Where there are families there are stories and where there are stories there are always secrets. It’s ripe crop for a writer. In literature, these are a staple of the coming-of-age novel. Family secrets seem to rise to the surface when a protagonist steps from childhood into adulthood, in that equally devastating and freeing moment of realising that one exists both within a family and outside of it, too.
It’s something I find myself drawn towards as a reader and as a writer – to the way untold truths take root between friends, lovers, families. In my debut novel, The Things That We Lost, I explore a family history through the eyes of a British Indian mother and son, Avani and Nik, as Nik tries to uncover the circumstances of his father’s death.
Whether in memoirs, novels or short stories, I’m also interested in the negotiation that takes place between a narrator and reader when secrets are involved, whether the two stand side by side in unearthing them, or the dramatic irony that charges through a story when truths are revealed to one but not the other. Here are 10 books that pull off this kind of negotiation especially well.
1. Foster by Claire Keegan
The story opens with the narrator’s father leaving her with the Kinsellas, a couple who live on a farm in rural Ireland. Cautious at first, the compassion she is shown by the couple draws her closer to them. She is bathed, fed, loved, and told, fervently, “there are no secrets in this house”. Except there are, or rather, there is one, sitting quietly behind the couple’s tenderness towards the girl. It’s the memory of their dead son, whose clothes the narrator wears to mass, whose room she sleeps in. A subtle, beautiful tale, all the more powerful for its succinctness.
2. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
This novel takes the form of a letter from Little Dog, a Vietnamese American narrator, to his illiterate mother. The fact that she will never be able to read it creates the perfect occasion for sincerity, for whispering truths that will never be heard. Revelations are made, secrets surface. Little Dog discovers fragments of his family’s history, the trauma they fled, and how all of this can lead him back to the pieces of himself.
3. A Dutiful Boy by Mohsin Zaidi
Zaidi’s affecting memoir recounts his journey growing up in east London in a devout Muslim household. He has a secret, one he cannot share with anyone – he is gay. When he moves away to study at Oxford he finds, for the first time, the possibility of living his life authentically. The dissonance this causes in him – of finding a way to accept himself while knowing his family will not do the same – is so sensitively depicted. One of the most moving chapters includes him coming home to a witch doctor, who his family has summoned to “cure” him. This is an incredibly important read, full of hope.
4. Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
Gyasi’s story follows a family who have moved from Ghana to Alabama, narrated by Gifty, the youngest daughter. Life does not pass smoothly for Gifty; her father goes back to Ghana and never returns, her brother becomes addicted to opioids after an injury, then dies of an overdose, and her mother succumbs to a grief-induced depression. Gifty goes from a family of four to none, her mother still chasing the ghost of her son. Meanwhile, Gifty oscillates between science and faith to better understand herself and the way her family has been torn apart. There is a slow and measured reveal of secrets throughout, unglamorous and unglorified.
5. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
The mysteries in this tale exist outside as much as within it; it’s not so much the quotidian family secrets that grip the reader, but rather the enigma of the real Hamnet, Shakespeare’s son, who the world knows so little about. The fictionalised relationship between Hamnet and his twin sister Judith is so tenderly illustrated, as are the shades of grief that ripple through the family in the wake of his death. Most beguiling is the mother, Agnes, who holds her own quiet secrets and has a strength and allure to her that is perfectly imagined.
6. In the Days of Rain by Rebecca Stott
Stott was brought up in the Exclusive Brethren, a fundamentalist Christian sect in which her father was a high-ranking minister. Despite this, he hides copies of Yeats and Shakespeare’s poetry and keeps a radio, all of which are forbidden. Then he leaves, taking his family with him. As he is dying years later, he asks Stott to finish the memoir he started, and the result is a deeply moving account of their family story, as they build a home in a world they’ve been taught to fear.
7. Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
This novel follows the Lees, a Chinese American family living in Ohio in the 1970s. In the opening lines, the omniscient narrator declares: “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” Lydia is the middle child, the favourite, whose body is soon to be found in a nearby lake. The narrator moves between the perspectives of each family member, weaving together the secrets each holds, allowing the reader to see the misunderstandings and miscommunications between them as they grapple with their grief and the mystery of Lydia’s death.
8. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Against the backdrop of the second world war, a 12-year-old girl flees Paris with her father to live with her great-uncle and his housekeeper. She is blind, so to help her navigate her new home, her father builds a miniature of it. Unknown to his daughter, he hides something in the model house. Then he goes missing and her world collides with Werner, a German orphan who is an expert at fixing radios, a highly coveted piece of technology. Rich with detail and intricately woven, it’s a story of resilience told in vivid prose.
9. Things We Do Not Tell the People We Love by Huma Qureshi
Huma Qureshi’s collection of short stories brims with misunderstandings and things left unsaid. In Too Much, a daughter ghosts her mother after finding freedom at a yoga training course in Spain. Distraught, the mother goes to great lengths to uncover the secret her daughter harbours, for there must be one. Except there isn’t. Qureshi simply holds up a mirror; it’s the mother’s suffocating behaviour itself that has pushed her daughter away. In this way, Qureshi dives into the everyday tragedies and betrayals that pull us apart from each other.
10. Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson
When Byron and Benny’s mother dies, she leaves them two things: a frozen black cake made from a beloved family recipe and an eight-hour voice recording. The siblings have been estranged for years, but are thrown back together to uncover the truths their mother has held back, and to share the frozen black cake “when the time is right”. It’s a delicious and gripping tale that sweeps the reader across decades and continents, turning everything the siblings think they know about themselves and their family on its head.