The arrival of the relations for an extended visit brings nemesis in the shape of an ardent young woman who falls for her host, causing a lasting rupture in a formerly happy marriage. William Maxwell is a monstrously underrated American writer whose Time Will Darken It describes with excruciating psychological deftness the disintegration of a marriage brought about by a mans unquenchable need to please and be seen as amiable to a set of distant relatives who once helped his father. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons is not exactly realism, but the Starkadder family, with their hysterical self-dramatising, are the protagonists in one of the funniest books I know about family life. The novel also adumbrates something that is often overlooked but reads to me like a pre-Freudian grasp of the allure of incest: Fanny, the books principal, falls in love with Edmund, the cousin she grows up with, and ultimately he with her (an idea I borrowed for my own novel, Cousins). Mansfield Park is perhaps Jane Austens least loved novel, but in my view it is possibly her best for its depiction of the upper-middle-class neglect suffered by Maria and Julia, the spoilt Bertram girls this in turn leads to their failure to make happy marriages. Phillips also shares Winnicotts rare feeling (among psychoanalysts) for poetry. Terri Apter is a shrewd psychologist and her book The Sister Knot covers the subject of sibling rivalry: Shes got the red spade and you said I could have that! As well as being a highly original thinker, Adam Phillips writes in Winnicott with elegance and a keen sympathy about one of the great analysts of children, Donald Winnicott, who brought his powerful intuition and understanding to the subject of mother and child, as the nursing couple.

Here is some reading that reflects on family relations and the deep fissures of ambivalence we feel towards those to whom we are related. Struggling to understand your relatives this bank holiday weekend? The novelist picks her favourite books, from Mansfield Park to Cold Comfort Farm Summer is traditionally a time for lucky families to recover from the strains of the work and school treadmill and take time together on holiday but this added space and time also allows the tensions that trammel and contain us in the web of family life to spring to life like waiting demons.

The librarian vickers