It seems like most of us can’t get enough of family dramas, whether in books, movies, or TV series. There are innumerable types of families, yet they share many traits across time, place, and culture. Along with love stories and coming of age tales, family stories represent one of the universal human experiences that we all seek to understand better. In the last few weeks I’ve read three novels about families that I think are worth your time.

Good People by Patmeena Sabit (Crown Books, Feb. 3)

Good People is a book for these complicated and contradictory times. The Sharaf family fled Afghanistan to build a new life in America. They start in an apartment in Arlington but soon make the move to a house in the Fairfax, Virginia suburbs, where an Afghani community has developed. Like all good American Dream stories, they start with nothing. But Rahmat Sharaf believes hard work will give his family the life they dream of and he works like a machine for several years, slowly climbing up the economic ladder. But then an accident involving one of their children changes everything.

The story of the Sharaf family’s rise and fall is told by a Greek chorus of friends and neighbors, teachers, business owners, and local journalists. But rather than speaking as one voice, each member of this chorus tells the story and comments on it from their own point of view. In this way we learn about what happened, the Sharafs’ life before the accident, and the chaos that ensued. We never hear from any members of the family, only from those on the outside looking in, all operating from incomplete information, personal bias, and in many cases, under the influence of Arab stereotypes.

Patmeena Sabit has done a brilliant job in structuring Good People in a way that reflects our short attention spans and steady diet of social media snippets. Each chapter is another person’s explanation, and they run from one to three pages. This creates a fast-paced documentary of a novel. Like a detective trying to solve a case, we hear from dozens of witnesses, learn about physical and circumstantial evidence, and attempt to assess the credibility of those we hear from. Were the Sharafs a happy family or were the parents abusing their children by forcing them to lead a very strict Afghani-Muslim lifestyle in 21^st century America? Or were they so obsessed with their ambitious dreams that they put too much pressure on their older children, Omer and Zohra? Were they too Old World or too American? Everyone has an opinion. And when the police begin to investigate the accident, everything goes off the rails.

I found Good People to be a completely absorbing and thought-provoking read that kept me guessing and had me changing positions as I learned more about the Sharafs’ lives. This is a very impressive debut; it is smart and pointed in its observations of immigrant life, the changing nature of the media, and complex family dynamics, as well as a clever, literary twist on the mystery genre.

This is Not About Us by Allegra Goodman (The Dial Press, Feb. 10)

Allegra Goodman moves back to family drama after a detour into historical fiction with Isola. This is Not About Us is a series of interconnected episodes (the cover says “Fiction” rather than “A Novel”) about three elderly sisters (Helen, Sylvia, and Jeanne), their children and, eventually, their grandchildren.

While the family is Jewish, their level of Jewish observance varies widely, and the members’ lives allow Goodman to explore many aspects of family life, a range of personality types, and several sociocultural issues. It’s an affectionate but unsentimental portrait of a sprawling American family that depicts their very human strengths and weaknesses and their attempts to stay close despite the usual, and in some cases unusual, conflicts. This is Not About Us stands out for its sympathetic depiction of elderly, middle-aged, and young characters, the interconnected and often shifting relationships within an extended family, and the crisp and often funny dialogue.

Becoming Sarah by Diane Botnick (She Writes Press, Oct. 28, 2025)

Sarah was born in Auschwitz in 1942 and was one of the handful of babies who survived (over 3,000 babies were born in Auschwitz but only 30 survived). She has no memory of her mother or her three years in the death camp. After liberation, she is adopted by a Christian family, who send her off to another family at age 15, where she faces a different type of trauma. Four years later, she flees and, through some fortuitous meetings, eventually makes her way to the U.S. With no family and a past she wants to forget, Sarah creates her life — and stories about her past — as she goes. She is determined and ruthless in her desire to build a stable life but has little skill in building relationships with others.

Becoming Sarah depicts Sarah’s life as the eventual matriarch of an American family and the way her traumatic beginnings affect all her relationships, especially those with her daughters and granddaughters. This is a finely etched portrait of a life of deprivation that is slowly redeemed.  Much like her namesake, Sarah lives a long but difficult life. Diane Botnick follows the branches of Sarah’s family across a century, ending in 2045, allowing us to see what her struggles and occasional victories have achieved.

This is a book that deserves much more attention, both for its subject matter and the fine writing and characterization.