Cressida Connolly is a reviewer and journalist who has written for Vogue, the Telegraph, the Spectator, the Guardian and numerous other publications. Connolly's books include The Happiest Days, which won the MacMillan/PEN Award, The Rare and the Beautiful, My Former Heart, and After the Party.
Her new novel is Bad Relations.
At the Guardian Connolly tagged ten top novels about inheritance, including:
A Thousand Acres by Jane SmileyRead about another entry on the list.
Shakespeare’s King Lear is perhaps the most confounding fiction ever written about inheritance. Why doesn’t the favourite daughter just humour her batty oldfather and get the prize? This question, among others raised by the play, lodged itself in the mind of US novelist Smiley. Her novel is a subtle and at times harrowing reworking of the Lear story, in which the kingdom becomes a farm in the mid-west. As a study of how toxic a legacy may be, it is hard to better.
A Thousand Acres is among Alison Espach's ten best novels featuring sisters, Renée Branum's seven novels about family curses, Lois Leveen's five novels that riff on—and rip off—Shakespeare, Stacey Swann's seven novels about family members making each other miserable, Robert McCrum's ten top Shakespearean books, Rachel Mans McKenny's eleven books about midwesterners who aren’t trying to be nice, Hannah Beckerman's top ten toxic families in fiction, Brian Boone's five books that offer a brand new take on pre-existing works, Edward Docx's top ten Shakespearean stories in modern fiction, Emma Donoghue's six best books, Anne Tyler's six favorite books, Sally O'Reilly ten top novels inspired by Shakespeare, Alexia Nader's nine favorite books about unhappy families, and John Mullan's top ten twice-told tales.
--Marshal Zeringue