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OVER the Easter holidays, at a seaside pub lunch in the North-East of Scotland, my children did some drawing with a pair of second cousins once removed. They also met three of their father’s first cousins and a second cousin.

My parents were there, too, as we were returning from the Highlands with them. It turned out an old friend of theirs had bought a boat from my husband’s late uncle. ‘What a small world,’ everyone agreed. Too often it can feel bewilderingly vast, but this past holiday I felt a connection to places and people.

Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse unfolds over the course of two gatherings at the Isle of Skye holiday home of the Ramsay family.

At the first, Mrs Ramsay, at the helm of her household, is attuned to all the emotional and mental upheavals of her immediate family and their guests. The next holiday happens years later, in the aftermath of World War I and the deaths of Mrs Ramsay and two of her children.

Grief casts a long shadow, but on a summer’s day, the family make it to the lighthouse and a painting is completed. Life goes on.

‘It always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach,’ reflects Prentice McHoan, the student narrator of Iain Banks’s The Crow Road. But it is also his family. ‘It was the day my grandmother exploded,’ is the book’s opening line.

At her funeral service, Prentice introduces us to his eccentric Argyll clan: his cooler brothers, his irritable atheist father, his uncles and aunts and glamorous cousins.

It is the person missing from this family scene that haunts Prentice, though — his writer Uncle Rory, who disappeared eight years earlier.

While Prentice and Mrs Ramsay are at the heart of their families, Flora Poste, the orphaned heroine of Stella Gibbons’s satire Cold Comfort Farm, arrives at Howling, Sussex, as a distant cousin interloper, after deciding her best course is to ‘impose upon one’s relatives’.

At the Starkadders’ farm she finds chaos, but creates order, earning her place at the family table.

A robust reminder that relatives generally add value.