Six top books featuring families

Paul Murray was born in 1975 in Dublin. His novels include An Evening of Long Goodbyes, short-listed for the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award; Skippy Dies, long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Mark and the Void, joint winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and one of Time’s Top 10 Fiction Books of the year; and The Bee Sting, one of The New York Times Top 10 Books of the Year.

At the Waterstones blog Murray tagged six favorite books featuring families. One title on the list:

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

As I Lay Dying was one of the first ‘grown-up’ novels I read. A kind of a Gothic road trip through the Deep South, it recounts the Bundren family’s journey from the badlands of Mississippi to Jefferson to bury their mother, Addie. They carry the coffin on a horse and cart and encounter many obstacles. It’s one of Faulkner’s shorter and less difficult novels – relatively speaking – and has a sly line in black humour. It ended up being a big influence on my novel The Bee Sting, both tonally and structurally; Faulkner lets his characters take it in turns to tell the story, and the conflicting, even contradictory perspectives that emerge within a single family are brilliantly brought to life here.

Read about another entry on the list.

As I Lay Dying is on a list of four books that shaped Carmel Reilly's love of literature, a list of four books that changed Elizabeth J. Church, Jesmyn Ward's list of six favorite books featuring absent parents, Emily Ruskovich's top ten list of rural American novels, Jeff Somers's top five list of books written in very unlikely places, Shaun Byron Fitzpatrick's list of eight of the most badass ladies in all of banned literature, Nicole Hill's lists of nine of the biggest martyrs in fiction and five books that, like country and western songs, tell "stories of agony and ecstasy, soaring highs and mighty powerful lows, heartache and hard living," Laura Frost's list of the ten best modernist books (in English), Helen Humphreys's top ten list of books on grieving, John Mullan's list of ten of the best teeth in literature, Jon McGregor's list of the top ten dead bodies in literature, Roy Blount Jr.'s list of five favorite books of Southern humor, and James Franco's six best books list.

The “My mother is a fish.” chapter in As I Lay Dying is among the ten most notorious parts of famous books according to Gabe Habash.

--Marshal Zeringue