The best psychological novels involving family secrets and mysteries from the past

After reading this book three times, I still find it fascinating–and I still have to concentrate to follow the complex plot. The death of a young British army officer during the Battle of the Somme in the First World War lies at the root of a mystery that involves three generations of an aristocratic family living in a decaying country house in Hampshire’s Meon valley.

With its skillful interweaving of past and present, I think this early book by Robert Goddard is one of his best. 

I was intrigued by the first chapter, in which a terminally ill woman is writing a confession about an event in her past. The content of that confession is not revealed till the end of the book, and meanwhile, the suspense is maintained with a clever interweaving of past and present told from different characters’ points of view.

After the woman has died, her husband, a retired schoolmaster, his children, and grandchildren visit their holiday house in Devon, intending to scatter the ashes of their beloved matriarch. But panic ensues when the baby of the family disappears.  

A haunting, erotic, somewhat mystical story of sexual obsession. Set near Newbury sometime during the last century, it has an old-fashioned air, portraying English provincial life as it used to be.

The narrator is a sensitive, naive young man who deals in fine ceramics. He falls passionately in love with a Danish woman, and they marry, but she has a dreadful secret that leads to tragedy. The book's title refers to an antique figurine that plays a part in the plot.

I love reading novels set in Oxford, where I spent some of the happiest years of my life, and this book includes some vivid descriptions of the city and its environs.

The narrator is an eccentric woman, a mathematician with a troubled past, who works for academic families as a nanny. She takes a post with an unlikeable couple in the hope of befriending their withdrawn 8-year-old daughter. But when the little girl goes missing, the nanny comes under suspicion. This is an unusual story with some quirky characters.  

In the 1970s, I worked in a large old English mental hospital, which was soon to be closed and replaced by community care services. This novel is set in an Irish hospital where the same process is underway. It concerns the developing relationship between two characters.

One is the psychiatrist tasked with assessing the long-stay patients prior to relocation. The other is a woman of about 100 years old who has spent all her adult life in the hospital and kept a secret diary. The book is beautifully written and serves as a reminder that aged people in institutions should not be undervalued.