"Little Fires Everywhere" by Celeste Ng, this book is set in Shaker Heights an affluent suburb of Cleveland, Ohio back in the 1990s. The Richardsons are a wealthy middle class family living the American dream. Into their world comes Mia and her teenage daughter who rent a house owned by the family and for a while Mia becomes housekeeper in the Richardson household, whilst her daughter Pearl involves herself in friendships and relationships with the sons and daughters of the family who are of a similar age. Mia is an artist who with her daughter has lived a peripatetic existence and gradually as the narrative progresses the reason for this unfolds. At the heart of the story is an adoption of a Chinese baby by a white family which not only puts Mia on a collision course with her employer, Mrs Richardson, but divides the wider community. Very good I believe there is talk of a film in the pipeline.
In complete contrast, I've also recently read "Sarum" by Edward Rutherford which has been lying on my shelf for a couple of years, mainly because it's such a tome at roughly 1,300 pages. As with many of his books the author takes a couple of families and traces the progression of their descendants down the centuries from Neolithic times right through to the late 20th century. Introducing some more families at pivotal points in history, such as the settled Roman presence, The Anglo Saxon influx and the Norman Invasion, lingering for a 100 pages or so in certain eras to illustrate how history unfurled to affect not only that area of England but the winder country as a whole. The reader sees a reversal of fortunes as some of the characters fall down the social scale. Inevitably given it's proximity to Sarum (Salisbury) Stonehenge features in one of the chapters. he wrote it back in 1985, so not quite up to date insomuch as their wasn't a whiff of Novichock in the whole 7,000 years covered in the story!
