The 13 Best Books About Siblings, Ordered by What They Fight Over

Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March grow up with their father away at the war and their mother running the household on very little. The book follows them across several years through plays in the attic, a rich boy next door, illness, work and marriage. What keeps it alive is that Alcott wrote four sisters who are genuinely unlike each other and let them be unfair. Amy burns the only copy of Jo's manuscript because Jo would not take her to the theatre, and Jo does not forgive her quickly, which is the truest thing in it.

Tara returns to the family house in Old Delhi with her diplomat husband. Bim, the elder sister, is still there, teaching history, looking after their brother Baba, in the same rooms where all four of them grew up through the summer of 1947. The novel moves backwards, from the polite adult visit to the year the family came apart, and it catches the thing every returning sibling knows: walk into that house and you are fifteen again, and so are they. Nothing dramatic happens and everything is at stake.

Enid Lambert wants her three grown children in the Midwest for Christmas. Gary is a banker managing a depression he refuses to name, Chip has lost his university job and is writing a screenplay nobody wants, Denise is a chef sleeping with the wrong people. Alfred, the father, is disappearing into Parkinson's. Franzen cuts between all of them at length and the comedy is exact and merciless. The sibling material lives in the phone calls and the negotiations about who visits, who pays, and who gets to keep having a life while somebody handles the parents.

When Mr Dashwood dies the estate goes to his son by a first marriage, and his widow and three daughters are moved to a cottage on a small income. Elinor keeps everything in, including her feelings for a man who turns out to be secretly engaged elsewhere. Marianne puts everything out, loudly, in public, at some cost. Austen sets the two methods against each other for the length of a novel and declines to declare an easy winner, though she has firm opinions about which one survives a bad winter. The money is discussed in exact figures.

Grace leaves a failing marriage in America and returns to Tamil Nadu to deal with her mother's death. What she inherits is a beach house and a sister, Lucia, who has Down syndrome and has spent her life in an institution because her parents decided that was easier. Grace takes her in, and the novel becomes a careful account of the months that follow: the dogs, the neighbours, the money running down, the days that are fine and the days that are not, and the slow discovery that love and duty are not the same substance.

Lydia is dead and the police are treating it as a drowning. She was the favourite, pushed towards medicine by her mother and towards popularity by her father, and the weight of being everybody's plan is the real subject. Ng writes the siblings very well. Nath, the older brother, is the only person Lydia could talk to, and he is leaving for college. Hannah, the youngest, watches everything from under tables and is never once asked what she saw. The mystery is thin on purpose. The family is the case.

Steinbeck runs two pairs of brothers across fifty years in the Salinas Valley. Charles and Adam Trask fight over their father's approval and a birthday present, and the damage travels into the next generation, where Adam's sons Cal and Aron split into the good one and the one who is sure he is bad. Plenty else happens, including one of the coldest characters in American fiction, but the engine is that moment when a father praises one son in front of the other. The Hebrew word timshel does heavy lifting near the end.

The Joshi family rents out an upstairs room to a young man with no surname and no plans. Tanay, the son, falls for him. Anuja, the daughter, falls for him too, and eventually leaves with him. Kundalkar splits the novel in half. Tanay's section is addressed to the man who left, in second person, and Anuja's is a diary kept after she comes home. The lodger never speaks for himself. What you get is two siblings describing the same person and producing two different men, in a house where none of it can be said out loud.

Olanna and Kainene are twins, educated abroad, daughters of a Nigerian businessman. Olanna is the beautiful one who moves in with a radical university lecturer. Kainene is the sharp one who runs their father's business and takes an English writer as a lover. A betrayal splits them. Then Biafra secedes, the war starts, and everything the family owned, the houses, the staff, the certainty, is taken apart with the sisters on different sides of a moving front line. Adichie writes the domestic and the historical at the same scale, which is why the book holds.

Rahel and Estha are seven years old in 1969 in Ayemenem, Kerala, in a family with a pickle factory, a divorced mother and a great deal of anxiety about what people will say. Something happens across one fortnight, and the twins are separated and sent into different lives. They meet again at thirty one. Roy tells it out of order, in a language that invents its own rules, moving between what the children understood at the time and what the adults are left holding. The twins share one mind at seven, and the book is about what breaking that costs.

Yeong-hye decides she will not eat meat any more. In her Seoul family this is not a diet, it is a rebellion, and her husband, her father and her brother-in-law each react in ways that make everything worse. The novel comes in three parts with three narrators, none of them Yeong-hye. The last part belongs to In-hye, her older sister, who ends up managing the hospital, the money and the decisions, and who works out somewhere in there that she has spent her entire life being the one who behaved.

Kate has leukaemia. Anna was born as a genetic match for her and has spent thirteen years supplying cord blood, marrow and platelets whenever they were needed. Now a kidney is required, and Anna files for medical emancipation from her parents. Picoult rotates the narration through everybody: the mother who cannot see past her sick child, the father, the brother left to burn down small things unnoticed, and the two sisters. It is a courtroom novel built around one question about whether a child can be an instrument.

Effia and Esi are half sisters born in different villages in what is now Ghana, and neither knows the other exists. Effia is married to the British governor of Cape Coast Castle. Esi is held in the dungeon underneath it and shipped to America. From there Gyasi writes fourteen chapters, one for each descendant, alternating between the two lines, from the Asante wars and the slave castles of the coast to Alabama, Harlem and a California university. Each chapter works almost as a short story, and each one hands you the next.