I was slightly surprised when my first novel, A Time For Silence, was classified on Amazon as a family saga. My publisher had told me it was crime fiction and I had thought of it as a simple mystery. Besides, it was a single book and I never expected to add to the series. Surely a family saga has to fill half a shelf on the bookcase, like the Forsyte Saga or the Poldark novels.

But of course it doesn’t. A family saga follows the affairs of members of a family through a period of time and that’s it. It can be one volume or a hundred. It can involve crime, like mine. It can focus on family relationships or it can use the family’s affairs as a means of reflecting changes and events in the world beyond. In fact a family is a perfect vehicle for just about…