• Grant Allen: The Woman Who Did (published in 1895) (a "New Woman" has a child but refuses to get married)
• Christine Bell : The Perez Family (Cuban exiles in Florida)
• Kate Bingham : Mummy's Legs (three generations of women thinking they can do without men)
• Lily Brett : Just Like That (Holocaust survivors and their children in contemporary New York)
• James M. Cain: Mildred Pierce (ungrateful daughter)
• Erskine Caldwell: Tobacco Road (poor whites trying to make ends meet in the American South)
• Ernest Callenbach: Ecotopia (green utopia devoid of conventional sexual morality)
• Ivy Compton-Burnett: The Present and the Past and all her other novels (love, hate and incest in Edwardian England)
• Amanda Craig: A Vicious Circle and the other novels in her cycle (satires of contemporary Britain)
• Helen Dunmore: Your Blue-Eyed Boy (the past catching up with a mother of two)
• Jeffrey Eugenides: The Virgin Suicides (five sisters committing suicide in quick succession in surburban America)
• Joy Fielding: Kiss Mommy Goodbye (divorce, battle over custody, and subsequent kidnapping)
• David Gates: Jernigan (dysfunctional family headed by a hard-drinking, slightly paranoid father)
• Kaye Gibbons : Ellen Foster (little girl looking for love and protection)
• Kent Haruf : The Tie That Binds (several generations of a farming family on the Great Plains of Colorado)
• Nick Hornby: About a Boy (single mother suffering from depression)
• Marsha Hunt: Joy (family secrets)
• Christopher Isherwood: All the Conspirators (evil mother)
• P.D. James: Innocent Blood (blood ties are stronger than anything else)
• Tama Janowitz: By the Shores of Gitchee Gumee (white trash heading for Hollywood to realize their American Dream)
• Nella Larsen: Passing (African American wife and mother torn between allegiance to her race and her friendship with another woman)
• Nancy Mitford: The Pursuit of Love (eccentric aristocratic family spend the interwar years in Britain falling in and out of love)
• Bharati Mukherjee: Jasmine (Indian immigrant ends up as the mother in a patchwork family )
• Marge Piercy: Woman On the Edge of Time (feminist utopia advocating complete equality between men and women)
• Bernice Rubens: A Solitary Grief (a father unable to cope with the fact that his child has Down's syndrome)
• Anne Tyler: A Patchwork Planet (a young father as the black sheep of the family)

See also

• Family saga