FAMILY SPANNING

After researching VC Andrews’s Casteel saga, I wondered what other great fictional family sagas might exist in screen or novel form.

ICELANDIC SAGAS

Where better to start than the collection of literature from which the word “saga” is derived in the first place? There are dozens of these stories from Iceland dating from around the 13th century, chronicling fictohistorical stories from earlier centuries, often with a focus on family lines and their trials and tribulations.

DUNE

I won’t lie, this epic sci-fi novel series is a bit of a tough read. But if you can get into it, not only will you find a space opera completely unlike modern sci-fi with its lack of computers and other technology, but also a generation-spanning family saga featuring galactic conquerors becoming revered as gods, siring sacred children, turning into sand-dwelling worms and becoming possessed by the spirits of their overweight grandfathers. Yes, all of that actually happens.

THE WITCHER

What little in this Polish fantasy novel series counts as “family saga” material was enough for Wikipedia to include it, so I will too – not least of all because the videogames based on the novels are awesome, and there’s a TV series coming to Netflix later this year that could fill the hole “Game of Thrones” left behind. Anyway, the main character is a long-lived, monsterslaying swordsman named Geralt, but a good portion of his life is spent in the company of scheming nobles, especially training and teaching an emperor’s daughter named Ciri as she grows from a cheeky child into a figure of prophecy.

THE GODFATHER

This trilogy of films was an obvious choice. It follows the rise of Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino) from a straight-arrow guy who wanted no involvement in his family’s dubious affairs to the head of the Corleone crime family. Along the way he starts a family and has to deal with threats to their lives as well as his own.