), her mother and father (a professor of behavioural psychology), her brother Lowell and – most memorably – her ‘twin sister’, Fern. Rosemary is a student at the University of California, and is trying to make sense of her deeply unorthodox 1970s childhood, and the events that led to Fern going missing and Lowell becoming a criminal fugitive. While we won’t reveal the jaw-dropping twist that happens a quarter of the way through the book, we’re certain it will make you think differently about sibling relationships, parental responsibility, and even animal rights.

In the New York Times Book Review, Barbara Kingsolver described it as ‘a novel so readably juicy and surreptitiously smart, it deserves all the attention it can get. Its fresh diction and madcap plot bend the tone toward comedy, but it never mislays its solemn raison d’être’. The book was shortlisted for the Booker in 2014 and won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in the same year.

Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo, translated by Leah Janeczko

A bestseller in the author’s native Italy, this comic, auto-fictional novel centres on Vero, a young woman growing up in 1980s Rome (and a deeply unreliable narrator). Contending with her strange yet endearing family, including an anxiety-ridden mother, an obsessive father and a borderline-genius brother, Vero desires to strike out on her own, without really knowing where she’s going. A natural liar, she embellishes stories and eventually turns to writing to preserve her sanity. Translated from Italian by Leah Janeczko, Lost on Me is constructed as a series of chaotic snapshots of family life – some true, some less so – as Vero seeks independence from her neurotic, overbearing relatives. 

Longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2024, Lost on Me was described by the judges as ‘a funny, sharp, wonderfully readable novel in which a fresh, playful voice takes us to the heart of an obsessive, unpredictable family’. Barry Pierce from The Big Issue called it ‘a biting portrait of a dysfunctional family that deserves to reach a discerning audience’.

Self Help by Edward Docx

Secrets and revelations abound in Edward Docx’s page-turning, globe-trotting second novel, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2007. Indeed, secrets and revelations are things Docx knows quite well. Until his teenage years, the author thought he was part Indian; then, a confession by his ailing grandmother revealed she wasn’t his grandmother at all, and that he was actually part Russian. It’s the sort of bombshell Docx would plant in Self Help, which follows twins Gabriel and Isabella as they navigate the aftermath of their mother’s death and uncover a series of secrets that upend their lives. Set between London, New York, Paris, and Saint Petersburg, the book explores the lives of a cast of colourful, entangled characters, scattered around the world, from their manipulative father to a heroin addict and an illegitimate Russian child.

In the Financial Times, International Booker Prize-nominated author Andrey Kurkov said that Docx ‘delves deep into the internal world of his heroes and his perceptiveness and precision allow him to create some memorable images,’ while other reviewers have drawn comparisons between Docx and such literary heavyweights as Dickens and Dostoevsky.

The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens

Bernice Rubens became the first woman to win the Booker Prize – and the prize’s only Welsh winner (so far) – with this 1970 novel that explores the effects of addiction on a respectable, close-knit family, and the invisible damage that can be caused by parental love.

The Elected Member centres around the Zweck family, who live in London’s East End, and whose eldest child Norman possesses a prodigious talent for language and spends his younger years being groomed for greatness. But after a spell as a moderately successful lawyer, Norman slowly becomes addicted to amphetamines. He suffers from vivid hallucinations, convinced that he is seeing silverfish everywhere, and is eventually committed to a psychiatric hospital by his Rabbi father. Through their efforts to help him, it becomes clear that Norman’s loving family are weighed down with responsibility for his downfall – a form of childhood ‘abuse’ Rubens herself admitted she had experienced firsthand.

In her autobiography, she wrote: ‘I cannot even claim an abused childhood. No uncle laid a finger on me, and I was never hungry, yet I was abused. We all were, my brothers and sister, by parental expectation. Such expectation is abuse of a kind. It doesn’t matter that it was motivated by love. Its effect was damaging and long-lasting’.

David Holloway, Chair of the 1970 Booker judges, said that The Elected Member ‘was a book that clamoured to be given the prize. It took hold of the judges’ imaginations quite rapidly and would not be denied’.