A Family Matter
2025
Told across two timelines, 1982 and 2022, the novel centers on Heron, who receives a terminal cancer diagnosis and struggles to tell his adult daughter, Maggie, whom he raised largely on his own. As Heron and Maggie go through his belongings, she uncovers legal documents revealing the truth she was never told: that her mother, Dawn, lost custody of her decades earlier after falling in love with another woman, Hazel, at a time when British family courts routinely used a mother’s sexuality against her. The 1982 timeline traces Dawn and Heron’s marriage, Dawn’s relationship with Hazel, and the devastating custody battle that followed, while the 2022 thread follows Maggie reckoning with a childhood she now has to see completely differently, and eventually reconnecting with the mother she believed had abandoned her.
This was a fast, gripping read that I didn’t want to put down. Lynch handles heavy material, marriage, sexuality, custody, loss, and institutional injustice, with real emotional precision, and I found myself invested in Heron, Dawn, and Maggie in equal measure. By the end, I wanted more time with all three of them; more of the reconnection between Maggie and Dawn, more of Lynch’s writing in general. That’s a compliment: the book left me wanting to stay in these characters’ lives a little longer, and I found myself highlighting passages and still thinking about them well after I finished.
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