Practically Different Generations / Literature

• Acid Row:
  • It's mentioned that the generations in the Patterson family are all over the place, as they tend to continuously have lots of children and the women tend to start having children very young. Gaynor Patterson's great-grandmother was born five years after her eldest brother died in World War One; she also gave birth to ten children. Gaynor herself has a four-year-old son - her youngest child - who is a six months younger than her four-year-old granddaughter Rosie, and about fifteen years younger than her eldest child Melanie (who was fourteen when she had Rosie). Rosie's maternal uncle Colin is fourteen and could easily be her older brother.
  • Laura Biddulph's older sister explains to the police that she and their brother are much older than Laura; their younger sister was unexpectedly born when their mother was forty-eight, with Laura being eighteen years younger than her sister and sixteen years younger than her brother. Laura's sister explains that their father doted on Laura as The Baby of the Bunch (much more so than her siblings), so she grew up rather spoilt while his wife and older children were pushed aside. Because of the age gap, Laura's sister says she isn't close to Laura, regarding her more as "a distant cousin". The sister also admits she was once jealous of Laura, but not anymore after her disastrous marriage to Martin Rogerson.
• Adachi and Shimamura has Akira Hino, youngest of the Hino siblings. Her brothers are much older than her, and she mentions in Volume 9 that the oldest was practically an adult when she was born.
• Adrian Mole:
  • When Adrian is 15, he gains two new half-siblings (Brett and Rosie) as the result of his parents each having an affair. While waiting for his mother to give birth in hospital, a nurse mistakes him for the baby's father.
  • Adrian's own children count as well. Glenn, who was born after a brief relationship Adrian had in his teens, is 10 years older than William and around 17-18 years older than Gracie.
  • In the second book, 15 year old Adrian befriends Barry Kent who is the same age as Adrian and in his class at school. Barry, who has a large family, is mentioned to have baby/toddler-aged siblings at home.
• In Animorphs, Elfangor was an aristh (cadet) in the Andalite military by the time his brother Aximili was conceived. Thanks to time travel shenanigans, Ax is roughly the same age as Elfangor's son.
• Many, many examples can be found in the various American Girls Collection series, though often justified due to the time period.
  • Kaya's younger brothers Wing Feather and Sparrow are four "winters" old, and, although her age is not explicitly stated her older sister Brown Deer is described as being "old enough for courtship."
  • Felicity is slightly more than 10 years older than her youngest sister, Polly. Her other sister, Nan, is three years younger than Felicity, and their brother William is three years younger than Nan, giving the Merriman children a fairly consistent age gap.
  • Josefina, the youngest of four sisters, already has two young nephews at the beginning of her story - the sons of her oldest sister Ana, who is twenty and married.
  • Kirsten has a baby sister, Britta, born just before her tenth birthday, and an older brother, Lars, who's at least 15 around the same time.
  • Addy has an older brother, Sam, and a younger sister, Esther. By the time the whole family is free and reunited, Sam is seventeen and Esther is two.
  • Appeared to be averted (at first) by Samantha Parkington and Nellie O'Malley; Samantha is an orphaned only child and Nellie has two younger sisters, Bridget and Jenny, who are around 2 and 3 years younger than her. However, Cornelia's twin sisters, Agnes and Agatha, are around the same age as Samantha and Nellie and her youngest sister Alice is only three years old, making her young enough to be Cornelia's child. Then by the end of Samantha's central series they're all living under one roof with Samantha's Uncle Gard and Aunt Cornelia, who adopt the O'Malley girls and become the legal guardians of Samantha, effectively making them all sisters—and the mystery books set afterwards have Gard and Cornelia have a son named William, who's about 12 years younger than Samantha and Nellie.
  • Maryellen's family possibly takes the cake here - her oldest sibling, Joan, is 17 (and marries during the story), and her youngest sibling, Mikey, is "almost 2." She also has a fourteen-year-old sister, a six-year-old sister, and a four-year-old brother.
  • Melody's oldest sister, Yvonne, is roughly ten years older than her.
  • Courtney's stepsister, Tina, is eleven years older than the two's half-brother, Rafi.
  • Nicki has twin sisters born during the course of her story, making her ten years older than them.
  • Luciana's family adopts her little sister when she's twelve.
  • Corrine and Gwynn are ten (and seven) years older than their half-brother, Blix.
• Artemis Fowl has Butler and his younger sister Juliet, professional bodyguards with an age gap of at least twenty years, which only serves to exacerbate Butler's Big Brother Instinct.
• Ascendance of a Bookworm: Later in the story, the protagonist is being passed off as a nobleman's youngest daughter. When this happens, the protagonist is eight years old and pretending to be seven. She gains three brothers in the form of the nobleman's actual children, the oldest of whom is eighteen years old and winds up guarding her on several of her subsequent adventures because he's among the few people who know that they actually aren't siblings.
• In Ask Amy Green, Amy's mother is 20 years older than her younger sister Clover. Clover is 17, and only 4 years older than her niece Amy.
• In the later installments of the Aurora Teagarden Mysteries, 36-year-old Aurora becomes the legal guardian of her 16-year-old half-brother Philip, after their mutual deadbeat father abandons him. His disappearance and Aurora's attempts to find him is the main conflict of the 10th book All the Little Liars.
• Jane Austen employed this trope on occasion since it was Truth in Television for the time period when couples tended to marry comparatively young, have many children, and lose some as infants or small children.
  • In Pride and Prejudice, Darcy has a Promotion to Parent for his sister Georgiana after their parents die. He is twenty-eight and she is sixteen at the end of the novel, giving them a twelve-year age difference. Also Charlotte Lucas is twenty-seven and the oldest of Sir William and Lady Lucas's many children; we don't know how old the others are (except for Maria, who is apparently around the same age as Kitty Bennet), but the youngest are implied to be under ten.
  • In Mansfield Park, protagonist Fanny Price's eldest sibling is 19-year-old William and the youngest is 5-year-old Betsey. The other eight Price children are between them in age.
  • In Northanger Abbey, the eldest of the Morland siblings, James, is in his early 20s, while the youngest, Harriet, is only 4 years old. 17-year-old Catherine, the book's heroine, is in the upper middle of the age range.
  • In Sense and Sensibility, the youngest Dashwood child Margaret is thirteen years old. John, her older half-brother, doesn't have his exact age given; but he's older than Elinor, who is stated to be 19 when the story begins, and is married with a child who is not many years younger than Margaret.
  • In Emma, Frank Churchill is 23 years old when his half-sister Anna Weston is born. His mother was Mr. Weston's first wife, and Anna's mother is Mr. Weston's second wife.
  • In the unfinished Sanditon, the eldest Parker is 35-year-old Tom and the youngest is 21-year-old Arthur, and the heroine Charlotte Heywood is 22 years old while her oldest brother is 31. We might have met more of the Heywoods' fourteen children had Jane Austen not died.
• Kristy's family in The Babysitters Club has this. In the first book, her oldest brother Charlie is sixteen and her youngest brother David Michael is six. Later, when Charlie is seventeen, their mother remarries and they gain stepsiblings who are even younger than David Michael, and then their mother and stepfather adopt a baby girl.
  • 11-year-old Jessi is a decade older than her one-year-old brother Squirt.
  • In the spin-off series California Diaries, Dawn's father and stepmother have a new baby, who is 14 years younger than Dawn and 11 years younger than Jeff.
• In the novel Bad Girl by Margaret Clark, Ruth discovers she is adopted and has a large number of siblings, including a brother ten years younger than she.
• Inverted in the Brother Cadfael series, in which young Edwin Gurney and Edwy Bellecote are uncle and nephew respectively, yet look and behave just like brothers.
• A Brother's Price: The setting makes up for the rarity of men via a form of Exotic Extended Marriage in which a man marries all the sisters of a family. This can easily result in women who are old enough to get married while their youngest sisters are still children or even yet to be born.
• The Camp Half-Blood Series: Because these series focus on the children of gods, all of the protagonists have this — for example, one of Percy's half-brothers is Theseus, who died millennia before he was born. On the more mundane side of this, his mortal mom and stepdad have a daughter, Estelle, late in the series, when Percy is 17.
• Confessions of Georgia Nicolson series: Georgia is 12 years older than her sister Libby. At the start of the books, Georgia is 14 and Libby is two.
• In Crescent City, Bryce is half-Fae. She's 25, while her half-brother, Ruhn, is 75 but looks much closer in age. Also Played With in the second book, as her human mom and stepdad adopt a twelve-year-old.
• A Christmas Carol:
  • When the Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge a vision of his former fiancée Belle with her children and husband, the youngest of her children is just a baby, while the eldest daughter is a young woman around the same age that Belle was when she and Scrooge were engaged, who looks so much like her mother that Scrooge thinks she is Belle at first.
  • This is implied to be the case with Bob and Mrs. Cratchit's six children too. The eldest, Martha, must be at least in her teens, since she works as a milliner's apprentice and apparently lives at her workplace, only coming home to her family for the holidays. Meanwhile, the youngest is Tiny Tim, still small enough to ride on his father's shoulder.
• Daddy's Little Girl: Ellie is thirteen years older than her half-brother Teddy, who is the product of her father's second marriage. Ellie is 30 and established in her career during the main events of the story, while Teddy is 17 and still in high school. Ellie has never met Teddy at the start of the novel, though it's more because of her estrangement from her father than the age-gap. Andrea would've been around twenty years older than Teddy if she was still alive, though Ellie wonders if Teddy would even exist if Andrea hadn't died (as it was her death that triggered her parents' divorce).
• In Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Greg Heffley is 12, while his brothers Manny and Rodrick are 3 and 16 respectively. Manny gets treated differently by their parents because he's the youngest.
• In the backstory of the Dollanganger Series, as revealed in the prequel novel Garden of Shadows, Malcolm Foxworth's father Garland married a 19-year-old girl, Alicia, and had a second son, Christopher. By the time Christopher was born, Malcolm and his wife Olivia already had two sons of their own. The family tree became a tangled mess from there.
• In Dune:
  • Glossu Rabban was over 60 while his brother Feyd-Rautha was 19. The prequels establish that the Bene Gesserit slipped their parents' fertility drugs to ensure Feyd's birth for their Super Breeding Program.
  • Less extreme example with Paul Atreides, who is 16 years older than his sister Alia.
• Earth's Children:
  • Joharran is indicated to be much older than his youngest half-siblings Thonolan and Folara; he was already considered an adult when his mother mated Thonolan and Folara's father and when Folara is having First Rites to become a woman (making her a teenager), Joharran is mated with a young child. It's complicated by the fact people in the setting are often considered adults at a younger age than most modern societies, ^note  Jondalar is considered unusual for still being unmated and having no children at 18 although this still puts at least a decade between Joharran and Thonolan, and more than a decade between Joharran and Folara.
  • Lanoga is ten-years-old in The Shelters of Stone and her youngest sibling Lorala is only a baby. Consequently, Lanoga takes it upon herself to care for her infant sister, as well as her other siblings (given their parents are extremely neglectful). However, while she is a decade older she's still a child herself and so struggles to provide Lorala with the care she needs until Ayla steps in.
• At fourteen, Enola Holmes is twenty years younger than her older brother Sherlock and twenty-seven years younger than Mycroft. Because of their large age gap, Sherlock and Mycroft would rather ship her Off to Boarding School than act as parental or even brotherly figures. It also leads to suspicions that Sherlock and Mycroft's father might not have been Enola's father.
• The Fault in Our Stars: 17-year-old Augustus has two sisters, a pair of twins who are 11 years older than him. Both of them are married with children of their own. (They are Adapted Out of The Film of the Book.)
• Frankenstein: Victor Frankenstein is a man in his twenties, while his younger brother William is only 6 years old. When the Creature learns that William's surname is "Frankenstein," he mistakenly assumes that William is his creator's son, and this is why he kills him.
• In The Great Opposition, Sima is born after an unplanned pregnancy when her sister Lyudmila is nineteen and her brother Georgy fifteen. As a result, she has never been close to either, and at the start of the novel, when she is still at school, Lyudmila is already married and living separately and Georgy is living and working half a continent away.
• Harry Potter: There are seven Weasley siblings, so naturally there is a case of this. The eldest, Bill, is ten years older than Ginny, the youngest. Bill went to Hogwarts a year after Ginny was born. At the start of the series, Bill and Charlie, the two oldest, have graduated from Hogwarts and are leading separate lives; Harry (and the reader) doesn't even meet them until the fourth book.
• In The Heartstrikers, Bethesda has had ten clutches over the course of a thousand years, starting when she was a hundred years old (fairly early for a dragoness to lay eggs). As a result, protagonist Julius has brothers and sisters centuries old while he's in his twenties. While Chelsie's F-clutch were all laid at the same time, the youngest failed to hatch; she kept the egg alive through sheer force of will, and Felicity was ultimately born six hundred years after her brothers and sisters.
• I Know What You Did Last Summer:
  • Elsa and Helen Rivers are young women (late teens to early 20s) with siblings who are still small children.
  • Collingsworth Wilson and his sister Megan are young adults with a younger half-brother David Gregg, who was six when he was run over a year before.
• In InCryptid, Angela and Martin Baker adopted three children: Evelyn (born and adopted 1965), Drew (born 1981, adopted 1983), and Sarah (born 1990, adopted 1999). By the time Sarah was adopted, Evelyn already had three children of her own (born 1987, 1990, and 1993)^note who were there when Angela and Martin found Sarah, so Sarah calls them her cousins even though she's technically their aunt.
• Judge Dee: In The Chinese Maze Murders, a dead governor left behind two sons from different marriages, one of whom is forty when the story begins, while the other is twelve. The older son accused his half-brother of being illegitimate, but this is a lie and they are in fact related. The age gap between the sons is actually a plot point. The father realized that his older son had a criminal disposition and would likely be caught and executed or sent to prison one day, so he remarried a younger woman mainly to have another son to continue his line in case his dark predictions about his firstborn son came true. They do.
• The obscure young adult novel Sister of the Quints has this as its basic premise. Fifteen-year-old Natalie's father and his second wife become the parents of quintuplets Alice, Beth, Craig, Drew, and Emma. The whole novel is about how she is consistently overlooked in favor of the babies, to the point where her father even forgets her birthday because it's so close to theirs.
• In Mary, Bloody Mary, Mary is seventeen when her half-sister Elizabeth is born; she's later forced to become Elizabeth's nursemaid. Mary tries not to resent Elizabeth for this, knowing she's innocent in the matter, and feels sorry for Elizabeth when she's also declared illegitimate. Mary finds it hard to believe her adorable three-year-old sister could one day become her enemy as a rival to the throne, but sadly notes in the end that this indeed came to pass. This is at least partly Truth in Television; Mary was born in 1516 and Elizabeth was born in 1533, and Mary did come to view Elizabeth as a threat.
• In The Mists of Avalon, Vivian, Igraine and Morgause share a mother, but Vivian is about twenty years older than Igraine and says that she was twenty-six when Morgause was born. Meanwhile Taleisin, father of the latter two, has another daughter, Niniane, in his old age; she would have been born when Igraine's daughter Morgaine was a teenager.
• Moribito: Traveler of the Indigo Road reveals that Tugum is three while his surviving half-brother, Chagum, is fifteen. Their deceased half-brother, Sagum, would have been seventeen if he'd survived the ending of Guardian of the Spirit.
• The ending of Nighttime Is My Time reveals that Jean and Mark now have a son, who just turned a year old. He's around twenty-one years younger than his older half-sister Meredith, who was born when Jean was only eighteen. Meredith adores her younger brother though she has little time for babysitting as she's about to pursue a military career. Becoming a mother again later in life and in more stable circumstances gives Jean a chance to finally raise one of her children, which she missed out on with Meredith (who she gave up for adoption) even though she's involved in her life now.
• In Number the Stars, Lise was eleven years older than Annemarie and sixteen years older than Kirsti. She was engaged to Peter before she died, so if she'd lived, Lise would've gotten married when Kirsti was only a toddler.
• On the Street Where You Live:
  • Emily Graham mentions that her two brothers are ten and twelve years older than her and they jokingly call her "the afterthought", implying she was the result of an unplanned pregnancy.
  • Richard Carter's daughter Margaret - from his second marriage - was born in 1900, over twenty years after his son Douglas was born; he'd died by an apparent suicide several years earlier (with Richard's first wife dying a few years after their son's death).
• Pirates of the Caribbean: Legends of the Brothers Court: Sri Sumbhajee is about fifty and it's mentioned that he has several brothers, but all but two of them failed to show him "proper respect" and are now dead. One of the survivors is also middle-aged, but the other (a half-brother) is only seven.
• In The Princess Diaries series, Mia is a high school student when her mother gives birth to her little half-brother Rocky. She learns of her royal status around the same time as the birth of her little half-sister Olivia.
• In Ramona Quimby, the title character is 4-5 years younger than her older sister, Beezus, and is about 8 years old when her younger sister, Roberta, is born. This makes Beezus about 13 when Roberta came along — and a good thing too, as she's old enough to help her mother (who is working full-time) take care of Roberta, and is excited by the prospect of doing so.
• In The Red Tent, some of Tabea's half-siblings have children of their own. There is also another one on the way.
• In one chapter of Fazil Iskander's Sandro of Chegem, a mule brought to the funeral of the local Dirty Old Man (one who went Out with a Bang at that) notes how ridiculous it is that the deceased one's son from his latest wife is being watched by the man's granddaughter who is thrice his age.
• In the sequels to Sarah, Plain and Tall, former Mail-Order Bride Sarah and her husband Jacob have two children together, Cassie and Jack, in addition to Jacob's two children by his deceased first wife, Anna and Caleb. In the final book in the series, ''Grandfather's Dance," Anna is a young woman about to be married, while Cassie is nine years old and Jack is a toddler.
• Serge Storms:
  • In Atomic Lobster, Rachael is exactly a decade younger than her only confirmed sibling (the Ambiguous Syntax of her comment that she once had "a sister in Tampa" could indicate a larger family), a sister who she is implied to have looked up to before the other woman's death.
  • In Mermaid Confidential, Mercado Benzappa, an Affably Evil cartel member, is 7-12 years younger than his only brother AJ (Mercado was in high school when AJ turned 25), who Mercado looks up to. Mercado mentions that they have at least three sisters, all between them in age.
• A Series of Unfortunate Events: Violet and Klaus are fourteen and twelve years older than Sunny, respectively.
• The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants: Tibby's younger siblings Nicky and Katherine are thirteen and fourteen years younger than her.
• In Helen Dunmore's The Siege and its sequel The Betrayal, Anna Levin is 17 years older then her brother Kolya. She had a Promotion to Parent for him, as their mother died during his birth.
• Skulduggery Pleasant: Stephanie Edgely (better known by her Taken Name Valkyrie Cain) is 16 when her younger sister Alice is born partway through the series.
  • Skulduggery Pleasant was born in 1580 as the second of ten children, with his older sibling Carver Gallant born in 1573, seven years before him, and his youngest sibling Respair Kempt born in 1602, twenty-two years after him.
• Dean Ray Koontz's Shattered: Courtney is 24, while her younger brother Colin is 11. Both Courtney and her husband Alex become the legal guardians of Colin after the death of their parents.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Walder Frey is a peevish old man who keeps getting new young wives, with no plan of stopping even in his nineties. As a result, he has children from his later marriages younger than great-grandchildren from his early marriages. There's enough of an age difference that his great-grandson "Black" Walder Frey, who has a habit of sleeping with his relatives' wives, is rumored to be the real father of the children Walder had with his seventh wife.
  • House Targaryen provide several examples:
    • Both Jaehaerys the Conciliator and his sister-wife, the Good Queen Alysanne, were over a decade younger than their older sister, Rhaena. They were in turn over fifteen years older than their half-siblings, Boremund and Jocelyn Baratheon. Jocelyn later married her nephew, Jaehaerys and Alysanne's eldest surviving son, who was only one year younger than her.
    • Jaehaerys and Alysanne had thirteen children within a period of twenty eight years. The oldest to survive to adulthood, Aemon, was twelve when his fourth younger sister, Saera, was born, and twenty five when the youngest sister, Gael, was born. At the time of her birth, Gael had seven living siblings who were a decade older, and top it off, she was younger than her niece Rhaenys and nephew Viserys (the future Viserys I).
    • Rhaenyra Targaryen was ten years older than her eldest half-brother Aegon II Targaryen, and over a decade older than her other half-siblings; she was seventeen when her youngest half-sibling Daeron was born and she gave birth to her eldest child Jacaerys Velaryon that same year, with the two boys sharing a wet nurse in an attempt to foster a friendship between them. This likely played a part in Rhaenyra's lack of closeness with her half-siblings (and vice versa), with the animosity between Rhaenyra and her stepmother Alicent Hightower only worsening matters.
    • Rhaenyra's own sons Jacaerys, Lucerys and Joffrey, and her second husband Daemon Targaryen's twin daughters Baela and Rhaena, were all over a decade older than their half-sister Visenya (Daemon and Rhaenyra's son Aegon III Targaryen was a borderline case, being nine years older), though unfortunately Visenya was stillborn. As was typical for highborn girls at the time, Rhaenyra was married off and began having children in her late teens, partly explaining the age gap.
    • Aegon IV "The Unworthy" Targaryen was made to marry his sister Naerys as a teenager in keeping with family tradition, but Really Gets Around into his forties. His heir (unless you believe certain rumors) Daeron and youngest bastard Shiera Seastar are at least over 20 years apart in age, and some of his Great Bastards are in the same age group as Daeron's sons (Daeron's eldest son Baelor is the same age as the eldest of the Great Bastards Daemon Blackfyre while Daeron's youngest son Maekar is one year older than another of Aegon's bastards Brynden Rivers). Even if the count is limited only to Aegon's legitimate children, Daeron's younger sister Daenerys (not the one in the main series, an earlier Daenerys) is 19 years his junior.
    • Aerys II Targaryen had Prince Rhaegar as a teenager, and his youngest daughter Daenerys was born shortly after his death. This is because Queen Rhaella experienced a series of stillbirths and miscarriages after giving birth to Rhaegar, with only her last two children Viserys and Daenerys surviving to adulthood. Rhaegar already had infant children at this point, meaning that if Rhaenys and Aegon had survived the sack of King's Landing, they'd be older than their aunt Dany. Indeed, in A Dance with Dragons, the person who claims himself to be the long-believed-to-be-dead Prince Aegon is eager to marry Daenerys once he takes the throne. Incest aside, they are part of the same generation. Daenerys also muses to herself at one point that if Aegon had survived she might have married him, as he'd be closer to her age than Viserys, whom she'd assumed she'd marry for most of her life.
  • The current generation of House Stark. Oldest brothers Robb and Jon^note not twins, but paternal half-brothers who are only a few months apart are eleven years older than their youngest brother Rickon. Robb winds up given a Promotion to Parent when their father Ned goes south to become Hand of the King.
  • The Baratheon brothers. King Robert and his middle brother Stannis are in their mid-thirties and only a couple years apart, but their youngest brother Renly is in his early twenties.
  • Doran Martell is stated to be about 10 years older than his younger brother Oberyn; two brothers died as infants while they also had a sister named Elia who's two years older than Oberyn and was murdered along with her children Rhaenys and Aegon (see above). This also applies to Doran and Oberyn's children; Doran's eldest child Arianne is 11 years older than her youngest brother Trystane while Oberyn's children are much more varied; four of his daughters are adults with the eldest nearing 30 while his four younger daughters born from his paramour Ellaria Sand are between the ages of 14 and 7.
  • This might be the case with the Daynes; Arthur and Ashara are contemporaries of Ned Stark, Robert Baratheon, and Rhaegar Targaryen, but their sister Allyria is betrothed to Beric Dondarrion, a man nearly 20 years Arthur's junior.
• The Shadowhunter Chronicles:
  • Helen and Mark Blackthorn are 16 and 14 years older than their youngest brother, Octavian. However, since Mark doesn't age the entire time he is in Faerie, he is physically only 9 years older than Tavvy.
  • Tessa Gray gives birth to a baby girl, Mina, in 2013. Tessa, who is immortal, previously gave birth in 1886 (James Herondale) and 1887 (Lucie Herondale). The same year Mina is born, James's great-great-grandson, Jace, turns 22 years old.
  • When Sona Carstairs gives birth to her third child, Zachary, she already had a 19-year-old son, Alastair, and a 17-year-old daughter, Cordelia.
  • Charlotte Fairchild and Henry Branwell conceive two sons, Charles and Matthew, who are 7 years apart, but they have trouble conceiving afterwards. It's only after Charles and Matthew have turned 24 and 17, respectively, that Charlotte manages to get pregnant with twins, though it's unknown if she will carry them to term.
• In The Squire's Tales, Morgan le Fay is only one year older than her nephew, Gawain, so Morgause must be quite a bit older. It's unclear where King Arthur fits in, but he's probably closer to Morgan's age.
  • Dinadan and Tristram are brothers with a thirteen-year age difference. Tristram has already been gone for eight years when eighteen-year-old Dinadan leaves home.
• The Stormlight Archive: Kaladin, who is roughly 21, returns to his hometown in Oathbringer and learns that in the years he's been away his parents have had another child, a little boy whom he estimates is about a year old.
• In Straight by Dick Francis, Derek Franklin is over twenty years younger than his brother Grevile and was born after their parents retired and gave up the lifestyle Grevile was raised in.
  [B]y the time I was born, he was away at university, building a life of his own. By the time I was six, he had married, by the time I was ten, he'd divorced.
• Teenage Worrier:
  • Letty is ten years older than Benjy and their other brother, Ashley, is thirteen years older than Benjy.
  • Aggy is the same age as Letty (15) and has multiple siblings under the age of five, at least one of whom is still a baby.
  • In Love Fifteen (also by Ros Asquith), 15-year-old Amy has four or five-year-old twin sisters. By the end of the book Amy has been through a Teen Pregnancy and had twins of her own, who would be only a few years younger than their aunts.
• Third Time Lucky: And Other Stories of the Most Powerful Wizard in the World: In "And Who Is Joah?" Joah is a thirteen year old girl, with her half-brother Zayd at least twice her age.
• Halfway through This Is Not a Werewolf Story, Tuffman claims that he's Raul's great-uncle, the much-younger brother of his grandmother; supposedly, she died when Raul's mom was still a kid, leaving twenty-year-old Tuffman to raise her. Later revelations imply that this story probably isn't true, however, unless Raul's grandmother was also hundreds of years old.
• Played With in Tolkien's Legendarium: since elves are immortal, "generation" doesn't have the same connotation.
  • For example, there's a 111-year age difference between Arwen and her older brothers, the twins Elladan and Elrohir.
  • Narrowly averted with Túrin Turambar and his sister Nienor in The Children of Húrin. By the time Nienor was born, Túrin was nine years old and had left home for his own safety after their home of Dor-lómin was taken.
• At the conclusion of the Colleen McCullough novel The Touch, Nell Kinross finds it highly amusing that her new baby brother and sister are 24 years younger than she is. This is due to her mother having been an Absurdly Youthful Mother (she had her at 17), paired with a mid-life pregnancy.
• In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Francie and Neeley are fourteen and thirteen years old when their sister Laurie is born. Their parents were seventeen and nineteen when they married and eighteen/nineteen and nineteen/twenty when they were born.
• The Twilight Saga: The adopted Cullen siblings all appear to be in their late teens, but some of them actually have decades between them. This is justified by them being vampires who were turned at different times. Jasper was born in 1844 and turned in 1863, Edward was born in 1901 and turned in 1918, Alice was born in 1901 and turned in 1920, Rosalie was born in 1915 and turned in 1933, and Emmett was born in 1915 and turned in 1935. There are 71 years between the 'eldest' Jasper and the 'youngest' Emmett.
  • A straighter example would be Aro and Didyme: he was turned into a vampire in his mid-twenties, and waited about fifteen more years to turn his sister, who had just reached adulthood.
• In The Vampire Diaries Elena Gilbert is seventeen years old at the start of the series while her sister Margaret is around four years old, making Elena thirteen years older. Margaret isn't as affected by their parents' deaths as Elena because she only a year old at the time and gets along better with their aunt Judith, who is raising them. Elena's protectiveness of her little sister is one of the early signs that she's more of a Lovable Alpha Bitch deep down. Due to her young age, Margaret also readily accepts Elena's claims that she's a guardian angel after Elena dies and is in fact resurrected as a vampire; Elena had been forced to reveal herself to save Margaret from her aggressive kitten, who was actually a shapeshifted Katherine.
• Several examples from Warrior Cats; justified given that the characters are cats, who don't actually go through menopause and can have kits at any point in their lives, in addition to having much shorter childhoods compared to their overall lifespan than humans have. Even siblings with a "normal" age gap but not in the same litter often have adult siblings when they are born, due to, as mentioned above, being cats:
  • There's Leopardfoot and Patchpelt with their siblings Redtail, Willowpelt, and Spottedleaf, who are all younger than Leopardfoot's son and are still fairly young warriors when Patchpelt had retired to be an elder.
  • There is the gap between the first and second litters of Sorreltail and Brackenfur's kits and especially Cloudtail and Brightheart's kits (Whitewing was already a fairly senior warrior when full-grown children of her own by the time her siblings were born).
  • Yellowfang and her siblings are an especially extreme example - Yellowfang already has an adult child and is considered elderly when her siblings are born.
• In The Wildflowers, Cat discovers she has a half-sister who was already an adult and married when Cat was born. It turns out that her half-sister is actually her adoptive mother Geraldine, who was pressured into adopting Cat to cover up the fact that Geraldine's mother had an affair with her brother-in-law.
• Jacqueline Wilson's novels sometimes feature this trope:
  • In Cookie, this is implied to be the case with Beauty and her three older half-brothers, Gerry Junior, Mark and Ryan, who are from her father's previous marriages; Beauty's mother is much younger than Gerry's ex-wives and Gerry himself (she having only just left high school when they got together). Beauty is still in primary school, indicated to be around ten or eleven (her birthday is featured in the plot, though it's not mentioned how old she is) and mentions having attended Gerry Junior's wedding a few years back. Beauty likes the idea of being part of a big family but barely knows her brothers, both because of the age-gap and because they're not especially close to their father.
  • In The Diamond Girls, there's a big age gap between the Diamond sisters and their newest sibling Sundance, whom their mother unexpectedly got pregnant with. Dixie, previously the youngest in the family, is still ten years older than Sundance; the eldest, Martine, is sixteen years older and is later revealed to be having a baby herself, meaning Sundance will have a niece or nephew who is around the same age. Dixie also finds out her father and his wife recently had another baby, making her ten years older than her other half-sibling too.
  • In My Sister Jodie, it's eventually revealed Sharon is pregnant with her third child; Pearl found her pregnancy test earlier in the story and thought it was her sister Jodie's at first. Pearl is eleven years older than her new sister May. Jodie would've been fourteen years older...if she'd lived to meet her; she tragically dies near the end of the novel and Pearl takes it upon herself to look after May the way Jodie did for her and ensure that she knows who Jodie was.
  • In Secrets, Treasure's mother has younger siblings who are closer to Treasure's age (she's about eleven). Treasure's aunt Loretta is only four years older than her at fifteen, Treasure's uncle Willie is still in school, and her aunt Patsy is even younger than her.
  • Common in Wilson's books set in the Victorian era: Diamond/Ellen-Jane, Clover Moon, and Lucy in The Runaway Girls are all around 10-11 years old with newborn baby siblings. Justified due to the time period.

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