Brother Sister Incest / Literature

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• Ada, or Ardor: a Family Chronicle chronicles an incestuous family with a focus on a specific brother-sister pair, who end up semi-happily married by the end of the book. This is only scraping the surface of it. Van and Ada start off thinking they're cousins—and second cousins, as while their mothers are sisters, their fathers are cousins. They later find out that they're both the product of an affair between the man Van knew as his father and the woman Ada knew as her mother. The two parental pairs were also second cousins. Oh, right, and Ada's sister (or half-sister, as it ended up being) also had a thing for Van and is Driven to Suicide when it is unrequited. And Ada and said half-sister also had an incestuous lesbian relationship when they were younger.
• Age of Fire: After the death of her mate/great-uncle SiDrakkon, Infamina is engaged to her brother (and new Tyr) SiMevolant, with whom it's implied she was already having an affair with. That being said, it doesn't appear as though dragons have too much of a taboo on incest, as the only objection raised to this relationship is it's announced almost immediately after SiDrakkon's death, skipping the mourning period.
• The Amber Chronicles by Roger Zelazny hint at a mutual attraction between Corwin and Deidre to the point that King Oberon put his foot down and issued a decree banning brother-sister marriages in order to break it up. Lampshaded by Julian in Courts of Chaos as he discusses his own attraction to Fiona.
• Steve and Roz Brickman from Patrick Tilley's excellent Amtrak Wars series had a covert sexual relationship while they were younger. However, given the extremely weird nature of the Trackers, it's arguable as to whether or not Roz and Steve are related biologically (they are emotionally at the very least). It's implied the relationship came about due to the unconscious telepathic link they share.
• Angel Station: Beautiful Maria (yes, that is her full name) and Ubu Roy are not genetic siblings, as they were both genetically engineered by their "father" from scratch. This is most evident by Ubu's four arms and Maria's technopathy. However, they have been raised as brother and sister, so their feelings for each other are no different than if they had biological ties. That said, they have no problem screwing each other whenever they feel like it (it gets pretty graphic at times), although this can be justified by the fact that (after their "father's" suicide) it's just the two of them on long voyages and that their "father" used hormones to boost their growth, which made them all the more horny. They don't see a problem with this, probably because they have limited exposure to other people and they don't really advertise this. Oh, and their ages are 13 and 11, although, thanks to their hormone treatments, they look like adults.
• The Anna Pigeon mystery A Superior Death includes a consensual brother-sister couple who have had themselves sterilised so there will be no children. Anna pities them more than condemning them.
• A rare brother/brother example is part of the final twist in the novel As Meat Loves Salt. It is not portrayed romantically.
• Aztec: Mixtli the protagonist is forced via drugs into having sex with his older sister during the first arc. This later leads to genuine love between the two, at least until a Jerkass prince steps in...
• In Dean Koontz' The Bad Place:
  • The villain, generally known as "Candy", and his brother, co-protagonist Frank, are two of the offspring of hermaphroditic Roselle (fully reproductively functional as either sex), who was herself the product of brother-on-sister rape.
  • The villain's sisters, Violet and Verbina, have an implied attraction for each other and a rather blatant one for Candy. Considering that this eventually gets them killed, the latter is definitely not played for eroticism.
• Koontz uses this again in What the Night Knows, with a dubiously consensual brother/sister pairing being the first of four generations of line-breeding in the family, with the brother intentionally impregnating several generations of his own daughters (only one son is known to have been allowed to live past birth).
• The Beebo Brinker Chronicles: The book The Marriage is about a man and a woman who don't find out that the man is the woman's long-lost older brother until after they've married and conceived a child. In the end, the child is born healthy and the couple decide to stay together without telling anyone else about the incest.
• In Piers Anthony's Bio of a Space Tyrant series, the titular Tyrant may have had sex with his sister. The books are presented as Fictional Documents by the Tyrant's biographer, and she hedges herself by saying that she doesn't know for certain because neither of them would talk to her about it — which does not stop her from engaging in lurid speculation about it, particularly in The Iron Maiden.
• A good deal of the drama between Jory and Kol in Blade Dancer is caused by Jory's concern that they might have the same father (well, that, the machinations of Fayne, and Kol's natalist streak). They don't.
• A rare sister/sister example crops up in The Blindness of the Heart (Die Mittagsfrau): Martha and Helene have a sexual relationship for a while; Helene doesn't really seem to dislike it, but she's clearly being taken advantage of by her older sister. Ends when Martha and Leontine enter a full-time relationship.
• Blue Bloods series: Twins Jack and Mimi Force are actually the angels Abaddon and Azrael, respectively, and are vampires who are "immortal twins"; that is to say they are bonded forever. This life cycle just happens to have them as blood relatives, which doesn't really seem to stop them - until Schuyler Van Alen (who is so many tropes in and of herself) steps in.
• Book Of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow ends up here. Brother and sister Daniel and Susan eventually consummate their relationship.
• Brat Farrar heads in this direction. He's not actually her brother; she just thinks he is.
• Ella from Bright Lines is in love with her adopted sister Charu. Charu is biologically her cousin, but they were raised as siblings after Ella's parents died.
• In Bring Up the Bodies, Thomas Cromwell is told by Lady Rochford, Anne Boleyn's sister-in-law, that Anne and George Boleyn kiss. When he says that's not unnatural she specifies that it's with tongues. Cromwell is at first skeptical, but works up a rationalization that he can present to the court—they were raised apart, met as adults, a child of the union wouldn't be an obvious bastard because it would look like a Boleyn—and it works for the purpose of getting both of them convicted.
• A Brother's Price: Little Eldie Porter's parents were brother and sister, though Not Blood Siblings — though it's still considered incest. The other characters don't realize they weren't blood siblings at first, and genetically they were Kissing Cousins. In this world a man marries every sister in a family, and the sisters themselves are descended from a series of sisters and so on. It's still pretty savagely taboo in this world.
• Burying the Shadow: Siblings Gimel and Beth Metatronim share a sexual if not romantic connection. Storm Constantine is fond of this trope.
• Captain French, or the Quest for Paradise: the titular protagonist's new wife decides she wants children, but he points out all the problems of having children aboard a ship that spends most of the time traveling from planet to planet with very low gravity aboard. Even if they spend all her pregnancy on a planet, they would still have to raise the baby aboard the ship with no one his or her age around. Additionally, after a certain age, the son or daughter will wish for a partner, and that adds another layer of problems. She reads up on genetic engineering and suggests having opposite-sex twins, whose DNA is slightly altered, so that they're not actually siblings. This would allow them to marry later. He points out that it doesn't matter what genes say; it's being raised as brother and sister that'll make it feel extremely wrong.
• Ian McEwan's "The Cement Garden", where two older children wind up having sex together in the final scene. It only happens once, but when they get caught by their social worker (who is implied to be atracted to the girl), she teases him by saying "Oh, this has been going on for ages and ages". Sanity did not have a strong grip on any member of that family, even the parents.
• In Barbara Vine's novel The Chimney Sweeper's Boy, the final twist is that Gerald Candless abandoned his family and changed his name because he unintentionally had sex with his brother in a bathhouse.
• In the short story "Chinandega" by Lucius Shepard, the protagonist's sister becomes his favorite prostitute. They only start this after an admitted liar claims she had been adopted. The truth is never established.
• Chronicles of the Kencyrath: Historically, the Kencyrath bred close relatives because inbreeding seemed like a good plan to produce the chosen one. They don't do it has much these days, but because of the old traditions, the Kencyrath now see incest as—at worst—a unwise, not creepy or immoral.
  • Twins and consorts Gerridon and Jamethiel were responsible for a great betrayal in the distant past. Their twincest and betrayal were unrelated, but all the same, ever since then twincest has had some mixed connotations in the culture.
  • All the way through the first book, Jame and and Implied Love Interest Bane seem on the verge of Slap-Slap-Kiss. They never quite do. At the end of the first book, they are revealed to be half-siblings, which gives it shades of Surprise Incest. It's all very subtexty and unclear. Much later, in the eighth book this finally gets confirmed, with Jame naming him as one of the people she's been attracted to.
  • Jame (the protagonist) and Torisen (the deuteragonist) are twins. The mutual attraction has so far led to The Big Damn Kiss, and an Erotic Dream. There's no real relationship between them so far, it's heading in that if for no other reason than that, as the author stated in an interview, she simply does not find any other male character in the books as interesting as Torisen.
  • Timmon's parents, Pereden and Distan, were half-siblings and consorts. They seem to have been pretty happy together.
    Timmon: I may have older half-brothers, you see, but my parents were half-siblings, which counts for a lot in our house. [grins] Are you shocked?
  • This example is very different than the first three: It's homosexual, non-consensual, and not socially condoned: Greshan raped his little brother Ganth when they were young. Ganth told their father, who didn't believe him. It mentally and emotionally scarred Ganth for life.
  • Tiggeri had his eye on his half-sister Must ever since she was little, and he eventually raped her. This example is different than the others because Must is a half-Kendar bastard, and in their world, Highborn men either raping, or having coercive Unequal Pairing relationships with, Kendar women just because they can is far from uncommon. The scenario with Tiggeri and Must is also something of a deconstruction of Unlucky Childhood Friend.
• The Chronicles of Magravandias: Twins Valraven and Pharinet Palindrake fall in love and being an incestuous and adulterous affair. They almost conceive a child, but Pharinet miscarries. That doesn't stop the relationship from destroying their family and their spouses.
• Chung Kuo: Ben Shepherd and his sister.
• The Cornelius Chronicles: Jerry Cornelius has a relationship with his sister. His brother Frank tries to as well. And in a later story, Jerry is referred to as "the last of the truly innocent motherfuckers."
• Count to the Eschaton: Nymph culture acts as a Planet of Hats, whose hat is Extreme Omnisexual. As a consequence, the word "brother" also means "homosexual incestuous sex partner."
• Darkover: In Stormqueen!, a father finds himself with no living male heir, a foster son (20-year-old son of his dead mistress from her marriage) he loves, and the only heir of his body existing is his preteen daughter. Oh yeah, and he hates his brother. What to do to pass on the succession? Marry off the half-siblings to each other. Yes, he intends them to make a baby. Even worse, the two of them are eventually willing to go along with that. It's only stopped when Dorilys kills her brother after she finds out he knocked up his girlfriend.
• In The Dark Volume by Gordon Dahlquist, it's revealed toward the end that Francis Xonck is the father of one of his sister Charlotte's children. It's obliquely hinted at in that the girl's name is Francesca.
• In murder mystery The Demoniacs by John Dickson Carr, the early-eighteenth-century detective has come to suspect that his girlfriend is his half-sister. She isn't. If she is, he wants to find and destroy the evidence so he'll be able to marry her anyway. When he admits that to her, after finding out she isn't related, she's pleased rather than squicked; she plainly feels it's romantic.
• Deryni: In Camber of Culdi, the last king of the Festillic dynasty, Imre I, has an incestuous relationship with his sister Ariella, which produces the line of Festillic pretenders who for generations proceed to plague the Haldane dynasty.
• In the works of Ian McDonald:
  • In Desolation Road the eponymous town's dentist has an unspoken and unrequited (she knows about it but is indifferent) love for his sister. When she "cheats" on him with another man he commits suicide.
  • In "Ares Express" which occurs in the same universe two minor characters are the postmasters of a small town and apparently come from a long line of inbreeding resulting in both of them, especially the brother, being rather dim-witted. Whether they indulge in the same pastime is left vague.
• Twice in Deverry series; the first time in Daggerspell, as part of the ancient tragedy that drives the first four books, involving a despairing heroine dumped by her one true love, the second time as one of the many acts demonstrating the corrupt nature of the villainess.
• In Sky Lee's book Disappearing Moon Cafe, a half-brother and sister (who are unaware that they have a parent in common) have a sexual relationship.
• The Divine Comedy: She may try to downplay it, but by having an affair with her husband's brother, Francesca not only damned herself for adultery, but also for incest. Sure, they're in-laws, but if we can take anything from Dante dismissively remembering them as "the two kindred," it's that he didn't think Hell would see the distinction.
• Dollanganger Series (better known by the title of the first book, Flowers in the Attic) is about four siblings who are locked in an attic by their grandmother. The elder two—Chris (14) and Cathy (12)—are put in the situation of taking on the role of parents for their younger twin siblings (5). They're in the attic for years, not escaping until they're 18 and 15. As Chris and Cathy go through puberty with no one else to direct their budding sexuality toward, as well as playing the roles typically occupied by a married couple, UST develops between them, eventually resulting in a single torrid encounter which leaves him stricken with guilt and her trying to rationalize to him that it wasn't rape because she never tried to struggle or stop him. After escaping the attic they spend years wresting with their feelings for each other. Chris wants to be with Cathy, but Cathy is terrified about sin and deformed children, and she enters a series of ill-advised relationships with other men as she tries to flee from her feelings for Chris. She has two children with two different men. After the birth of her second son, doctors say it would be dangerous for her to carry another pregnancy and advise she be sterilized. Cathy reluctantly agrees—not for the doctors' reasons, but so that she can be with Chris without fear of inbred children. She and Chris are not together at this point, but she knows in her heart that they're endgame. A few years later, they do get together. They get married, which is to say they move across the country where no one knows them and present themselves to the world as a married couple. They co-parent her two boys from prior relationships, and adopt a third child together.
• Downtiming The Night Side presents this as the inevitable consequence of growing up marooned on a small island with only your parents and siblings for company. It's only natural for the kids to want to do what mom and dad do (a lot, since it is a Jack Chalker book) with the only other people available.
• The Dresden Files: One of the short stories opens with a brother/sister pair who've been whammied into being passionately in love. Eventually the wrongness in their subconscious got too much and they shot themselves. While having sex.
• Mentioned as a possibility several times in Dune, usually with regards to Paul the Kwisatz Haderach. The Bene Gesserit have a plan to have Paul marry and have children with his sister Alia in order to preserve his genes, but Paul saw that coming (being able to see the future is useful in that regard) and their manipulations failed. Later, Paul's twin children Leto II and Ghanima briefly mention the possibility when discussing their future plans, but dismiss it immediately. They do end up marrying in order to establish Leto's rule as God-Emperor, but it was a Sexless Marriage (taboos aside, Leto can't have sex due to his transformation; all of Ghanima's children were fathered by her consort).
• In Jean M. Auel's Earth's Children series, Jondalar's half-sister is madly in love with him. 'Course, since these characters don't understand where babies come from and Jondalar and Joplaya's common parent is their father, they are believed to be something closer to cousins than siblings. Still squicky though.
• The Egyptian, as it involves Ancient Egyptian royalty obviously includes this as a matter of course. Mostly in the character of Baketamon who considers her brother as the only man fit to marry her.
• In The Elenium trilogy by David Eddings, King Aldreas has an incestuous relationship with his sister, Princess Arissa; there is a lingering question, for part of the story, whether he was the father of her son Lycheas. It eventually is revealed Lycheas is the product of Arissa breaking another taboo — seducing and having sex with a priest.
• The Faerie Queene features intercourse between twins in the womb. The giants Argante and Ollyphant, themselves the product of incest, mingle "in fleshly lust" before birth and emerge clasped in the act.
• Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher". The obsession of Roderrick for his sister Madeleine hints clearly at incest. It explicitly states that their family tree does not branch.
• The Family: Lucrezia Borgia loses her virginity to her brother Cesare. Their father, the Pope, who told them to do it, stays in the room to watch. Lucrezia and Cesare are in love for the rest of their lives.
• In the short story "Florville et Courval" by the Marquis de Sade, Florville falls in love with her brother Senneval and bears his child, though he abandons her, taking the child with him. She had been given away secretly by her mother at birth, and they were unaware of their biological relationship.
• Flowers for Algernon: It doesn't actually happen, but Rose's fears that it might happen (because the mentally disabled Charlie just doesn't know any better and is confused about why he got an erection when looking at his sister), causes her to demand that Charlie be sent away even threatening to kill him herself if he's not gone.
• Forbidden deconstructs and partly reconstructs this trope. It's about siblings Lochan and Maya, and their relationship is shown in a sympathetic light as they did not have a normal childhood. They lost their father early and having a callous mother made them look after their younger siblings. They do commit incest towards the end of the book. A point is made several times that neither of them feels anything for their other siblings beyond the norm.
• A sister/sister version in the Gaea Trilogy by John Varley. April and August Polo are very much a couple despite being identical twins—which the protagonist comments isn't very surprising given that they (and their seven other sisters) are all clones of their "mother" created after her death and raised in a lab with no outside friends.
• Ghoul: Rika and Saxon Hyde provide a pretty Squick-tastic version. It started when they were teenagers, and Saxon was trying to molest their other sister, Debra.
• The God of Small Things features extremely heavily implied Twincest between Rahel and Estha after their 23 year separation.
• Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo Dao Zu Shi:
  • Not long before Jin Guangyao and Qin Su are supposed to marry, he finds out that they are half-siblings. He ends up marrying her anyways out of fear of the political consequences of backing out, not to mention she's already pregnant.
  • Mo Xuanyu, one of Jin Guangyao's half-brothers, was said to have harassed him, and he gets kicked out of the Jin Clan as a result. Whether this is actually what happened though is never made clear.
• The History of the Galaxy setting has the St. Ivo family, the owners of the Galactic Cybersystems MegaCorp. The original founder of the company, Erlik St. Ivo, intentionally married his cousin in order to keep the ownership of the company and its secrets in the family. They used genetic engineering to bear a son and a daughter who were not genetic siblings, convincing them to continue the tradition. However, after a few generations, even genetic engineering couldn't fix the problem, culminating in the birth of André St. Ivo, whose sub-par intelligence was insufficient to properly run the company. Deciding to break with tradition, André's parents did not have a second child, instead forcing him to find a wife elsewhere. He married Theia Mitchell, a smart and beautiful woman who effectively ran Galactic Cybersystems in her husband's stead. Jealous, André had her publicly assassinated, making sure she was Only Mostly Dead, and had an Evilutionary Biologist turn her into a compliant sex slave. André later died, and the freed Theia ends up accidentally killing her eldest son Aramant, mistaking him for André (thanks to this trope, they look nearly identical). Theia dies from genetic complications some years later, while her other son John Mitchell St. Ivo (who looks like Erlik for the same reason) is mortally wounded and forced to undergo Brain Uploading into an android body (coincidentally built in the image of Erlik). Many years later, John ends up cloning himself a new body from a genetic sample taken prior to his body's death and becomes able to continue the St. Ivo line, although the corporation is long-gone by that point.
• The novel The Holy Sinner by German author Thomas Mann features this, as well as parental incest. It is a retelling of the 12th-century epic poem Gregorius or The Good Sinner by Hartmann von Aue, which in turn is based on a medieval French version of the story.
• “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?” is a science fiction short story by Theodore Sturgeon. It first appeared in Harlan Ellison's anthology "Dangerous Visions" in 1967. It is about an Earthman who manages, with some difficulty, to go to the planet Vexvelt, a paradise which is shunned by the rest of civilised universe for unknown reasons. He finds it a utopian paradise, but then discovers to his shock and horror that incest is actively encouraged there. Indeed, a large part of the reason for Vexvelt’s harmonious social relations, it is argued, is precisely Vexvelt’s social acceptance, indeed encouragement, of incest.
• I'm In Love With the Villainess has Lambert and Lene Orso, brother and sister, respectively. The portrayal is decidedly unsympathetic when he abuses his position and power to stage a working class revolt, a mass murder attempt of the aristocrats and royalty of the kingdom, and using his demon-sealing skills to unleash an extremely powerful one to do his dirty business. After the end of the arc, their family is disgraced and exiled, though it's implied they're now living well together in another country thanks to the protagonist's intervention.
• In Immortals After Dark, the antagonist of one book is screwing his half sister... because she somewhat resembles the half sister he really wants to be screwing.
• In Death: Piper and Rudy Hoffman in Holiday In Death are fraternal twins and longtime lovers; Piper even had herself surgically sterilized, with Rudy's encouragement. Eve, herself a victim of incestuous rape by her father, is highly squicked out by this, and there are some indications that the relationship has taken a toll on Piper mentally (though it's not entirely clear how much of this is projection on Eve's part).
• In Innocent World by Ami Sakurai, main character Ami, seventeen years old prostitute and Author Avatar, has a long term sexual relationship with her brother. And to add more Squick, he is mentally handicapped. Also, this relationship is portrayed as Ami's only way of feeling close to true and innocent love. Needless to say, the novel seems to be aimed mainly at shocking the reader with the depravity of Japanese teenagers.
• The narrator in Invisible by Paul Auster describes a particular incident in his childhood extremely explicitly.
• A tragically sympathetic example in Island Beneath the Sea. Maurice Valmorain and Rosette (conceived by Maurice's father raping an enslaved Haitian woman) are not allowed to be together, not only because they're half-siblings but also because of Rosette's race.
• Played without angst or tragedy in Jacob's Ladder Trilogy. Since it happens on a generation space ship that's been out and about for almost a thousand years, the "ruling" family wants to keep their blood "pure", as the people on the ship are devided into "Exalt" and "Mean". Thanks to advanced technology and genetic engineering, marriage and children can happen without the genetic downsides. The various sibling relationships are portrayed as diverse as other kinds of relationships and tend to go the True Love route.
• The titular characters of Kelly Braffet's Josie and Jack have an increasingly sexualized relationship, but it's deliberately unclear if they ever consummated it.
• Judge Dee: The villain of the last book was a walking pile of psychological issues and frustrations, being denied a military career due to his frail body and lusting after his own sister. He tried to convince her to sleep with him, citing mythological rulers who did so. When she understandably refused him, he blinded her by pouring boiling oil in her eyes as she slept. She only pitied him all the more after, which didn't do his mental state any favors.
• The Left Hand of Darkness: Along with some other sexual taboos, sibling incest is much less stigmatized on the planet Gethen — siblings are forbidden from becoming life partners, but can remain lovers until they have a single child together. The deuteragonist Estraven fell foul of this restriction: his sibling committed suicide rather than be separated from him after their child was born, leading to Estraven's exile.
• In A Legacy of Light, the siblings Pharaoh Tutankhamun and Queen Ankhesenamun have been married since childhood in order to preserve the royal bloodline.
• The God King of Gothir and his sister in The Legend of Deathwalker.
• The Legend of Drizzt: Vierna was quite taken with her little brother, but he refused her. That incest is implied to be seen as kinky at best even among dark elves — who, among other things, have sex with demons and engage in public orgies at graduation ceremonies — it kind of drives home that even Vierna, probably the most well-adjusted of the Do'Urden women, is more than a little twisted. Vierna seemed to think she was doing him a favor; assuming Drizzt was too embarrassed to engage in the aforementioned public orgy, she was offering to help him fulfill his "graduation ceremony" in a private setting with someone he knew, rather than in public with a stranger. Vierna was warned against such behavior by her mother, so, apparently, the drow DO look upon it negatively. And she warned her about it the night Drizzt was born...
• Lensman: The end of the series strongly implies that the Kinnison kids will do this to produce a new race of superbeings. E. E. "Doc" Smith implied on several occasions that this idea kept him from doing a sequel, as back then such ideas were strictly taboo — if he wrote that into a story, he'd never find a legitimate science fiction publisher who'd accept it. At least here, the Arisians' having bred out all the nasty recessives throughout human history means there won't be any horrible genetic consequences.
• The Reveal of "The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter" is that Alastair lost his grip on reality and is implied to have committed suicide because he was in love with his sister, Squid.
• Lilith's Brood has a variant with the Cthulhumanoid Oankali: parental units comprise a male and female, who are usually brother and sister, and an "ooloi" third sex from a different family. Justified (from a biological perspective, at least) by their innate ability to manipulate DNA; males and females seek out and concentrate desirable genetic traits, while ooloi combine them into Designer Babies without the usual disadvantages of inbreeding.
• The first Lord Darcy mystery, "The Eyes Have It", had this as its motive for homicide, as a noblewoman had killed her obsessed brother to stop him from raping her.
• The Machineries of Empire has Shuos Mikodez and his body double/younger brother Istradez, who have been lovers for decades by the time they appear in the story. Their parents don't mind, and are actually quite happy that their two most hyperactive children have something to occupy themselves with.
• The not very famous book Malika from French author Valérie Valère is all about the incestous love between a teenaged boy and his little sister Malika. The siblings live on their own in Paris, and have a Disappeared Dad. At one point they confess their feelings to each other and start a relationship. (And have a sexual encounter, and a really, really tragic end.)
• Middlesex is a Generational Saga that begins with the story of the incestuous relationship between the protagonist's grandparents Desdemona and Lefty. They were starting to like each other, and Lefying made a joking wedding proposial to Desdemona. Then on a night they were pretty sure they were going to die, Desdemona had the nerve to accept it. They didn't die that night, so then they emigrated to America and had two kids.
• In Mirror, Mirror (2003), a retelling of Snow White, has Lucrezia Borgia not only sleep with her brother, but also her father, and the son she conceived with said brother.
• In Agatha Christie's Miss Marple story Sleeping Murder, the killer was the victim's brother, who had tried to prevent her from forming any romantic attachments, and killed her after her marriage to another man.
• The Mists of Avalon: Morgaine and Arthur have sex and conceive a child as part of a religious ritual without either of them being aware of the other's identity. When they find out Arthur is appalled, but Morgaine maintains that since they were possessed by the God and Goddess at the time it wasn't really them. However, she does feel guilty about the enthusiastic non-possessed morning sex they had after waking up the next morning, and immediately before recognizing each other. Kind of further confused by the fact that Morgaine is capable of just leaving it behind her (more or less) while Arthur is still in love with her. Even more confused because Viviane, who arranged the whole thing, apparently thinks this is no biggie and Morgaine should take the opportunity to become Arthur's consort and influence his reign in Avalon's favor. Viviane seems to regard [half]brother/sister incest as a specifically Christian taboo (it isn't), an influence that Morgaine should be above as a priestess of the Goddess.
• The heroine of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders finally discovers her long-lost mother. Unfortunately, Moll's mother is also... her mother-in-law. Oops.
• The Monk: Ambrosio and his younger half-sister Antonia, though neither of them is aware of their blood relation. Ambrosio only finds out after he's raped and killed her.
• The Shadowhunter Chronicles: There are a couple of these, leaving some to wonder if it is an Author Appeal:
  • Clary Fairchild and Jace Herondale fall for each other in City of Bones, only to discover that they're siblings. Throughout the next two books, Jace openly says that they can have a Secret Relationship anyway; Clary won't, but also gets angry if Jace shows interest in other girls. Eventually, they find out that they're not biologically related. Clary and Jace are still kind of Not Blood Siblings, though (he was raised by her birth father).
  • On the other hand, Clary's actual blood brother, Jonathan Morgenstern, is in love with her, and wants her to be his queen when he conquers the world. To her credit, Clary feels that there is something wrong the first time they kiss (but before she learns that they are siblings).
  • Alec Lightwood has a crush on his adopted brother, Jace Herondale, but this can be attributed to Jace being the only boy his age who is regularly around him. Jace never learns about the crush, so this doesn't cause that much drama, and Alec eventually moves on to Magnus Bane anyway.
  • Emma Carstairs and Julian Blackthorn can be considered this. While Emma was never properly adopted into the Blackthorn family, she basically grew up with them since she was 12. What makes their relationship taboo, however, is not because they are foster siblings, but because they are parabatai.
• The Night Angel Trilogy has Terah Graesin and her brother Luc. Terah Graesin has some Cersei-ish vibe. She eventually sends their younger sister Natassa to certain and horrible death because the poor thing found out.
• Nightside: Suzie Shooter was coerced into a sexual relationship by her older brother as a young teen, got pregnant, and was forced to have an abortion by their parents, who blamed her for "leading him on". She shot her brother, pissed on his corpse, and ran away to the Nightside.
• One Hundred Years of Solitude: The first two propagators of the Buendía family are cousins, and a major theme throughout is the prevention of the family tree from getting too tangled, for fear of "bearing iguanas". There is much Squick. In fact, at the very end, one character becomes the lover of his aunt, thinking she's his long-lost sister.
• Present in a benign form in regards to Ben in An Ordinary Sex Life. Adrienne, on the other hand...
• Griffins Quri and Jin in The Orphan's Tales. Justified, since this the only way their species will survive.
• The Other Boleyn Girl has several non-platonic kisses between Anne Boleyn and her brother George (who in real life as in the book was accused of adultery with her and was also beheaded). Their "closeness" probably stems from the fact that George is the only person Anne can really trust in her precarious position. The narrator, their sister Mary—who he also kisses—and her husband speculate that Anne may have convinced George to sleep with her once she was queen so that she could have a son, and that one or more of her miscarried pregnancies may have been incestuous.
• Outer Dark: Rinthy and Culla, two poor siblings who live together in a small house out in the woods and had a child together. The conception happened offpage and whatever lead to it in the first place, and whether or not this was even consensual is never discussed, but it's clear that by the time of the story's present there's no affection between the siblings, with Culla abandoning the baby to die out in the woods and Rinthy setting out to find him.
• Outlander series:
  • In Outlander, it's implied that Depraved Bisexual Jonathan Randall lusts after his younger brother Alexander.
  • A Breath of Snow and Ashes has Malva and her brother. He not only gets her pregnant but, tragically, kills her when she refuses to go along with his plan to pretend that it's actually Jamie's child in order to coerce money out of the Frasers. Had she gone along with the plan, he informs Claire, they would have moved to another state, where no one would know them - or that they were related. He also implies, while he's blurting out secrets, that he started having sex with Malva when she was quite young. There are hints, throughout the scenes involving the two of them together, that their relationship is a bit more than just brother and sister, but it's not stated explicitly until well after Malva is dead. Claire suspects, though, that their father may have known or at least had strong suspicions.
• PercyJacksonandthe Olympians averts this. Most of the Greek gods are closely related (siblings/parent/child). However, Divine blood has no impact on the genetics. So relationships between campers are not an issue.
• Pin features a complex relationship for Leon and Ursula. While growing up they had no personal space and often appear naked, cuddle and talk about their sexual encounters. As it is later revealed when they have a threesome with Pin (who is an anatomically correct medical dummy) it is mentioned they've done this many times before. In the end with Leon now paralyzed thinking he is Pin, it is implied the now quite mad herself Ursula uses her brother as a living sex toy when she waltzed into his room fully naked all the time.
• Prophet's House quartet: In spades with the incestuous House Rassianus, most notably in the Backstory between Sepirahkt and Areina, but later Alisayne and Lysander get in on the action.
• Prospero's Daughter trilogy An Attempted Rape in the Back Story turns out to have been a half-brother attacking his half-sister, thoroughly Squicking both the victim and the now penitent would-be rapist on top of their already strong reactions to the attack. Furthermore, Logistilla and Titus had children together in hopes that that would persuade Prospero to give the children the Water of Life; they are sick of watching the children die of old age.
• In Pyramids, Ptraci's father was Teppicymon XXVII, so she is Teppic's half-sister. This is revealed to the reader midway through the book, but the main characters remain unaware of it until near the end. They show UST for each other during their escape from Djelibeybi. After they meet up again back in Djelibeybi and find out that they are related, Ptraci asks "That doesn't make any difference, does it?", to which Teppic replies "I think it does, really."
• Quarters: Vree is attracted to Bannon, her brother. She's also disturbed by the fact, and tries to tell herself that isn't what her feelings are. Bannon later actually proposes she have sex with Gyhard in his body to get close so they can kill him, and Vree reluctantly agrees, rationalizing that it's not her brother in there now. After she realizes how much Bannon is into the idea of having sex with his body while sharing hers, she's disgusted and stops herself though.
• The Rook: Getsalt (three brothers and a sister who share a Hive Mind) is revealed to have had an incestous baby between the sister and one of the brothers. There's a "practical" purpose for this, however: since both the baby's parents were Getsalt, the baby is also part of Getsalt, allowing it/them to survive into the next generation.
• The Saga of the Jomsvikings: Knut, the founder of the Danish royal house of Knytlings, is the result of an incestuous affair a Saxon jarl called Arnfinn had with his sister. The parents keep the boy a secret and abandon him in a forest so he will be found by King Gorm of Denmark.
  The jarl had a beautiful sister, and he was fonder of her than he should have been and begot a child with her.
• Secret Histories: Harry Drood and his half-demon half-brother Roger Morningstar are very much in love.
• The Secret History: Twincest Twins Camilla and Charles are siblings with benefits.
• Sharp Objects: Amma clearly has a thing for her older half-sister Camille. She passes a pill of Ecstasy to her tongue to tongue and later crawls into bed with her wearing only panties. Camille's reaction to this is confused more than repelled.
• She Is The One: The first chapter reveals Alan and Amanda, who share a bedroom, have been having sex with each other. They're eventually broken up by Jack's parents, who think their relationship doesn't really have a future. Amanda also tries to seduce Jack, then forces herself on him when he turns her down, though he's able to stop her from going too far. Jessica is also being blackmailed by Brad with a picture of her and her brother having sex, necessitating The Plan to get the picture deleted from Brad's phone and get him caught, though as Brad boomerangs back into Jack's life in senior year, it's called into question if that picture, and Jessica's relationship with her brother, ever really existed.
• In Stand on Zanzibar, this is heavily implied between French siblings Pierre and Jeannine, especially during the final chapter featuring these characters, which ends with them kissing.
• J. R. R. Tolkien's story of Túrin Turambar (told both in The Silmarillion and The Children of Húrin) has a doomed relationship between Túrin and his Separated at Birth sister, Niënor, even impregnating her. But they didn't know they were siblings because of Nienor being mind-wiped. They don't take the revelation well. Túrin is based on the character of Kullervo from The Kalevala, who has a similar unknowingly incestuous relationship with his sister.
• Smoke and Shadows: Siblings Cassie and Stephen engaged in sexual activities—quite often, if Stephen's "there was lots of sinning" is anything to go by. Unfortunately for them, their dad caught them in the act and then got possessed by a malevolent house presence, causing him to violently murder them both with an axe.
• A Song of Ice and Fire has several examples. Note that these are only the explicit examples; this series also has a fairly large entry on the Incest Subtext page.
  • The reigning House Targaryen made a proud tradition of breeding brother to sister for generations, which comes from their Valyrian dragonlord ancestors.^note Failing that, there were uncle-niece, aunt-nephew, and cousin marriages, as well as marriages to other nobles for the usual reasons of Altar Diplomacy. Brother-sister incest is generally held to be an abomination by the Faith of the Seven, but Targaryens got a special dispensation, because dragons. Though most Targaryens have a penchant to be silver-haired and violet-eyed, their insistence on keeping the bloodline "pure" for three hundred years or so means that they now tend to produce either great heroes or complete psychopaths, making the Targaryens a sort of on-again-off-again example of Royally Screwed Up.
    • To be more precise: Aegon I married both of his sisters, Visenya and Rhaenys, to follow tradition and his heart (he only loved Rhaenys, but had to marry Visenya because she was the eldest). Aenys I, Aegon I's son with Rhaenys, had five children, two of whom (Aegon and Rhaena) married and had two children, while another two (Jaehaerys I and Alysanne) married and had thirteen children. Out of those thirteen were Baelon and Alyssa, who married and had three kids, one of whom, Viserys I, had two children (Aegon II and Helaena) who married each other. Viserys I's great-grandson Baelor I wedded his sister Daena but out of piety never consummated the marriage, while another great-grandson, Aegon IV, wedded his sister Naerys and had two children with her. The incest tradition would stop for a couple of generations, only to restart with Aegon IV's great-grandchildren and twins Aelor and Aelora, followed by great-great-grandchildren Jaehaerys II and Shaera, who broke off their respective engagements to marry each other without their father's permission. Their children, Aerys II and Rhaella, were in love with others, but were forced to marry because of a prophecy.
    • The Targaryens believed that keeping their bloodline pure did not just preserve their Valyrian look but also their control of dragons. Since the Doom of Valyria left them as the sole surviving dragonlord family, it was impossible to do this without resorting to incest. The family tree confirmed that incestuous marriage dated to as far back as a century before Aegon I's conquest (Daenys the Dreamer, who foresaw the destruction of Valyria, resulting in the flight of the Targaryens to Dragonstone, married her brother Gaemon, and their children Aegon and Elaena would marry each other in turn). Hence, after the dragons were driven extinct during the Dance of the Dragons, the incest tradition slowly faded away, as the family integrated with Westeros.
    • Daenerys Targaryen was raised believing that she would marry her brother, Viserys the Beggar King, and bear his silver-haired violet-eyed children. However, since Viserys needs an army to help him conquer Westeros, he instead sells her to Drogo, the most powerful khal of the Dothraki, in exchange for military aid. Dany also notes that if her (over twenty years) older brother Rhaegar's children had survived, she might have married her nephew Aegon instead, as he'd have been closer to her age than Viserys.
  • Cersei and Jaime Lannister, as revealed in the first book. It's a major plot point because Cersei's children, including King Joffrey, are not the offspring of her husband Robert Baratheon, but of her Half Identical Twin Jaime. If this were ever proven, the kids would be publicly slaughtered as abominations. Mom's not cool with that. This pairing is an unusual case of this trope as Cersei and Jaime are actually one of the few genuinely loving relationships seen in the series... at least at first. It's plain to see that Jaime truly loves Cersei and, even when other women want to jump into his bed, proudly remains loyal to his sister. Cersei is rather less monogamous, and still carries a torch for Rhaegar Targaryen and sleeps around with other men, including their cousin Lancel Lannister... but mostly because sex is one of the only weapons she has at her disposal as a woman in her society. The other people she sleeps with are either to reach political ends, and occasionally out of loneliness or wanting for feel powerful. She still flat-out says, "It had never been any good with anyone but Jaime." Eventually though, the war changes the twins so much that, once reunited, they each come to resent the other.
  • There's the scene with Theon Greyjoy and his sister Asha, where she gave him a deep and rather passionate kiss, and felt him up. In this case, it was a Secret Test of Character: Asha recognized her brother, even if the reverse wasn't true. Plus, Theon was pretty repulsed and embarrassed when he found out.
  • The preview chapters of The Winds of Winter reveal that Euron Greyjoy molested his younger brother Aeron as a boy.
• In The Sound and the Fury, it is implied that Quentin is in love with his sister, and even offers to have sex with her so that he can claim that her out-of-wedlock child is his, shifting the blame to him and preventing her from dishonoring the family (exactly how this would have helped is dubious). She says okay, but he chickens out. He then tries to tell his father that he has "committed incest" with his sister, who doesn't believe him. To top it off, Quentin later commits suicide, and his sister ends up naming her daughter after him.
  • It's also a major plot point in the later book Absalom, Absalom!, in which Quentin is told the story of Henry Sutpen, who protected his sister from the advances of her half-brother (although he, in the end, manages to convince himself he's okay with the incest, just not the fact that her half-brother has a fraction of black ancestry). This is but part of the huge amount of emotional baggage Quentin gets dumped on him.
• In Speaker for the Dead (sequel to Ender's Game) Miro and Ouanda are outed as half-siblings by Ender's Speaking, due to Miro's mother's adulterous relationship with Ouanda's father. Later they both remark that it's lucky that, due to strong Catholicism, they never had sex. Although one of them points out later that if further tragedy hadn't struck right after that revelation, they might have made some attempt to continue the relationship — but what happened next would have drastically changed things for them anyway, and therefore made it easy for one of them to break it off. Actually, Miro wasn't so big a Catholic that he would abstain before marriage. Ouanda was the devout one. Miro reached the same conclusion through rational means, reasoning that only a large community can afford to have people break religious taboos. Their community is very small.
• A major theme of Helen Dunmore's A Spell of Winter is the incestuous relationship between siblings Cathy and Rob. Cathy eventually breaks off the relationship after she gets pregnant, is blackmailed into aborting the baby, goes crazy from the guilt, and murders her blackmailer.
• The Stone Dance of the Chameleon: Due to their obsession with blood purity, the God Emperors have been known to engage in this, as well as Parental Incest. The current God Emperor at the start of the series, Kumatuya, is married to his sister Ykoriana.
• Sword of Truth: Tobias and Lunetta Brogan apparently have an incestuous relationship, giving her saying she cast glamours for him in private.
• The Thirteenth Tale: Charlie's obsession of sorts with his younger sister Isabelle. Then again, with a family like theirs, it's hard to turn out in any way normal children. It's implied that Charlie is the father of her children.
• Tigana:
  • Dianora and Baerd were involved like this in their backstories. To Dianora, because Baerd is her brother, he's family—he's home. Her love for him is symbolic of, or at least intertwined with, her love of her homeland. And love of their homeland is perhaps the biggest driving force in the story.
  • In-universe incest is referred to as the "sin of the gods" because two of their three gods, a brother and sister, were the parents of the third.
• Time Enough for Love has multiple examples:
  • In one of his stories Lazarus Long recounts the time he met a fraternal twin couple who due to the circumstances of their conception had inherited different genes from their parents and as such were no more related to each other than their parents had been. They had several perfectly healthy children.
  • Later Lazarus' Opposite Sex Clones insist that he impregnate both of them. Which could be this, Parental Incest, or Screw Yourself depending on your opinion.
  • Also comes up in To Sail Beyond the Sunset, with several mentioned instances of sibling incest among Maureen's children. The only such pair she has an issue with is Donald/Priscilla, because she considers their rather exclusive pairing (especially on Priscilla's side) unhealthy, since a marriage would not be advisable due to the genetic relationship (this part is in the mid-20th century). More casually recreational encounters among her children, she's fine with if they're careful to avoid conceiving.
• Sibling criminals Stanley and Lucinda Clovis in Lawrence Sanders' The Timothy Files. To add to the squick, Stanley is married with two kids.
• Richard Slater and Sara Ffitch in Walking on Glass by Iain Banks.
• In War and Peace, there's a rumor that Anatole and Helène Kuragin/a have an incestuous relationship; their interactions lead most readers to come away believing these rumors, and many adaptations make it explicit. Given that the two are willing to sleep with anything that has a pulse, it's extremely possible.
• Warrior Cats: When the author was asked about parentage of some of the main characters, she said that Graystripe's parents were Patchpelt and Willowpelt, trying to keep it consistent with the family trees on the official site (which weren't by an Erin, not her choice to be put online, and not canon — but it was, after all, the official site, so she didn't want it to be 100% wrong). However, she forgot that in Bluestar's Prophecy, we see that Patchpelt and Willowpelt are brother and sister — they're both kits of Adderfang and Swiftbreeze, just in different litters. When that fact was pointed out to her, she decided that it would remain canon since it can actually happen with cats (and besides Graystripe's parents aren't actually mentioned in the books, so it's not like young readers would happen across that — it's only canon through Word of God.) Patchpelt being Graystripe's father was eventually retconned out, however.
• Francesca Lia Block's novel Wasteland explores how a relationship like this could even develop. Older brother Lex and sister Marina appear to be soulmates (their attraction apparently began as small children) and they are written as extremly sympathetic. When the relationship is finally consummated, the guilt drives Lex to suicide. And then it turns out he's adopted.}
• Thomas Mann's Wälsungenblut (Wälsung blood) in which a brother and sister have sex after watching a performance of Rheingold
• The Wayfarer Redemption features the Icarii, a race of winged humans, for whom anything goes any time after the start of puberty, so long as it's consensual and isn't between siblings or between parent and offspring (both of which are absolutely forbidden, to the point where even villains will describe it as "Unclean"). Unfortunately, the ruling SunSoar family has a curse - like calls to like for them, and siblings Caelum and RiverStar discover the hard way just how badly things can turn out. He kills her when she tells him she's pregnant with his child and frames her twin brother for the murder.
• Coira and Hadz in White as Snow are very likely half-siblings, but that's not going to stop Hadz from claiming her as his Persapheh.
• Philippa Gregory's Wideacre, complete with BDSM. Squick squick SQUICK. ...Or alternatively...
• Maria McCann's The Wilding, involves a Surprise Incest twist between a couple who are at least half-siblings and possibly full.
• Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship: Mignon's parents did not find out that they were siblings until after she was born; the discovery led to Mignon's mother's suicide and her father's madness.
• In the short story The Witcher the titular hero is hired to kill (or disenchant) a strigga - a monster that is the undead offspring of King Foltest and his sister Adda (who died in childbirth).
• Clark Ashton Smith's Vathek story The Story of the Princess Zulkais and the Prince Kalilah has the titular prince and princess. Born to an Emir of muslim Egypt whose latest wife dies in childbirth, these twin aristocrats had been treated with unholy sorcery at the Emir's request to give them great talent. Between these treatments, growing up isolated from their older half-sisters and being twins, the two develop a more than filial love for each other and join with the djinn lord Eblis so that they can have their forbidden love.
• A Discovery of Witches: Ysabeau reveals that her sire and his other male children raped and abused her to try to break her.

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