The best family sagas of all time, according to Samantha Ellis

Samantha Ellis is a playwright and author, whose books include How to be a Heroine, about the women in fiction who shaped her ideas of the world, and Take Courage, a biography of Anne Brontë.

Her latest book, Chopping Onions on My Heart, is her gorgeous, devastating memoir about trying to preserve the language of her Iraqi-Jewish parents – and the culture that goes with it. Ellis writes with insight and tenderness about food, language, generational trauma, displacement and parenthood, as she considers which aspects of the lives of her ancestors she wants to save, and which to relinquish.

So what are the novels about families and the relationships between the generations that she holds closest to her heart? Here, she chooses her top five family sagas.

Victoria by Sami Michael, translated by Dalya Bilu

This family saga is almost like my family saga, in that it centres on a Jewish family in Baghdad, on the eve of the First World War. Victoria is part of a sprawling family crammed into an old courtyard house and tearing themselves apart with rifts, betrayals, rivalries and seductions. It’s an intense, sometimes shocking, portrait of a lost world too; there are now believed to be just three Jews left in the whole of Iraq.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

In this sprawling, rollicking novel, a Jewish boy smuggles himself out of Nazi-occupied Prague in a coffin and seeks refuge with his American cousin. Together they invent a superhero called The Escapist who battles Hitler on the pages of the comic books they write. He wins, but off the page, the cousins have a harder time trying to save their relatives from the real Nazis. It’s devastating but also exhilarating on love and creativity.

The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji

Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, this is a glitzy, gutsy, deliciously dark romp about Persian exiles in LA (or Tehrangeles as it’s known) and the relatives they left behind. There is caviar, there is a waxing parlour, there are priceless jewels thrown into the snow – and also a lot of good thinking about misogyny, generational trauma and losing your home.

The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

You can’t have a multigenerational story without inherited trauma, and the teenager at the heart of this novel is struggling and does not know why. It’s only when she learns more about her family story – involving star-crossed lovers separated by the 1974 civil war in Cyprus “hemmed in by carnage and hatred on all sides” – that she is able to understand herself and glimpse a way forward.

Rules for Ghosting by Shelly Jay Shore

The queer romance about a Jewish funeral home I didn’t know I needed, this is a gorgeous love-struck novel about seeing ghosts and trying to find love while under pressure from both the living and the dead. I loved that, unusually for a family saga, its protagonist had a really charming and intentional found family, but also never gave up on their original family.

‘Chopping Onions on My Heart’ by Samantha Ellis (Chatto & Windus, £16.99) is shortlisted for the Wingate Prize