Orphans, Institutions, and Adventures Out West: Five Books Featuring Unconventional Families

In my debut novel, Going Home, out now through Knopf, a group of Londoners band together against their initial instincts to help look after a two-year-old boy who has been left without a home. Who knows where the inspiration for fiction comes from.

Readers have pointed out a similarity between my novel and the premise of the 1980s comedy Three Men and a Baby. The New York Times made reference to that movie in the headline of a review that published in January.

With all the respect in the world to Tom Selleck, Ted Danson and Steve Guttenberg (especially you, Steve, hang in there) British and American novels were more of a guide to me than Hollywood romcoms when I was writing my unconventional family to life.

Here are four of my favorites.

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Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

Spoiler avoidance will necessitate some vagueness here: but the core characters in Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel—Kathy H, Tommy D and Ruth C—were born in such a way that family was denied to them. Growing up in an institution together, they become each other’s support system, friends, rivals, lovers, carers.

The title (agonizing, in its fictional context) is a reference to a song that Kathy H, who cannot have children of her own, sings to herself while she imagines rocking a baby to sleep.

Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

Elizabeth Bowen’s icy, excellent novel, set in 1930s London, tells the story of a teenaged orphan, Portia, who has to move in with her half-brother Thomas and his wife Anna in a town house on the edge of Regents Park. Ignored by complacent Thomas, a figure of suspicion to the listless Anna, Portia winds up in a doomed romance with one of Anna’s visitors to the house, eccentric troublemaker Eddie.

The head maid, Matchett, provides Portia some honest affection, as does a socially clumsy visitor to the house, Major Brutt.

Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

In Larry McMurtry’s long, richly detailed historical novel, set in the late nineteenth-century West, the cowboys Call, McCrae, Pea Eye, Deets and Dobbs set out with several others on an arduous cattle drive from Texas with the intention of forging a new home for themselves in Montana.

Long periods of repetition, frustration and ennui are interrupted by occasional bursts of startling violence and high drama. An essential family story in which the family just happens to include dozens of heads of cattle and horses.

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

One of the great pleasures in Hilary Mantel’s endlessly rereadable saga about the 16th-century Tudor court is the ragtag family of quasi-relations and strays that the central character, Thomas Cromwell, assembles about himself over the trilogy’s three novels. True, Gregory Cromwell, a beloved figure in the ensemble, is his son and heir; and at the trilogy’s start Cromwell has other children, a wife….

Before too long his family is more or less made up of aides, from right-hand-man Rafe to knife-fighting bodyguard Christophe to the loyal, cantankerous cook, Thurston.

Owen Johnson, The Lawrenceville Stories

This collection of short stories from the 1910s—about a group of precocious and ruthless schoolboys at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey—is out of print. I found my copy secondhand.

Johnson’s stories are wonderful, funny, inventive and rich in bizarre unexplained slang. These young boarders have no outlet for their energy but to cause havoc at each other’s expense. They have nowhere else to direct their love, either.

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Going Home by Tom Lamont is available via Knopf.