Welcome back to Book Break! I'm gonna give you my recommendations for the best books that span
multiple generations. Such a lovely format for a book, I know so many people love this,
so let's get to it! Let's start with a new one. Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia. So this is
about five generations of Cuban women, all linked by a book that has been passed down through the
generations, with an affirmation scrawled in the margins. “We are force. We are more than we think
we are.” The earliest generation that we meet is in 1866 Cuba when Maria is the only woman working
at a cigar factory, and then we go all the way through the generations to present day Miami
where Jeanette has just decided to go back to Cuba to visit her grandmother, and her mother Carmen
knows there are secrets threatening to be exposed. So the book is about this whole line of fearless
women, it's about mothers and daughters and the choices that they make, and it's about the bravery
of women choosing to tell their stories. The Art of Losing by Alice Zeniter is translated from
French. This is about a young French woman called Naima who knows that her family is Algerian,
but has never felt much personal connection to that, having lived her whole life in France,
and her whole family are pretty silent on their past. She knows that her grandfather Ali
was forced to leave, but she's never known why, so when she decides to go back and visit Algeria it's
the first time in three generations that any of their family have gone back. And so the book spans
70 years of this family history and explores themes of identity and the loss of identity.
Some Luck by Jane Smiley is actually the first in a series, in the Last Hundred Years trilogy
that spans a century of American history. So this first book takes us from 1920 to 1950 in the lives
of Walter and Rosanna Langdon on their remote Iowan farm. So we're basically following 30 years
in this book of this family growing up. We really get to fall in love with each member of the family
and see how much life will change for them through the decades. And I absolutely loved
this quote from the description. “Some will fall in love, some will have families of their own,
some will go to war, and some will not survive. All will mark history in their own
way.” And then there are two more books in the series that take us even further
down the generations. And Jane Smiley is such a wonderful writer, her most recent book just
came out this year, The Strays of Paris. That one is about the friendship between a boy,
a dog, and a horse, and it's just stunning. Another gorgeous multi-generational series is The
Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard. This is my copy here, but the whole series is actually
getting a brand new look this summer with covers that look like this. So there's five books in the
series following this privileged family living in a beautiful house in the Sussex countryside,
starting with this one that I've got here, The Light Years, which begins in 1937,
and where we meet three generations of this family and follow them over the course of
two idyllic summers, before in the second book, World War II breaks out. And the series takes us
all the way through to the 50s for the final book, where we see how this family is holding up in
such constantly changing times, and we meet a whole new generation of Cazalets ready to take the
family into the modern world. And then a series that takes multi-generational to a whole new level
Ken Follett's Kingsbridge series spans over 500 years of history. So there are four books in the
series, starting with The Pillars of the Earth, which is about the attempt to build the greatest
Gothic cathedral in the medieval world. And then each book takes us to a whole new time period,
a new cast of characters, but set around this city and this cathedral with generations of the same
families through the centuries. So this is really one for history buffs, for people who love tracing
their family trees. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is such a heartbreaking one. This starts in Korea
in 1883 where we meet Hoonie, who is the only surviving son of a poor fisherman and his wife,
and then it's this epic historical fiction that takes us all the way down Hoonie's family line
all the way through to 1989. We see the family immigrate to Japan and find whole new ways to
survive. There's so much hardship in this book but it is beautiful. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi is maybe
the ultimate multi-generational novel because each chapter takes us to a next generation, and the
whole book spans 300 years. So it begins with the story of two half-sisters in Ghana who never know
each other and have very different lives. Effia is married off to an English businessman and Esi is
sold as a slave and imprisoned in the dungeon underneath the castle where Effia is living.
And the book then takes us all the way through the generations of these two halves of the family
line. In one branch of the family we follow Effia's descendants through centuries of
warfare in Ghana, and the other line follows Esi's generation, taken to America and their life there,
in slavery and beyond. It's fascinating. So we've had some very sweeping novels, and then one that
focuses more on the generations of one immediate family and their secrets is The Butterfly Room by
Lucinda Riley. This is about 70 year old Posy who has decided she needs to sell her home,
when faces appear from her past. So we meet Freddie, her first love who broke her heart 50
years before, we meet her sons, including Nick who has just reappeared after 10 years in Australia,
and we learn a devastating family secret hidden within the house itself. The Namesake by Jhumpa
Lahiri is about a man called Gogol Ganguli growing up in America with Bengali parents,
and it's about the conflict between these two cultures, these two generations. And
the book really jumps through time, spans continents, we get to go back into the history
of the parents themselves. And the book is such a deep character study, you really get to learn
so much about every single character. You'll know them as if they were your own family. One to keep
your eye out for that's coming in July and you can pre-order it right now is Soul Sisters by Leslie
Lokko. So this is about the lifelong friendship between Kemi and Jen, one born in South Africa,
one born in Scotland. And since they were children Kemi and Jen have lived together like sisters in
the McFadden family home in Edinburgh, brought together by a shared history that stretches back
through the generations. And the book takes us to South Africa, as well as back into the past,
to discover the dark family secrets hiding there. And then finally I wanted to recommend this one
even though it's something a bit different for this theme, and that is The Office of Historical
Corrections by Danielle Evans. So this is actually a short story collection plus a novella,
so it's not a sweeping multi-generational novel like the others on this list, but I thought it
really fit because all of the stories in here are about the theme of history. What gets passed down
through the generations, who gets to decide which parts of history are told. And there's two stories
in here in particular that I think people who love multi-generational stories will adore. The first
is the story Alcatraz which is about a mother and a daughter visiting Alcatraz where their
grandfather and great-grandfather was wrongly imprisoned, and at the same time they're also
trying to reconnect with this long-lost branch of the family. So you really do get to explore the
family tree there. And then there's also the title novella, The Office of Historical Corrections.
That one is about a crime that took place in a small town where the descendants of those involved
still live. And it's about a woman whose job it is to piece together what actually happened. So
I would love to hear your recommendations of your favourite books that span generations. I will also
leave a playlist here of all of our videos where we have recommended historical fiction
books, because I feel there's a lot of overlap in the readers there, and we'll see you next time!