Summer is traditionally a time for lucky families to recover from the strains of the work and school treadmill and take time together on holiday – but this added space and time also allows the tensions that trammel and contain us in the web of family life to spring to life like waiting demons.

Here is some reading that reflects on family relations and the deep fissures of ambivalence we feel towards those to whom we are related. Terri Apter is a shrewd psychologist and her book The Sister Knot covers the subject of sibling rivalry: “She’s got the red spade and you said I could have that!”

As well as being a highly original thinker, Adam Phillips writes in Winnicott with elegance and a keen sympathy about one of the great analysts of children, Donald Winnicott, who brought his powerful intuition and understanding to the subject of mother and child, as “the nursing couple”. Phillips also shares Winnicott’s rare feeling (among psychoanalysts) for poetry.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Frances O’Connor as Fanny Price in Mansfield Park (1999). Photograph: c.Miramax/Everett /REX

Mansfield Park is perhaps Jane Austen’s least loved novel, but in my view it is possibly her best for its depiction of the upper-middle-class neglect suffered by Maria and Julia, the spoilt Bertram girls; this in turn leads to their failure to make happy marriages. The novel also adumbrates something that is often overlooked but reads to me like a pre-Freudian grasp of the allure of incest: Fanny, the book’s principal, falls in love with Edmund, the cousin she grows up with, and ultimately he with her (an idea I borrowed for my own novel, Cousins).

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons is not exactly realism, but the Starkadder family, with their hysterical self-dramatising, are the protagonists in one of the funniest books I know about family life.

William Maxwell is a monstrously underrated American writer whose Time Will Darken It describes with excruciating psychological deftness the disintegration of a marriage brought about by a man’s unquenchable need to please and be seen as amiable to a set of distant relatives who once helped his father. The arrival of the relations for an extended visit brings nemesis in the shape of an ardent young woman who falls for her host, causing a lasting rupture in a formerly happy marriage.

The irony is that the object of her affections by no means falls for her but his fear of being disobliging overrides his care for his own and his wife’s happiness. A stark reminder that charity begins at home.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest From left: Rose (Rose Byrne) and Cassandra Mortmain (Romola Garai) in I Capture the Castle (2003). Photograph: Allstar/BBC

William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is a terrifying study in the irrational power of jealousy. For those who call it a redemptive play I can only point out that Mamillius, the young son of the jealous Leontes, is killed by the despair brought on by his father’s unjust accusation of adultery by his mother, Hermione.

Finally, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. The eccentric Mortmain family, who reside in a crumbing ruin of a castle, is “captured” by the precious but innocent narrator, 17-year-old Cassandra: her father, author of a bestseller but now suffering 18 years of writer’s block; her stepmother Topaz, engagingly dotty and warm-hearted; the beautiful but greedy elder daughter, Rose; and the intellectual younger brother, Thomas. All are drawn with clarity, affection and a sharp psychology that is both funny and profound.

• Salley Vickers’s novel The Librarian is published by Viking. To order a copy for £16.99 (RRP £11.59) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99..