Specifically I'm looking for a narrative history that will cover in broad strokes, how various powerful families in Europe came about leading to Dynasties we all learned about in school and beyond. In other terms, the collapse of the Roman Empire at roughly 400AD must have left a giant power vacuum throughout Europe. How was this filled. By about 1000AD or thereabouts there are established nations, Kingdoms, dynasties with different names and languages from those seen in Roman times. What is the narrative of that 600 year period.
Obviously the whole of Europe is a rather large subject - I wouldn't mind books with a bias towards England / the UK but Europe as a whole would be good too.
Thanks.
Chris Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 (2009) sounds like the book you are looking for. Wickham is an excellent historian and his breadth of knowledge really shines in this book, it's not often that you can find a medievalist just as comfortable talking about Anglo-Saxon England as the Abbasid caliphate! It was also written for the general public, so it's a very engaging read. In case you are interested in church history as well, Peter Brown's The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000 (2003/2013) is a great introduction to that topic and covers the same time period. For books with a narrower chronological focus, I recommend Guy Halsall's Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376–568 (2005) and Peter Sarris' Empires of Faith: The Fall of Rome to the Rise of Islam, 500-700 (2011). Both are more detailed, but they are written by two experts in their respective fields, well worth a read if you want to know a bit more than Wickham's overview. Robin Fleming's Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070 (2010) is a wonderful and up-to-date survey of early English history, but does not approach it through a straightforward narrative, so it might be a bit harder to get into - I'm not sure what would be a good alternative though, so you might have to wait for someone else to recommend a book on early medieval England :)