Family History: A Novel - Softcover

In Family History, Dani Shapiro has written such a nail biter of a plot that it's easy to overlook just how good--and how literary--a novel this really is. Narrator Rachel Jenson is a housewife and art restorer married to Ned, a one-time painter. They live with their two children, 13-year-old Kate and 2-year-old Josh, in the small New England town where Ned grew up. In an elegant series of flashbacks, we learn of the emotional devastation teenage Kate has wrought. She was a perfect child growing up, but once Josh came along, her dark thoughts and tragic actions nearly destroy her family. As secret after secret is revealed, Shapiro gets perfectly Rachel's horror of daily life: how can you chat with the other moms at preschool when your world is falling apart? But what makes Family History a fine novel is its utter freedom from stereotype. Kate is bad, but she's never the bad seed; Ned's a failure, but he's not a total wash; Rachel's a narrator mired in tragedy, but she's a wry, slightly unreliable narrator mired in tragedy. Shapiro knows just how much hope to give her characters. In the end, their redemption is so slight that we actually believe in it. --Claire Dederer

“This gripping narrative has the deeply felt emotional fidelity of a true story; it’s a book readers will finish in one sitting. The physicality of Rachel’s maternal love—the need of a mother to touch her child, to feel it breathe—is almost palpable. Shapiro writes luminously about marital love and contented domestic routines, and with brutal insight about the corrosive misery of guilt and shame. Crafted with assurance, this novel holds a mirror to contemporary life.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“From the first page to the last, Family History is virtually impossible to put down: a beautifully structured, tightly woven exploration of the mysteries of adolescent pain, and the brutal efficiency with which a crisis can engulf a family and transform it into something unrecognizable.” --Jennifer Egan

“No family is ever entirely fathomed, even by itself–the map must be drawn new each time. In Family History, Dani Shapiro trains her abundant gifts as a writer on one family struggling at the brink of dissolution, and the map she so powerfully draws is heartbreaking, and impossible to turn away from.” --John Burnham Schwartz

“Dani Shapiro has the gift. That a book as harrowing as Family History can be such a pageturner is testimony to the primal power of storytelling and the saving grace of art.” --David Gates
“Few novels demonstrate the worth of and need for family in the way that this one does. None have made me more aware of its ongoing fragility. To read Family History is to understand in the most visceral of ways that nothing in our closest relationships can ever be taken for granted. And though that realization might make you uncomfortable, it will also make you deeply grateful for the blessings that you enjoy.” --Elizabeth Berg

“Dani Shapiro has written powerfully and lovingly about that most complicated, interesting, and dangerous of subjects, the family.” --Roxanna Robinson