‘There’s no place like home,” Dorothy declares at the end of The Wizard of Oz, as she departs the dazzling Emerald City for Aunt Em’s Kansas farmhouse. It’s a powerful metaphor for the way the domestic sphere is often portrayed in art: action, adventure and drama happen “out there” in glorious Technicolor, with the home rendered by contrast in sober sepia tones. Home may be the place we ultimately yearn for, but only once we have left it behind.

While working on my second novel, Natural Disaster, I was periodically plagued by the potential pitfalls of putting domestic life front and centre. The story takes place over 24 hours, following a woman who plans to spend her final day of maternity leave having a nice time with her two small boys (spoiler: it doesn’t go to plan).

Why – I kept asking myself – would an author with young children, who works from home, spend the precious few hours she has to write dwelling on the very environment she’s trying to keep at bay for those same precious few hours? Why, indeed, would a reader choose to spend their precious leisure time consuming yet more daily life, when one of fiction’s major selling points is its ability to help you escape or transcend reality? And yet, what could be more compelling? The home is where we do so much of our living: it’s the place our most formative relationships are forged as children, and the arena in which those earliest dynamics play out in later years.

For authors, and women in particular, however, writing about domesticity offers an especially fraught prospect: making public the personal is invariably interpreted as a political, if not actively dissident, act.

In 2001, Rachel Cusk received such intense criticism for her memoir A Life’s Work, that in the months after publication she “regretted, constantly” that she had written it. By telling the truth about her experience of motherhood, she felt she had “committed a violent act” against her family.Her 2012 memoir, Aftermath, detailing the breakdown of her marriage, was hardly less controversial: she found the divide between her life and the book was “completely breached”, with criticisms of her personal life printed in newspapers and broadcast on the radio.

Fiction, where emotional truth is privileged over fact, may offer a more forgiving medium. Elizabeth Jane Howard’s five-volume saga The Cazalet Chronicles, though based on Howard’s own family, incites fierce adoration in her readers rather than ire. It surely helped that (unlike Cusk) Howard was writing 50 years after the first novel is set, at a safe remove from the heat of its inspiration.

Part of the considerable charm of these books is the close attention Howard pays to the dailiness of a bygone era. Tessa Hadley remarked that the prose sometimes “reads like a hymn to household management”, and taken together, the whole project could be characterised as a domestic epic, where the endurance of Home Place (the aptly named Cazalet family residence) and its rhythms over decades provide a consoling constant against the random challenges of the outside world.

In Good Good Loving, published earlier this year, Yvvette Edwards also uses time to great effect in navigating the domestic realm. Beginning on the deathbed of her protagonist Ellen, Edwards’s narrative spools backwards through the years to the beginnings of Ellen’s married life.

This innovative approach elegantly reveals how attitudes, roles and expectations shift (and don’t shift) across the generations: the effect is like stripping back the walls of an old house, each layer of wallpaper a testament to the mores of its age.

But the past holds an allure that present-day reality might struggle to attain. What can a novel about contemporary domestic life possibly add to our knowledge? If familiarity breeds contempt, what could be more familiar than the home, with its sisyphean routines and demands?

In her 2019 Booker-shortlisted novel Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellmann takes these questions and runs an ultramarathon with them. Ellmann’s heroine, a housewife from Ohio, operates a one-woman pie-making business from her own kitchen, allowing her unlimited time to cogitate, ruminate and speculate about everything from Donald Trump to the death of her mother and the disturbing refusal of an ice lolly to decompose.

Weighing in at more than 1,000 pages, Ducks, Newburyport functions as a sort of existential counterpart to another domestic titan: Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. In writing a work of such scale and stylistic audacity (nearly every clause begins “the fact that”), Ellmann transforms the domestic experience into a philosophical, heroic one: the woman methodically latticing pastry over cherry pies is at the same time grappling with existence in all its light and shade.

It could be argued that a fundamental concern of literary fiction has always been “how should one live?”, but in recent years, global instability, the threat of environmental collapse and technological revolution have brought the problem of how to construct and sustain a good life amid all this more sharply into focus.

In Vincenzo Latronico’s 2025 hit Perfection (translated by Sophie Hughes), the protagonists Tom and Anna are, depending on your perspective, the beneficiaries or victims of tech disruptors such as Airbnb and Instagram. A few times a year they enhance their freelance incomes by subletting their Berlin apartment, packing up their laptops and decamping to their parents’ for a weekend or the holidays.

To Tom and Anna, “home” is a meticulously curated environment – the novel skewers so precisely the millennial aesthetic ubiquitous across IG and IRL that it was difficult for this millennial to look her mid-century coffee table in the eye for weeks after reading. But no matter how impeccably we frame our artwork, or artfully arrange our houseplants, true perfection is unattainable: grubby, inconvenient real life always gets in the way.

Latronico exposes how hollow and delusional the pursuit of perfection is, but he has no easy answers. The building blocks that have formerly been considered givens (a steady job, reliable housing, financial security) have become at best uncertainties. For young, urban, educated people such as Tom and Anna, the domestic sphere is no longer a welcoming retreat, but another potential revenue stream, whose existential costs (always hustling, never settled) risk outweighing the material gains.

The preoccupation about how to live now is also at the heart of Ayşegül Savaş’s The Anthropologists, which follows another young couple making their way in a foreign city. For Asya and Manu, who don’t share a common heritage, domestic life is about how much to preserve from their own cultures, and what to invent for themselves.

Like Perfection, it is a slim novel, but its concerns are weighty. Savaş recognises that daily life has a sacred quality alongside the banal, or perhaps it is the very nature of banality – with its rituals and repetitions – that makes it innately sacred. We are all faced with a handful of major choices (career, family, where to settle), but it is the infinite smaller ones – how we spend our Sundays, engage with our neighbours, take our morning coffee – that shape our sense of purpose, meaning and pleasure in the world.

In 2024,when I was racked with doubt about my own domestic novel-in-progress, Miranda July’s All Fours crash-landed on my desk: a taboo-shattering, wild and funny fantasia about testing the limits and confines of everyday life.

July depicts a family unit that is full of love and intimacy, yet her narrator doesn’t shy away from the conflict even the best-case scenario (happy child, engaged co-parent) can arouse in working mothers: “Walking around my own house I felt haunted, fluish with guilt about every single thing I did or didn’t do.” She likens re-entering the domicile after a day at her desk to “Buzz Aldrin preparing to unload the dishwasher immediately after returning from the moon”. Dorothy newly back from Oz could surely empathise.

For July, the home’s traditional function as a haven becomes complicated: what was originally familiar becomes alien. In All Fours she turns the question of how to honour the creative self while maintaining an earthbound existence into such an epic quest that, by the end of the novel, it is as though we too have been to outer space and back, standing dazed in our kitchens, clutching the dishwasher cutlery basket.

All Fours enabled me to confront my own draft again, armed with hard evidence that a domestic novel doesn’t have to be studied or quiet, or any other euphemism for boring; and a renewed understanding that the home – where we are our most intimate, lesser-seen selves – can be just as powerful, alive and stimulating an environment as anything we might encounter beyond the front door.