The best novels about siblings in trying circumstances

James’s novella is the closest thing I know to a literary version of the “Rabbit or Duck?” illusion— either a ghost story or a case study in psychopathology, depending on your perspective.

Miles and Flora, 10 and 8, are Victorian orphans left in the charge of an uncaring uncle. Their governess is far more attentive, but her own cloistered religious upbringing hasn’t prepared her for a world of anything other than Purity versus Corruption.

When she learns that the previous governess at Bly House was seduced by the uncle’s valet, she’s driven at any cost to purge the children of their vile influences—which she thinks they continue to exert as ghosts. But is she the only dangerous adult presence?

A chilling look at the power of puritanical ideology and the total dependence of children on their educators and caregivers, this book is well worth whacking through the thicket of James’s prose.

Richard Hughes has always been my favorite under-read author. I tell people he writes as though he were the love child of A. A. Milne and Joseph Conrad.

A High Wind begins in an idyllic Caribbean setting, with the five Thornton and two Fernandez children living in what seems to be pre-lapsarian innocence; but Hughes soon plunks them square into the world of “Typhoon” and Lord Jim.

There are hellacious hurricanes and swashbuckling pirates involved, but it’s the pirates that are finally defenseless in the face of the children they unluckily take on board from an England-bound passenger ship. Time and time again, Hughes captures the bizarre ways in which children see the world, just as often warped by imagination as consolidated by fact.

I’m struck by the way his empathy for his characters never guarantees that their fate in his hands will be anything other than brutal.

No English novel from the last hundred years impresses me more than this one.

It’s the story of thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis, daughter of a landed British family, and her tangled relations with her older sister—for whom she feels admiration, jealousy, and a precocious but fierce protectiveness. The results are life-shattering.

McEwan shares Hughes’s ability to chart the unruly territory of a child's mind, and he leaves you fascinated and horrified by what can happen when the adult world listens too trustingly to words “from the mouths of babes.”

Atonement is also about writing and the ways written words can both pale before and triumph over the hard facts of reality. Whether it’s the luminous descriptiveness of his prose or his rare capacity to craft gripping drama on stages of all sizes, from the domestic to the global, McEwan writes in ways that leave readers amazed and other writers envious.

The story of Ghanaian half-sisters expands into a majestic historical epic as Effia marries the English governor of the local slave trade and Esi is abducted and transported to America.

Spanning more than two centuries from the mid-1700s, the novel traces the fates of both halves of the divided family, embroiled on the one hand in the tribal rivalries and colonial exploitations of Ghana and immersed on the other in the horrors of plantation life, the challenges of post-Civil-War migration, and the cultural dynamism of Harlem.

By the time distant cousins from the two lines, Marjorie and Marcus, meet in America and travel together back to Ghana, I felt I had come as close as it’s probably possible to come to appreciating the countless challenges and astounding resiliencies of a long-suffering people.

Gyasi’s ability to develop and sustain a huge cast of characters on two sweeping historical stages is astonishing.

I’ve always loved the pluck and endurance of Ulysses, and this 2021 road-trip novel could almost be The Odyssey transposed into the worlds of Huckleberry Finn, The Grapes of Wrath, and Catcher in the Rye.

At its heart is Emmet Watson, recently released from a Kansas juvenile detention center and determined to use his dead father’s modest bequest to become a man of property. His younger brother Billy, though, convinces Emmet to suspend his plans and, as a pair, hit the Lincoln Highway towards California to find their runaway mother.

Billy’s poignant hopes for a family reunion run afoul of a motley crew of minor and major villains and benefactors—from car thieves, to a murderous hobo king, to a charismatic author who inspires Billy with tales of the heroes of old, Ulysses significantly included.

Towles takes my breath away with his wit, empathy, total narrative unpredictability, and a laser-keen eye for character and setting.