Can you please recommend great biographies/family biographies?

[Anonymous]

Family biographies preferred.

I’m in the mood for family/dynasty story telling, but as a romance novel, not just some dry facts.

Am I wording this right? What I mean is that I want to read it as a novel, not some dry research facts.

Some embellishment or writer’s creativity leeway is ok - I want it to be a pleasure read.

[Anonymous]

Try Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family. It's about his parents and grandparents in Sri Lanka. It's full of humor and one of my favorite books. Ondaatje wrote The English Patient.

[Anonymous]

Have you read The Spainish Bride by Georgette Heyer? It’s a legit historically accurate romance novel, albeit just a biography of a fraction of one person’s life, not a whole life or family history.

In a different vein entirely, Hidden Valley Road is a family history of a family with 12 kids in the 50s where the 6 of the 12 developed schizophrenia. It’s more biography mixed with pop science but it’s very good and I really appreciate that the author considers the family’s various experiences with sincere kindness.

The Mask of Apollo by Mary Renault is a really good fictionalized biography of Greek poet Simonides, childhood to old age. I haven’t read it in years but I loved it when I was younger. She also has a series on Alexander the Great that I think has more inter generational content but I haven’t read it so I’m not 100% sure.

This is absolutely historical fiction, and probably longer than you’re looking for, but the two Dorothy Dunnet series (Lymond and Niccolo) cover a European family over at least a century and many countries and are amazingly written.

[Anonymous]

The best biography I have read is the one about John Brown by Anthony Horowitz. Not exactly what you’re looking for but pretty great. Best autobiography is Anthony Trollope (and speaking of which, if you’re willing to consider fiction trollope’s Palliser series seem to fit the bill other than being fiction.)

[Anonymous]

The Kent family chronicles by John Jakes. It is a series of 8 books that were all published in the late 1970's.
The first book is about a European guy who immigrated to the U.S. in the late 1700's, and took part in the revolutionary war. The subsequent books are about his descendants and their adventures in the United States, through the civil war and afterwards.

The book series was published in commemoration of the bicentennial of the U.S.

The first couple of books were also made into "made for TV" movies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kent_Family_Chronicles

[Anonymous]

Empire of Pain

[Anonymous]

Thanks!!