- Grant Allen: The Woman Who Did (published in 1895) (a "New Woman" has a child but refuses to get married)
- Christine Bell: The Perez Family (Cuban exiles in Florida)
- Kate Bingham: Mummy's Legs (three generations of women thinking they can do without men)
- Lily Brett: Just Like That (Holocaust survivors and their children in contemporary New York)
- James M. Cain: Mildred Pierce (ungrateful daughter)
- Erskine Caldwell: Tobacco Road (poor whites trying to make ends meet in the American South)
- Ernest Callenbach: Ecotopia (green utopia devoid of conventional sexual morality)
- Ivy Compton-Burnett: The Present and the Past and all her other novels (love, hate and incest in Edwardian England)
- Amanda Craig: A Vicious Circle and the other novels in her cycle (satires of contemporary Britain)
- Helen Dunmore: Your Blue-Eyed Boy (the past catching up with a mother of two)
- Jeffrey Eugenides: The Virgin Suicides (five sisters committing suicide in quick succession in surburban America)
- Joy Fielding: Kiss Mommy Goodbye (divorce, battle over custody, and subsequent kidnapping)
- David Gates: Jernigan (dysfunctional family headed by a hard-drinking, slightly paranoid father)
- Kaye Gibbons: Ellen Foster (little girl looking for love and protection)
- Kent Haruf: The Tie That Binds (several generations of a farming family on the Great Plains of Colorado)
- Nick Hornby: About a Boy (single mother suffering from depression)
- Marsha Hunt: Joy (family secrets)
- Christopher Isherwood: All the Conspirators (evil mother)
- P.D. James: Innocent Blood (blood ties are stronger than anything else)
- Tama Janowitz: By the Shores of Gitchee Gumee (white trash heading for Hollywood to realize their American Dream)
- Nella Larsen: Passing (African American wife and mother torn between allegiance to her race and her friendship with another woman)
- Nancy Mitford: The Pursuit of Love (eccentric aristocratic family spend the interwar years in Britain falling in and out of love)
- Bharati Mukherjee: Jasmine (Indian immigrant ends up as the mother in a patchwork family)
- Marge Piercy: Woman On the Edge of Time (feminist utopia advocating complete equality between men and women)
- Bernice Rubens: A Solitary Grief (a father unable to cope with the fact that his child has Down's syndrome)
- Anne Tyler: A Patchwork Planet (a young father as the black sheep of the family)
