The following family sagas track generations over many years, offering us casts of characters we care out, complicated relationships among the clans and atmospheric settings. They also set in a variety of countries and feature a range of time periods.

Check out these novels featuring family stories. 

There are many novels we enjoy because they are fast reads or present mysteries to solve. In those books, we get caught up in the story arc and we can’t wait to see how they turn out. But there are also novels that I as a librarian like to call the quiet reads, the ones that have passages to savor and ideas to wrestle with long after you finish the last page. They are the ones that some of our patrons tell me are reads that “stay with you.”

Historical fiction is a unique way of looking at our, and other people’s, pasts. Novelists take historical events or people and recreate them with a mix of fact and fiction. While popular with adults, there are numerous historical fiction books for teens and young adults.

Dystopia: A modern term invented as the opposite of utopia and applied to any alarmingly unpleasant imaginary world, usually of the projected future (Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms, pg. 74).

If you're looking for something a little bit darker, a little bit scarier and not quite like our own world, look no further.