One thing I did find myself occasionally doing while reading Dalva is referring to the Northridge family tree to remind myself which of the various John Wesley Northridges was married to whom. As it happens there isn't actually a family tree printed in Dalva, but as luck would have it there is one in The Road Home which I took a handy snap of with my mobile phone just for quick reference. Here it is:
Not actually a massive number of people in total, but some confusion possible nonetheless owing to the multiple marriages and occasional out-of-wedlock sexy sexy times going on. Anyway, this set me to thinking - very much like the occasional list of books featuring explanatory maps, most recently Tokyo Express, are there any other books that have family trees in them? My gut feeling here is there will be considerably fewer of these, as in most cases there isn't a need. It's really only sprawling family sagas with gigantic casts of inter-related characters that justify including one, and the only examples on this list I could find (The Road Home aside) were Hilary Mantel's two Thomas Cromwell books, Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, both of which contain similar family trees representing the Tudor royal family and the various pretenders to the English throne.
Outside of books which have featured on this blog the only other one which sprang to mind was Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years Of Solitude (recently serialised for TV), which contains the family tree below; a bit like The Road Home, part of the usefulness of this is to distinguish between multiple characters who have pretty much the same name.
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