A Family Matter by Claire Lynch will be published in June in both England and America. (There is a giveaway on GoodReads, if you want to enter.) I expect it to be well-received. It is a beautiful, poignant, and pacific book with strong currents of pain, injustice, and joy beneath that carefully considered surface of Hemingway-esque prose. I look forward to Lynch’s future work and hope that she keeps her voice exactly the way it is. As for this book, the familiarity is almost startling, and yet the sympathy is a step removed. The style is almost poetry, but the most readable kind of poetry. It’s easy to slip into this book and you might even read it in a day.

Dawn is a young mother of a toddler in a quiet, cookie-cutter marriage in 1984 Windsor, England. When Hazel drops into her life, she can’t deny the excitement and attraction from the first meeting. In 2022, Heron has just received news that he has cancer, but the one thing he doesn’t want to do is tell his daughter, the one who visits almost daily. He also doesn’t want to tell her the other secrets he’s been keeping from her.

This is a short book at 219 pages of easily-readable, easily-comprehended text with lots of white space. Lynch’s style is brief, sparse, but extremely effective. She doesn’t need 300 or 400 pages to weave together the lives and times of four main characters. In fact, the beginning is a little slow and the end a little abrupt, but otherwise I would say the pacing is perfect. It reminded me of The Great Believers (Rebecca Makkai) or even Small Great Things (Jodi Picoult). For the record, Lynch’s writing is better and Makkai just takes longer to say things. (I loved Great Believers but not so much Small Great Things.) In all three, I was taken to a point in history where a minority was being systematically oppressed, and I learned so much while reading fiction. More importantly, I became incensed because I cared about these people. And since all three take place within my lifetime, it hurt a little to know it. (Great Believers is about the AIDS crisis in Chicago in the 80s, Small Great Things about neo-Natzi violence coupled with the believability of a Black woman in a professional setting, and A Family Matter is about lesbian motherhood/rights as parents over the past several decades).

But A Family Matter isn’t about things at all, in that sense. Even though Lynch came from a memoir and essays (this is her debut novel), this is very much a character-driven novel. It’s about these four people whose heads we dip effortlessly in and out of. We care about them (as Clare Chambers says on the cover, “…there were no heroes of villains…”) long before we even know what it is we’re dealing with here. Except a parent dealing with illness. That we know about right away.

It’s a calm, straight-forward read. I did see some of the twists coming, but for others I was on the edge of my seat. As I said before, though, it takes some time to get some traction. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to continue but let me assure you it gets more engaging as you go. By the meat of the middle, you will be engaged. There is a reviewer on GoodReads who said, “You feel like you’re floating among the characters’ lives. Or rewatching memories through a pensieve (ala Harry Potter)” (Megan). While bringing Harry Potter into this seems like a bad idea (it just has no similarities in any other way), I think the pensieve is a really great way to explain the feeling the reader has in this book. Like they are a witness, but not in the book. A ghost “floating” through, not immersed. It is Lynch’s writing style, and it’s probably what makes the brevity possible as well as what really makes this book special, makes her voice sparkle in its sparseness.

When I looked Lynch up and saw that she went to Oxford and is an English professor, it tracked so hard. Everything about this book is so precise, so intentional. And then when I saw that she had a memoir about motherhood and that she has a wife and three daughters, the rawness of the topics and simplicity of the prose clicked into place. Ah. Aha. It’s kind of like she’s saying things at a whisper, but the things she’s saying have so much emotion pushing behind them.

On consideration, I liked this book more than I thought I liked this book. It did start out slow. And I am not entirely happy with the ending. (It was abrupt? Too simple? Not far enough?) But I would definitely recommend it for summer reading, for any reading. It is short and goes down smooth. You will find lots of quotes (which unfortunately I can’t share with you because I have an ARC) and learn a lot. Unless you are heartless or extremely stubborn, you will sympathize, maybe empathize. (Oh, the horror! I believe in empathy, emphatically. This is a comment of the moment, but it’s 2025 and empathy is a bad word in some subcultures.) It is sorta literary fiction, sorta women’s fiction, and would be great for book clubs. Lynch is schooling us in how to write deeply and beautifully without getting all long-winded or purple prose. The blub on the cover says it best: “[It] is a heartbreaking and hopeful exploration of love and loss, intimacy and injustice, custody and care, and whether it is possible to heal from wounds of the past in the changed world of today.”

Note: I really appreciated the Author’s Note at the end, putting some of this fictional story into historical context.

Final note: If it’s not too late (it almost certainly is), the cup on the back cover is visually very confusing due to the light coming from the bottom, etc. I tested it out on a few people, and no one could figure out what they were looking at until I turned the book around and pointed.