Granta 37

The Family

'They fuck you up, your mum and dad,' Philip Larkin wrote, but Philip Larkin got it wrong. There are also your brothers and your sisters. And your uncles, your grandfather, your endless cousins, your second cousins, your mother-in-law, your father-in-law and your children. There are always the children.
The family: no relationship is more important, or more powerful, or more enduring. Or potentially more destructive.

In this issue:
Mikal Gilmore growing up with a murderer in a family in love with the romance of violence.
Sappho Durrell, daughter of the novelist, obsessed by her father - wanting to love him, wanting to kill him.
William Wharton determined to represent the intense, unrelenting detail of an unspeakable loss.
Geoffrey Wolff on the bliss of a family properly on course.