Simon Mason is the author of The Quigleys, a series of funny and heartwarming children's books about the chaos and joys of family life. His latest book, Moon Pie, about an 11-year-old girl struggling to hold her family together in the face of her father's alcoholism, has been longlisted for the Guardian children's fiction prize.
"Lifestyles have changed, and we've moved some way from the common-or-garden nuclear family, but the truth is that families have always been wildly varied. Think of the Greek myths. Perseus's dad was a shower of gold. Families are also ubiquitous. Most of us grow up in them. Wherever you look there's usually one lurking nearby. It's certainly true in books. Settle down with a bunch of Henning Mankell thrillers and you soon start to notice that the ongoing narrative is not so much about crime as Wallander's relationships with his father and daughter.
Books about families are just as common and varied as the real things. Who knows what I might have included in my list if I'd read more. But the ones I've chosen are among my favourite of all books. All the great themes are here – conflict, love, betrayal, loyalty, bitterness and joy – and each time it's personal. It's family."
1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Read one way, it's a classic love story; read another, it's the story of an exploding family: a fabulous spectacle of tears and laughter. As Mrs Bennet dreams of her daughters' marriages, and Mr Bennet hides in his library, the Bennet sisters fly out of control. Fantastic rudeness, love at first sight, hair-pulling jealousy, sullen moping and the world's least successful elopement ensue.
2. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Six generations of the Buendías family, most of the men helpfully called Aureliano, invent family life from scratch in the South American swamps of Macondo. The men are fantastical and useful, the women loving and vengeful: improbable magic, tender love and bitter feuds are their main occupations. Famous as the novelist who invented "magic realism", Marquez commented that he was just telling stories like his grandmother used to do. Some grandmother.
3. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
Meet the Starkadders of Howling, Sussex – sin-obsessed Amos preaching at the Church of the Quivering Bretheren, Urk tending to his beloved water-voles, sex-god Seth mollocking down in the village, and Great Aunt Ada, 20 years confined to her room since she saw "something nasty in the woodshed". The family from hell brilliantly anatomised by Gibbons' pitiless genius for comedy.
4. The Inheritors by William Golding
Here, by an astonishing leap of the imagination, is the last family in the world – the last Neanderthal family, whose way of life is about to be ended by the new species Homo Sapiens. As Mal the elder dies and his heir Ha disappears, it falls to Lok the clown to protect Fa, the sensible female and the trusting child Liku. The family's doomed struggle for survival is epic: powerful, intimate and very moving.
5. Beloved by Toni Morrison
Don't read this if you don't like sad books (ie catastrophically painful books about the inhuman suffering of slaves in the American South). Read it if you want to experience something extraordinarily powerful: the story of a mother who loves her children so tenderly she would do anything to them to prevent them falling into the hands of the slavers.
6. The Polyglots by William Gerhardie
Try to get hold of a copy of this in-and-out-of-print cult classic, a hilarious and heartbreaking story set during the Russian Revolution of mixed-up young man Georges Diabologh and his remarkable extended family of English, Russians and Belgians, including an alluring cousin Sylvia-Ninon and a tragic Uncle Lucy who hangs himself in his sister's knickers.
7. The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
Not even Disney could dull the wild magic of the man-cub Mowgli and his adoptive family of Kaa the python, Baloo the bear, Bagheera the black panther and a pack of wolves. Kipling was one of the great writers of growing up human (see also Kim), and here he shows how intimately it involves the jungle laws of kinship and enmity.
8. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
It casts a spell like no other novel, and at its heart is a portrait of one of the most touching if lopsided families in fiction – nine-year-old Scout Finch, her older brother Jem and father Atticus, plus maid Calpurnia – caught up in a viciously racist murder trial in the Deep South. It's hard to write convincingly about ordinary good people, but Harper Lee doesn't put a foot wrong.
9. Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence
No list would be complete without a dysfunctional family. Here it is: the Morels. Set (with all the rich, careless detail of personal experience) in a Midlands mining village, Lawrence's masterpiece is an eyes-wide-open, ears-pinned-back account of bitter rows, bewildered violence and icy scorn. It's not nice. But it's very real.
10. The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
And here, finally, is my favourite family saga: a gorgeous soap opera of continuous family dramas set in Cairo's ancient quarter through the 20th century. In a multi-faceted story of agonising births, bitter funerals and a bewildering number of incautious marriages, the characters are flung, as by sort of centrifugal force, towards their individual destinies.
