Family is embarrassing. Bad enough when they're ordinary humans, who know what gets under your skin. When they're gods, it's just that much worse.

In Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman takes a supporting character from his award-winning book American Gods and kills him off on page one. Mr. Nancy's son, Fat Charlie, who ran off to England to escape myriad inventive humiliations heaped on him by his father, comes back to America for the funeral. Fat Charlie has a mundane and perhaps unsatisfying life---an unfulfilling job, a fiancee with a hellish mother, and a fear of social embarrassment caused by his flamboyant father's pranks--but that life is turned upside-down when he finds he has a brother.

(Source: William Morrow)