Heather Parry’s new novel, Carrion Crow, is a gloriously gothic tale of an extraordinary relationship between a mother, Cécile Périgord, and her daughter, Marguerite Périgord. Cécile keeps Marguerite locked in the attic of their family home – for her own safety she says – with nothing but a sewing machine, a copy of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, and a carrion crow who has come to nest in the rafters, for company.

BooksfromScotland asked Heather to recommend five more stories of unforgettable mother-daughter relationships.

Carrion Crow
By Heather Parry
Published by Doubleday

Concerning My Daughter – Kim Hye-jin (trans. Jamie Chang)

Published in 2023, this novel is so precise and humane it’s hard to believe it was Kim Hye-jin’s debut. Like Carrion Crow, this is a story about a mother’s inability to accept her daughter’s vision of family, even when events in her own life show her what happens when rules are followed and conformity is insisted upon. Unlike Carrion Crow, this is told entirely from the mother’s perspective, with all her prejudice on show for the reader to try to understand.

Steel Magnolias (1989)

This film is marketed a comedy, and considered lightweight—no doubt due to Dolly Parton’s casting, and the fact that this is a unapologetically a story of six women—but Sally Field’s portrayal of M’lynn, and specifically the monologue she gives after her daughter Shelby’s funeral, which veers from tender and reserved to screaming rage and hysteria, and her friends’ ability to meet her where she is, at a point past reason and decorum, will never fail to make me cry.

Carrie – Stephen King

The original and best book by ‘Auntie Stephen’, as he’s affectionately called by my horror-adjacent writer friends, is supposedly about telekinesis and the horrors of high school—but really, it’s about the inability of a daughter to fit into what her mother wants her to be: pious, cowed, ignorant and constrained. As a former teenage King obsessive, I’m forever influenced by this book.

Beloved – Toni Morrison

A beautiful and absolutely harrowing novel, only made more so by the fact it was inspired by a real case and explores real, inescapable horrors. Toni Morrison’s perfect prose wraps around your heart as she tells the story of Sethe, formerly enslaved, who believes that a young woman arrived at their door is the reincarnation of her murdered eldest daughter. Perhaps only Morrison could write a book in which a mother does the worst thing imaginable to her child but never loses the reader’s empathy and understanding. The sort of novel that stays with you always.

Geek Love – Katherine Dunn

The ultimate story of fucked-up family dynamics and how love tries to plot a course through them. Al and Crystal Lil Binewski are part of a failing circus with their family when they come upon the idea of a freak show populated by their own offspring. Their experiments on their children (therapy-fodder if I’ve ever seen it) lead to telekinetic conception, the creation of a cult and the efforts of their daughter, Oly, to save her own child from everything she has been through. The first time I read this book, it blew apart everything that I thought a novel could be.

Carrion Crow by Heather Parry is published by Doubleday, priced £16.99.