Product Description

Highly-acclaimed, intelligent and funny first novel about a woman exploring her family's history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #147843 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

The Observer, January 29, 2006
'captures the desperation... maintains the tragicomic balance to the end and has the confidence to choose the right realistic ending'

Telegraph, February 4, 2006
'wears her intelligence so lightly, and with a tone so natural, it's hard to believe this is her first novel'

The Sunday Times
Touching and surprising...A moving account of the personal and social pressures that...resonate throughout our lives.

Customer Reviews

480 pages of "Don't bother me, I'm reading"
A friend gave me The Family Tree for Christmas. I started it on Boxing Day and couldn't put it down - I had to restrain myself from galloping through it in one go. I haven't enjoyed a read so much, and been carried along by stories so well, for a long time.

The three threads of grandmother Alicia in the 1950s, mother Doreen in the 1980s and narrator Rebecca in the present, are masterfully interwoven. Cadwalladr produces a feel for time and place through tiny details: Cecil's coconut hair oil, Alicia's Ingrid Bergman hair, shopping for party clothes with Doreen, Suzanne's growing feminism, and the modern lunches and dinner parties. Often a single economical line conveys the whole feeling of a time, be it the 50s, the 80s or now.

It's tempting to race through it to find out what's going to happen next with each set of characters, so a small warning: don't plan on doing anything else once you start reading it.

The Family Tree by Carole Cadwalladr - much more than a tale about 3 generations of women
Three generations of women make their way through the obstacles that life throws at you - yet another family saga, I thought. But no, this book is so much more. The family saga is done brilliantly well; the reader moves effortlessly between generations and decades as if reminiscing - without any of that lurching time-shift that you so often get with books of this kind. I loved the pseudo thesis style too, with frequent dictionary definitions used to break the text up into numbered sections, and witty descriptions of 1970's tv programmes as footnotes in the style of a cultural studies thesis.

But the best thing about it is the story itself, as it is slowly revealed in increasing complexity like peeling layers off an onion. Rebecca struggles to make sense of the relationships between herself, her sister and her mother, between her mother, her aunt and her grandmother, and of her own marriage, her mother's and her aunt's. Why does her mother hate her grandmother? What is the cause of the rivalry between her mother and her aunt? Why doesn't her husband want to have children? And, most of all, why did her mother kill herself?

Carole Cadwalladr takes us through emotionally charged explorations of family relationships, of love and trust, of nature vs nurture - all the while giving us a painfully accurate look at the lifestyle and aspirations of the middle classes in the late 1970s. She challenges you and gives you something to think about on almost every page.

all unhappy families are alike...
Neither the title nor the cover does this novel justice - it's much cleverer and funnier than chick-lit (even at its best). Readers who loved Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Hilary Mantel's Giving Up the Ghost, Jane Gardam's Crusoe's Daughter - in fact all those good and great novels about three generations of Northern women - will devour this. It works on many levels: as the tale of Rebecca's distintegrating marriage and decision to keep a baby rather than have a second abortion, as a meditation on whether we pass down psychological traits as well as physical ones, and as an excoriatingly funny portrait of lower middle-class life in the 1970s. The Monroes are a family divided by class, temperament, money and looks, and as the narrative weaves across past and present to the mysterious marriage of two cousins we get an inkling why Doreen and Aunty Suzanne hate each other so much. Eventually,you realise the novel is constructed as a kind of detective story, full of false clues and tiny revelations, particularly about family breakdown. The 1970s details are lovingly recreated with particularly amusing footnotes about popular TV shows. Highly recommended.