The Family Clause

An addictive novel about contemporary parenthood and modern family life.

‘A beautiful study of familial need and mess...insightful till it hurts.’ Nikita Lalwani

‘Bold and remarkable...full of heart and compassion.’ Dinaw Mengestu

A grandfather returns home from abroad to visit his adult children. The son is a failure. The daughter is having a baby with the wrong man. Only the grandfather, the proud patriarch, is perfect – at least, according to himself.

Over the course of ten intense days, the relationships of this chaotic and entirely normal family unfold and painful memories resurface. Something has to give. But the son is duty-bound to his father through an arrangement they call ‘the father clause’. Can it be renegotiated, or will it bind everyone to the past forever?

In The Family Clause, multi-award-winning writer Jonas Hassen Khemiri has created a tender, funny and bruising novel about what it means to be a good parent, the difficulty of understanding those closest to us, and how it sometimes takes courage just to stick around. An ode to families, their dynamics, their boundaries and their silences, in all their messy glory, it reveals one of the real challenges in life: how to stop your family defining your destiny.