If you liked Joanna Trollope's The Other Family
...here’s a selection of stories examining similar themes of loss and inheritance...
The Ghost Lover by Gillian Greenwood
This is Gillian Greenwood’s acclaimed second novel whose complex plot is matched by rich detail.
Josie Price has given up much of her life for the sake of the wealthy Haddeley family. She works with them, lives with them and knows their secrets. So when a young man, Luke, appears and claims, shockingly, to be the son of Kit Haddeley's late wife Alice, Josie tries to help the Haddeleys come to terms with the family ghosts they hoped had been laid to rest. But Luke's arrival casts shadows on both the past and the future. Above all it is the ghost of Alice Haddeley which hangs most heavily over the family. Through Luke, she seems to demand to be both mourned and revenged. With her intimate knowledge of the family past, it is Josie who holds the key to the mystery of Alice, and it is Josie, beset by guilt, who must resolve the destructive inheritance which Luke brings in his wake.
The Believers by Zoe Heller
The Notes on a Scandal author turns her gaze to a dysfunctional family in New York.
When Audrey makes a devastating discovery about her husband, New York radical lawyer Joel Litvinoff, she is forced to re-examine everything she thought she knew about their forty-year marriage. Joel's children will have to deal with this unsettling secret themselves, but meanwhile, they are trying to cope with their own dilemmas. Rosa, beautiful, disillusioned revolutionary, is grappling with a new-found attachment to Orthodox Judaism. Unhappily married Karla is falling in love with an unlikely suitor at the hospital where she works. Adopted brother Lenny is back on drugs again. In the course of battling their own demons and each other, every member of the family is called upon to decide what - if anything - they still believe in.
