We asked Minai Hajratwala, author of Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt): What are your favorite books exploring the theme of "family"?

Running in the Family

By Michael Ondaatje (Norton)

I love the fast-and-slow poetry of this memoir and the way Ondaatje brings alive his native Sri Lanka and the story of his family through the smallest of details: drinks, scents, moments and gestures. I learned from his willingness to delve into the unknown, all the bits of personal history that are impossible to reconstruct, but that must be evoked nevertheless. He's best known for The English Patient, which was made into a movie, but this book and his poetry volumes are the jewels I return to again and again.

Trash

By Dorothy Allison (Firebrand)

This collection of short stories is the bravest book about family I've ever read. Allison, who also penned the intense and acclaimed Bastard Out Of Carolina, wrote this book first and it contains her raw yet crafted, bitter yet poignant, tales of growing up poor, white and female in the South. Her characters buzz, fume and tense as they try, try so very hard to survive their own lives. I also appreciate her courage as a femme dyke to tell her sexual truth. This book moves me to tears every time I read it.

The Darkened Temple

By Mari L'Esperance

(University of Nebraska Press)

A hapa writer who lost her mother suddenly and mysteriously, L'Esperance writes beautiful, moving poems of connection, mourning and presence. None of us reads enough poetry, though it gives us what we need, when we remember to turn to it: "It is not in the sun-drenched fields / of your edited childhood ... get down on your hands / and knees, down among the lilies / perspiring on their furred stems, / breathing the rare air of an otherworld."