The Child in Time by Ian McEwan

A novel of loss and multi-layered reflections upon time itself. Losing a child in a supermarket is the catalyst for McEwan’s examination of parent-child relationships, the child in the man and the effect of this loss on a marriage.

Style/structure: prose, linear narrative, interlinked threads of narrative strands.

Themes: time, loss, relationships, science, dependence, child in the man.

Oranges are Not the Only Fruit

My Mother Said I Never Should

This contemporary play explores the relationships of four generations of mothers and daughters over the first seventy years of the 20th century. Through her dramatic use of contrasting time frames, Keatley explores how mothers try to control their daughters and how daughters gain their independence.

Style/structure: drama, non-linear narrative, juxtaposition of time frames

Themes: mother-daughter relationships, feminism, control, power, motherhood, children

Sons and Lovers

Wasp Factory

We Need to Talk About Kevin

Beloved

All My Sons

This American play centres on the death of a WWII pilot, the inability of his mother to accept his death and the effect of a dark secret upon the rest of his family as they are forced to confront skeletons from the past.

Style/structure: drama, linear narrative

Themes: war profiteering, principles, morality, love, responsibility, family, guilt

The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter (1967)

A coming-of-age novel which begins when the 15 year old protagonist Melanie wears her mother's wedding dress to explore the garden in moonlight. The next morning it transpires that her parents have been killed in a plane crash and she and her brother are forced to live with tyrannical uncle Philip, his victimised wife Aunt Margaret, and her brothers Francie and Finn. When Philip uses his life-sized puppet shows to control and intimdiate his niece, it is with Finn that she finds freedom and escape.

Style/structure: coming-of-age, allusive, magic realist

Themes: sexuality, incest, power, control, rape, fantasy, freedom

Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

Wise Children by Angela Carter

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

When their aunt dies, American twins Valentina and Julia inherit her London home and soon find themselves living in a haunted flat far from home at the mercy of sinister forces which threaten their relationship and their very lives.

Style/structure: Gothic novel, dual narrative

Themes: sibling rivalry, betrayal, death, parent/child relationships, destructive love, redemptive love

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

A classic of English literature, Emily Bronte's only novel tells the story of the Earnshaw family and its disrupture following the arrival of the child Heathcliffe. The love affair between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliffe and her decision to marry Edgar Linton instead of Heathcliffe has consquences that span generations of the Earnshaw and Linton families. This text lends itself to critical readings and in recent years it has been opened up to feminist, psycoanalytical and Marxist interpretations.

Style/structure: frame narrative, mirror structure

Themes: love, social class, nature vs culture, boundaries, family