Top 10 literary works about ancestors

Daisy Hildyard was born in Yorkshire in 1984 and currently lives in London, where she is studying for a PhD on scientific language. Hunters in the Snow is her first novel.

For the Guardian, she named the ten best poems, books and plays about our human inheritance, including:

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce is a long, bitter and, for its lawyers, pleasingly expensive inheritance suit, "from which no crumb of amusement ever falls". The storyline is a parable about the kind of ancestors we all want, the rich kind, who are probably more likely to leave us scrapping with our brothers and sisters than they are likely to leave us with a fortune.

Read about another entry on the list.

Bleak House is one of George Packer's six favorite books, Oliver Ford Davies's six best books, Ian Rankin's 5 favorite literary crime novels, Tim Pigott-Smith's six best books, James McCreet's top ten Victorian detective stories and one of Rebecca Ford's favorite five fiction books. It is on John Mortimer's list of the five best books about law and literature and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best thunderstorms in literature and ten of the best men writing as women, and is among the top ten works of literature according to Stephen King.

--Marshal Zeringue