I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
A Family Matter by Claire Lynch is a quiet yet powerful novel that explores identity, queerness, and the ripple effects of familial choices over time. Set against the backdrop of 1990s Britain—a time when LGBTQ+ rights were still heavily restricted—it weaves together the stories of a family through complex personal and political histories.
The novel primarily follows Dawn, whose life and decisions remain largely unseen until later in the book. And her daughter, Maggie, exploring herself within her own family set up. Their connection isn't fully revealed until the final chapter, but the emotional build-up to that moment is delicately handled.
I really enjoyed the deep character exploration of Maggie and Dawn—their emotional landscapes felt authentic and raw. That said, I found myself wanting more from Heron and Hazel’s perspectives, which felt underdeveloped in comparison. The pacing was a little slow in places, and there isn’t a strong plot drive, but it’s in the quiet moments that the story really shines—capturing the weight of secrets, identity, and the desire for connection.
This book gently but thoughtfully explores LGBTQ+ issues, motherhood, and the emotional residue of silence and societal shame. A poignant and reflective read.

The tactful, tasteful and exquisite unveiling of this multi-layered and multi-faceted story is a joy. Based on the social mores of the 1980s, which have changed by the 2020s, the breakdown of a marriage, the custodial battle for a much-loved child is handled with empathy and rendered from each character’s experience. A heart-breaking and powerful exploration of judgement, the judiciary, society, which offers hope – it is never too late to bond.

We start with the fairly mundane interactions of Heron and his adult daughter Maggie, interspersed with the ordinary life of Dawn with her young daughter and husband. Each story is set in its own time, Heron and Maggie in 2022 and Dawn in 1982. Then Dawn meets Hazel and her life changes, she finds love and in finding that she loses something precious her daughter.
As the story unfolds, it takes an unexpected turn. This is haunting story of how relationships were harmed and how lives have now changed for the better. An engaging story really well written. My thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the arc.

This was an amazing book that was heartbreaking and shone light on a difficult time
Period and something I was.nt at all aware of. Just beautiful

A slow burn of a book that isn't actually that much of a slow burn, if that makes sense? The writing is gorgeous, and the characters amazingly well fleshed out for such a short book. The last couple of chapters are a tour de force, and much of the writing contained within them punched me in the chest.

The book is divided into two timelines - one takes place in 1982 and the other in 2022. With the 'historical' timeline taking place just three years before I was born, it was actually heart breaking and shocking how Dawn was treated in court during the custody hearing. To then read the author's notes at the end and learn the questions she was asked weren't sensationalised but were taken from real life court proceedings was....chilling.

There's so much in this book about family, the way we treat and see other members of our family and the love. The chapter set on Christmas Day 2022 is just so startlingly accurate in its depiction of the multi-generational celebration.

One of the paragraphs that got me:

“Just before I fall asleep, I kiss the inside of my left wrist, on the hidden place beneath my watch, just where you always kiss it. I’m sure there must be some trace of your lips that stays there. Will you pay in some deposits when I see you on Wednesday? I need you to leave one hundred kisses on my wrist so I can cash them in when we’re apart.”

Thank you to Vintage/NetGalley for the ARC.

A quiet, tender little book.

Set from 3 perspectives over 2 time periods, we have present-day Heron, who has just discovered he has cancer. We have Maggie, his daughter, who grew up with him as a single parents. Then in the alternative timeline we have Dawn and Hazel, in 1982.

When Dawn and Hazel they have an instant connection, but Dawn has a family - Heron and Maggie - at home.

What follows is a story of love and injustice and families and change. A sad but hopeful story to show us how far we’ve come, but a sad reflection on where we were not too long along.

I really enjoyed this. It’s short and subtle but I loved the three narratives especially the parallels of Maggie’s home life.

4 stars.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book.

I really enjoyed this book from the moment I started it. Whilst there are duel timelines it is not complicated to follow along with each timeline and you do not get confused.

The theme of the book was sensitively but thorough explored. Despite working in family law myself as I was not aware of the harrowing decisions made by lesbian mothers in the 80's as they were told to what was right.

A beautiful, immersive but heart breaking tale. Both my daughter and myself were deeply affected by this book and could not stop talking about it. I'm so glad that I read it. This must win awards.

A woman with a young daughter discovers she is in love with another woman and decides to leave home. At that time lesbian mothers were ostracised by the courts and so custody was given to the father and the mother told not to contact them.
This is the story of the repercussions of this decision and how it affected the young girls life.
An interesting storyline

Incredibly well-written, this book is about the secrets that people keep between them, and what happens when they come out.
What I loved about this was how tenderly and in depth every character was explored. None of the characters made the 'correct' decisions, but the way Lynch writes allows their humanity and conflict to shine through.
If you like literary fiction that focuses on family and emotional conflict, this may be one for you.

Claire Lynch’s debut novel, A Family Matter, is a luminous exploration of love, loss, and the enduring impact of secrets. Spanning two timelines—1982 and 2022—the narrative intricately weaves the lives of Heron, a reticent father grappling with a terminal diagnosis, and Dawn, a young mother navigating the complexities of forbidden love. Lynch’s prose is both spare and evocative, capturing the nuances of familial bonds and the societal constraints that shape them. 

The dual narratives unfold with a delicate tension, revealing the profound ways in which past choices reverberate through generations. Heron’s struggle to communicate with his daughter, Maggie, is portrayed with heartbreaking authenticity, while Dawn’s journey offers a poignant commentary on the sacrifices imposed by societal expectations. Lynch’s ability to delve into the inner lives of her characters, rendering them with empathy and depth, is truly remarkable. 

This novel is not just a story about a family; it’s a meditation on the human condition, the weight of unspoken truths, and the possibility of redemption. A Family Matter is a compelling and emotionally resonant read that will linger in your thoughts long after the final page.

Split between two timelines (1982 and 2022) the novel centres on Maggie and the people in her life.

I definitely preferred the 80s timeline but it was a bit slow for my taste (it’s a short book but it took me a while to get through) but that’s just personal preference, i’m sure lots of people who love a character driven reflective novel will love this.

I adored this book.

I found the characters to be very well rounded and believable. The characters of Dawn and Hazel (and Heron) were written so perfectly for the time period of the 80s. The portrayal of attitudes of this time were so heartbreaking but so accurate.

The more recent timeline was very well written and I could feel Maggie’s heartbreak firstly at thinking her mother had abandoned her, and then when she finds out her father has lied to her almost all her life.

My only criticism of this book is I’d have like it to have been longer. I’d have liked to have seen how Heron reacted to Maggie finding her mother and how Dawn and Hazel’s life had worked out the way it had.

Overall a fabulous story and one I will happily recommend.

This book is an emotional roller coaster. Spanning 40 years between 1982 and 2022 and starts with an elderly gentleman called Heron and his daughter Maggie. This book is based on facts from the 80’s regarding parental rights. It is when Heron s diagnosed with cancer and starts to clear out years of stuff and paper debris from his past. Events take a new turn when Maggie finds details about her mother in these papers.
Beautifully written and eye opening to look at the law from 40 years ago. 09/10

Oh wow! What a beautiful book. It totally broke my heart! It’s not a long one, at little over 200 pages but it packs an absolute punch and it is one of those books that makes you sit back and realise how much prejudice existed not that long ago (it is set in the UK so I’m commenting on the UK as I know sadly prejudices continue to exist in many places) and what a huge impact that had on so many lives.

The novel is told across two timelines: 1982 and forty years later. In the early timeline we meet Dawn who adores her baby girl Maggie and Dawn’s husband Heron. Dawn has grown up in the town she was born in and did what she believed was the thing to do in life: get married, have a baby and make a home. But when she meets Hazel her life is turned upside down.

Forty years later, we see Maggie again, this time as a grown up mother herself with two children and Heron very much in her life. Father and daughter, a strong unit, even now that Maggie has her own family. Maggie genuinely believes her mother didn’t love her and left her and her Dad without a backward glance. But when Heron is diagnosed with a terminal illness and they start to clear out some of the things he’s accumulated over the years, a box of documents Maggie comes across turns her world upside down. Nothing is as Maggie understood and the truth comes rushing up to the surface.

This is a stunning novel full of emotion. It is heartbreaking and it is beautiful. It is also full of hope and shows us how things can change, how we can learn from the past and that it is never too late to understand, to forgive or to heal. I hugely recommend this short novel which you can easily devour in an afternoon but one that will stay with you for much longer!

When Dawn falls in love with a woman, she and her husband Heron divorce. The choices they make affect their daughter in big and small ways forty years later.

This book unfolds a quiet reflection on how one set of choices echo through a family across two time periods - the early 1980s as Dawn and Heron divorce, and the 2020s when Heron is diagnosed with cancer and his daughter Maggie discovers the truth about what happened when she was a child.

I enjoyed the hushed tone of the book - this kind of story could be told quite melodramatically, and I appreciated the choice to make this a family of people who love each other and want to understand. I also thought the choice to set the first part of the story in the 1980s worked really well and highlighted how different things were even then.

I felt the end was a bit abrupt, but perhaps appropriate to the story - is it ever really over? Or does it keep going through Maggie and her children and theirs?

I'd recommend for people interested in a reflective, literary, and family-centric take on queer social history.

In 2022, Heron, an elderly man, receives a devastating diagnosis but struggles to tell his daughter Maggie, burdened by years of unspoken truths. In 1982, Dawn, a young mother feeling trapped by societal norms, finds unexpected joy and complexity when she forms a deep bond with a woman named Hazel. Both timelines revolve around Maggie, as the people who love her wrestle with how much of themselves to reveal.

A Family Matter is a tender and moving debut that I really enjoyed. The novel progresses pretty slowly, which was a welcome change compared to a few books I’ve read recently! The novel is at once immersive, beautiful, and real. I’m excited to see what Lynch does next.

This book was very good and very well written. The two timelines worked very well together to highlight the huge difference in society today and not so long ago in the 80s. It covered many topics such as legalities surrounding parenting as part of the LGBTQ community, sexuality, grief, parenting in general and how challenging it can be in all aspects. As a parent myself I very much resonated with this. The writing was beautiful. highly recommend if you like moving character driven stories that feel important.

Thank you Chatto & Windus for this ARC for review!

Claire Lynch has crafted a devastatingly striking story unfolding in the domestic lives of the married Heron and Dawn and their daughter Maggie. In 1982, where Dawn meets Hazel, who awakens the lively and passionate version of herself that had felt out of reach for Dawn up until then, and Heron makes decisions that he thinks a good man, the right man would make, Maggie’s life is shaped by forces out of her control. In 2022, Maggie finds herself in a life tugged at by domestic pulls, just like her mother, when a life-altering diagnosis for Heron reveals how they really came to be father and daughter against the world back in 1983. Can the tear that broke across them then be bridged 40 years later?

This book gripped me instantly. The characters were relatable and so realistically unexpected, flawed, illogical and at one point even a little absurd – they make sense. Not in the way a math problem might make sense once solved, but in the way a real person and all their feelings, thoughts and experiences just make sense when you sit down and listen. There were so many decisions made in this story that I really did not agree with but they made sense to me. And that is Claire Lynch writing her characters and really meeting them with empathy and compassion and a fierce devotion to telling their story justly.

I am also a big fan of writing that is easy to read, conveying things straightforwardly, yet finds a way to incorporate beautiful and intricate, almost poetic descriptions of the everyday, such as:

“She keeps close to the tables, reaching out to touch sleeves and hems, the fabrics and patterns of other people’s memories.”

Or

“Something she had always known, as deep and bright as bone.”

It is like eating a Ben and Jerry’s, fully enjoying each spoonful of delicious ice cream, and every spoon or other you get that little nugget of cookie dough that just is the cherry on top of that deliciousness. That is how I would describe Lynch’s writing.

The story had me on the edge of my seat, keen to keep turning the page and find out what happened next. At the end, there is one scene I really wanted to see play out (to avoid spoilers, I will not give details) and we do not get to see it, time jumps and we are in the ‘afterward’ of that scene. And I realised that that is how the book works, we never see Heron get his diagnosis for example – what we do see is not the moments we’d anticipate to be the most emotionally laden but the ones that are affected by those emotions, the moments after the ‘big moment’, the seemingly calm domesticity for Heron, the feeling of something missing, both for Dawn and for Maggie, the conversations and interactions that play out between all of them. And that is what I love about this book – Claire Lynch has such a grasp on that moment after. The ones you usually never see in movies, where the film cuts to black after and that is what it all built to, that is when it ends. But really, life goes on and it is a question often unanswered – how does it go on? And for me, that is the interesting bit. That is life – the days seemingly untouched but underneath it all, so impacted by these catalytic moments, so shaped by them – maybe even unbeknownst to the protagonists. And that is exactly what happens to people, the days keep coming, there is no cut to black, there is just the next day, and the next, and the next, until there isn’t.

While this sounds massively depressing, the end is actually quite uplifting (although still heartbreaking) and I really resonate with the description of this book: heartbreaking and hopeful.

I believe this will be a good book for those who enjoy short chapters, intergenerational exploration of family and how it is shaped, historical fiction and are looking for something to touch them, deeply, and fill them with both a sense of loss of what is in the past, and a sense of hope for what is to come now, afterward.

This book is an exploration of family, identity, and the enduring impact of secrets. The book follows two timelines—1982 and 2022—following the lives of Dawn, a young mother navigating unexpected emotions, and Heron, an aging father grappling with a life-altering diagnosis and long-held truths.  
I enjoyed the character driven narratives that thoughtfully address the intersections of personal and societal challenges, A Family Matter offers a compelling and emotionally resonant experience.