I have twenty-five first cousins. It’s a lot, but it could be more—if all of my aunts and uncles had replicated their own childhood’s numbers, it would reach the biblical proportions of six-score (er, one hundred and twenty). Because there were loads of them and they were scattered over two continents, being thrown together at Thanksgiving or a wedding felt a little like meeting a celebrity: familiar, unsettling, and utterly fascinating. A decade could pass without seeing each other, but cousinhood, I learned, was a club that you didn’t join and couldn’t leave. 

And so cousins are rich territory for fiction: they don’t have the voluntary nature of friends or the “can’t see the forest for the trees” quality of siblings. They look enough like you, some of the time, to let you see yourself from a new angle. Kids develop verboten crushes on cousins because often cousins are strangers with a spark of the familiar, a key ingredient for love at first sight. They can offer the clamor of family without the ponderous weight of direct familial obligation. They’re mostly luxuries rather than necessities. 

My novel Idle Grounds is told from the point of view of a group of young cousins as they go on an odyssey over the family property and into the woods in search of the youngest member of their cousin clan. I wrote it in part because I now have kids of my own, and find myself ignoring an awful lot at social occasions in a bid to have a full, adult conversation. It’s something I remember keenly from my own childhood—grown-ups sat round the table, chewing over fond memories and old grievances. And all the while we cousins were left wonderfully unparented, free to size each other up and form a kind of makeshift society, even if just for one afternoon. 

In some of the books below, the cousin bond forms the heart of the book. In others, there are missing cousins or ghost cousins, cousins as arch-villains, best friends, competitors, usurpers, and love-interests. Cousins who act as mirrors or offer different paths. Cousins who have been with you since birth, or who swoop down in later life to shake things up. And in nearly all of them, cousins as a foil, as someone who you can’t quite escape, who allows you to see yourself with a new clarity, for better or for worse.

Which is all to say: Cousins, they’re just like us (but not!).  

Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin

The course of true love never did run smooth? Of course it did.

Guido and Vincent are third cousins. We know this because it’s the very first line of Laurie Colwin’s effervescent, razor-sharp novel Happy All the Time—a romantic comedy both genuinely romantic and relentlessly funny, bristling with delightful surprises while doing exactly what it says on the label. Not only are Vincent and Guido cousins, they’re best friends and they’re in trouble: both have fallen head over heels for women who are smarter, more interesting and far more complicated than they are—and that’s just fine. 

Colwin, a food writer as well as a novelist, offers up an exquisite platter of neuroses, as well as some of the most delicious descriptions of office life ever put to paper. There’s also a personal secretary named Betty Helen Carnhoops—it’s worth a read just for that name alone. 

Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout’s writing is beautifully understated, but her overall body of work reminds me of nothing so much as a spirograph: the novels collide, overlap, retrace, each book adding another illuminating layer. In Anything Is Possible, Strout drops us into her protagonist Lucy Barton’s hometown of Amgash, with its ghosts of a deeply impoverished childhood and the family she left behind. 

Part of the loneliness of Lucy’s adult life is how few of her circle understand the marking power of poverty, and because Strout’s novels are elongated mysteries, answers are revealed only in glimpses and across books, decades and hundreds of miles. Two clues to what makes Lucy tick are found here, in her cousins Abel and Dottie. Unlike Lucy’s siblings, whose traumas are bound up with their feelings about Lucy and her lucky escape, Dottie and Abel offer a clearer window into growing up very, very poor: the humiliations and deprivations, the hard-won stability always on the verge of evaporation, and the capacity for a tremendous and thorny empathy–a hallmark of Strout’s fiction. 

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

There’s Merricat Blackwood, of course, the unforgettable, feral antihero of Shirley Jackson’s masterpiece We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Then there’s Constance, Merricat’s beatific, martyred sister, shut up in self-exile on the family grounds after being cleared by the courts—if not the townsfolk—of poisoning her family with arsenic-laced sugar. And then there’s Cousin Charles: Venal, two-faced Cousin Charles can be felt long before he’s seen—Merricat knows something bad is coming but fails to ward against it, bringing further disaster down on the Blackwood house, and ultimately a very Shirley Jackson brand of redemption. In a book about both the rot and sustaining juices of community, Cousin Charles is the wormiest worm in the apple. 

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Milkman Dead’s nickname is only the latest of problems: His cold, unhappy father’s hatred for his mother makes everyone’s life a misery. His mother in turn is helplessly fixated on her own, dead father. 

Instead, young Milkman finds refuge in his Aunt Pilate’s warm and lawless household, a haven which contains two further treasures: a bag which may or may not contain gold robbed off a corpse, and Milkman’s beautiful older cousin, Hagar. Hagar and Milkman begin a love affair that sours spectacularly as Milkman grows into a louche, disconnected adult with his own plans for Aunt Pilate’s gold. Chased south by a knife-wielding Hagar and his best friend/co-conspirator and now would-be assassin, Guitar, Milkman searches for clues to the mysterious tragedy that set his family on this course decades before.

Morrison packs so much into this book—a secret society seeking eye-for-an eye revenge for the murders of Black citizens, a beyond-ancient midwife named Circe living with generations of Weimaraners in a ruined mansion, not to mention the most heart-rending depiction of grief I’ve ever read—it’s impossible to do it justice. Powering it all, however, are Morrison’s timeless concerns with the poisonous, warping effects of racism, and the intricate and bloody bonds of family. 

Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly

Greta & Valdin is a comedy of manners about capital-F Family, but contains only a single cousin who’s mostly conspicuous by his absence until—what else—an impromptu backyard wedding in the novel’s final pages. So why include it here? Because a) it’s fabulously funny and b) nearly everyone in the book falls into the category of ‘cousin-ish’: there are almost-grown nephews and uncles-by-marriage, and brothers-of-uncles-by-marriage, and every iteration in between. 

The novel flits between Greta and Valdin, a brother and sister both unlucky in love, at least for the time being. Greta is hung up on a colleague mostly just keen to get free admin support, and Valdin receives a book in the mail (which he is forced to collect at the sorting depot in the divinely relatable opening scene), from an ex-boyfriend he can’t get over. As the siblings negotiate the treacherous romantic terrain that is being in your twenties, they are accompanied by their magnificent Russian-Māori-French-Spanish-Italian-Argentinian family and a clutch of affairs and amicable splits and not-so-secret secrets—and yes, their cousin Cosmo, on the run from love troubles of his very own. 

Pop Jane Austen in a particle accelerator and that’s Greta & Valdin—the highest possible praise.

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Kambili is quiet, pious, and always comes first in her year at her exclusive private Catholic high school, except when she doesn’t and the countdown begins on her father’s wrath. Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s deeply moving debut, suspends Kambili between two worlds. The first is her father’s: affluent, devout, and ferociously punitive. The second, her Aunty Ifeoma’s: full of good-natured debate, laughter, and tolerance, including of the Igbo culture to which Kambili’s father has severed all ties. As the first world starts to come apart when her father takes a stand against a military coup, Kambili starts to spend more time in the second, blossoming in the sunlight of their three spirited, intellectual cousins and Father Amadi, a definite forerunner of Fleabag’s Hot Priest. 

A nuanced portrait of a daughter’s devotion to her loving and monstrous father against a backdrop of political upheaval, Purple Hibiscus explores what it means to be torn—between your past and your future, your principles and your living, your obligations and your desires—and offers the faint hope that something worthwhile can grow from the split. 

Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel

Raw physicality, good backstory, spotlit psyche? The world of boxing has always fascinated writers—think Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer, George Plimpton. Headshot, Rita Bullwinkel’s debut novel, expands the canon in more than just numbers: the novel takes place almost entirely in the ring, with each chapter devoted to a pair of boxers vying for the title of Daughters of America Cup over two days at Bob’s Boxing Palace in Reno, Nevada. Bullwinkel’s descriptions of the mechanics of boxing are beautifully inventive, but maybe her most audacious move is not only taking teenage girls seriously, in all of their idiosyncrasies, but depicting girls taking themselves seriously. 

The third round features Izzy and Iggy Lang, cousins who have trained and travelled together. Iggy, eccentric and irrepressible, wants just two things in life: to be a golden retriever and to succeed her adored older cousin Izzy. Izzy, on the other hand, mostly just wants rid of Iggy. As the fights progress, Bullwinkel reveals glimpses of the girls’ pasts and futures, and you find yourself rooting for each and every one of them to find some kind of fulfilment, if not in the ring.

Headshot presents young athletes at the top of their game—each fighter has her own reasons for being there but shot through every chapter is a unifying love of the sport and the tragedy of how little the outside world cares. 

Las Primas (Cousins) by Aurora Venturini, translated by Kit Maude

Las Primas, a brutal and brutally told account of disability, artistic flowering, and lower middle-class womanhood in 1940s Argentina, was Aurora Venturini’s break-out hit at the age of 85. We see the world of Las Primas through the eyes of Yuna—wide-eyed and sharp-tongued, Yuna is a celebrated young painter born into a family of ‘freaks’, as Yuna tells it, of which she very much counts herself a member. As she recounts a parade of rapes, back-alley abortions, and sudden deaths with a jaunty pace and provocative lightness of touch, there are two bright spots in the otherwise bleak landscape: Yuna’s burgeoning career, and her friendship with cousin Petra, a plucky, revenge-fuelled sex worker with dwarfism. After Yuna and Petra bond over the tragic death of Petra’s sister and a grisly murder, they begin to fashion an unconventional domesticity financed by Yuna’s painting and Petra’s sex work. There are few happy endings here, but that’s not Venturini’s province—Las Primas is unsentimental in the extreme, ushering in a freedom Venturini would prefer over happiness any day.