The Family

The Family is a novel by the American writer Mario Puzo, published in 2001. Puzo worked on it on and off for more than twenty years while he wrote his other books, and it was finished by Carol Gino and released two years after his death.

The subject is the Borgias, and the book is told through the family at the centre of it. Rodrigo Borgia is elected Pope Alexander VI, and he goes about his business in the confidence that a man in his position cannot sin: he expects God to forgive him because, as pope, he is infallible. Around him are the children he uses as instruments of policy. Cesare is ruthless and ambitious, a soldier and a politician who wants the power his father holds. Lucrezia is married three times over the course of the book for reasons that have nothing to do with her, to the lord of Pesaro, to a duke of Aragon and finally to the duke of Ferrara, and by the end of the last of those marriages she is managing a court of her own.

The novel mixes a large cast of real figures, among them Niccolo Machiavelli, with the domestic arguments of the family, and it presents Rome as a city where political murder is an ordinary tool of government.