The Spring of 2021, when I wrote On Earth as it Is on Television, ended with an otherworldly invasion of cicadas. You could hear them inside with the windows closed. My husband scooped buckets of exoskeletons from the garden. He was preoccupied with space aliens that spring, and the cicadas felt like tangible proof. The older kid and I took walks through the bug-splattered neighborhood, our ears covered to protect them from the deafening song. My terrified younger kid avowed to never leave the house again. The cicadas hatch once every 17 years. I can’t help but think about how much older my family will be when they hatch again,  and how much I wanted that weird spring to never end.  

My novel—On Earth as it Is on Television—is about aliens. They visit Earth. They make their existence irrefutable. Then they fly away, and in the uncertain wake of their departure, we humans panic and hold our loved ones close. And while alien arrival occupies the foreground of the book, the story at its heart is about family. Our families can drive us crazy. But we will also cross the vast universe just to be stuck on a spaceship together with them. 

Here are some other books where family plays an important role. As a reader my tastes are eclectic, so their genre varies. But every one of them is a great read. Enjoy!

—Emily Jane