Claire Lynch's debut novel, A Family Matter, follows a family during two timelines, 40 years apart: one set in 2022, the other in 1982. It is spare and direct and filled with beauty. In many ways, this is a love story between a father and daughter, depicting the ways they try to protect each other, and the pain that comes of hiding the truth.

A Family Matter opens in July 2022, just after Heron's doctor has told him he has cancer. The aging man drives to his favorite supermarket and climbs into a waist-high chest freezer. "There are things he will have to do now," Heron thinks, lying there with the lid slightly open. "Things he will have to say. Admit." A woman in search of frozen petit pois discovers Heron and screams.

Much of the strength of Lynch's exquisite novel derives from what is unsaid--by her and by her characters. She posits a enigma with those thoughts of Heron's; readers learn that his 43-year-old daughter, Maggie, is his sun and moon. There are things he will have to "admit" to her. But when he speaks to Maggie that evening, Heron mentions neither the hospital nor the supermarket: "Some things are best papered over, Heron thinks. For now."

Maggie, married to her college sweetheart, Conor, has a full-time job, a 14-year-old son, Tom, and an eight-year-old daughter, Olivia. Lynch's astute observations capture the complexity of a person in a few sentences. Maggie thinks, "There ought to be more to life than washing machines and emails and remembering to put out the recycling on the right day. But life is also this. It is all of this." Through perceptions like these, Lynch draws a parallel between Maggie and the mother who left when Maggie was three.

The July 1982 timeline begins with 23-year-old Dawn, whom readers soon learn is Maggie's mother, at a church jumble, where she combs through tables of clothing and finds an Aran cardigan. There she meets Hazel, who appreciates her taste. Soon they are meeting up day after day, "a coincidence, Hazel claimed." "It was in August that Dawn realised it wasn't Hazel's haircut, or the things she talked about, that she liked. It was the way she changed the air as she moved through it." Dawn falls in love with Hazel.

Lynch lets small details through, little by little, as she steers the story with strength and elegance. She allows readers to see Heron, Dawn, Maggie, and their fierce love and loyalty in three dimensions, and the ways in which they are all constrained by society. Because there are things readers know before Maggie does, it brings an urgency to how Maggie will respond when she learns the truth.

There are no villains here--unless one counts time and place and society's reluctance to progress and to integrate the full range of humanity. Lynch lays bare the evolution of ideas and values in a wonderful conversation between Heron and Maggie's son: "Did you ever worry about the world?... When you were my age?" He asks Heron about war, politics, climate change. Heron "is forced to admit that, no, he didn't really. Not the climate change part anyway, which is exactly the point, he supposes." And in another conversation, Hazel asks Dawn, "You wanted to collect the set, the wedding, the house, the baby?" She replies, "I didn't know you were allowed not to."

Lynch paints a sharp picture of 1982 England, as Heron fears the court will take Maggie away if he doesn't divorce Dawn. He can't see any way to keep Dawn in Maggie's life and still keep Maggie. His lawyers warn that social services will make the decision for him: they'll take the child from Heron and Dawn because of her relationship with Hazel. And after Maggie learns the truth about her mother, Heron hopes "she must understand, that this was the difficult thing about life. The way things changed, became wrong over time, or revealed themselves to be."

Dawn and Heron grew up in a small town, knowing everyone, and everyone knowing them. What happens when everything you know is lost to you? Dawn, Heron, and Maggie all must live the answer to this question, each in their own way. Readers will find themselves catching their breath at the truth and beauty of many of Lynch's sentences. Through her characters, Lynch shows her audience that love between people may change or plateau or grow by leaps and bounds, but as long as they want to keep it, they will. After Maggie has told her children that their grandfather is dying, she looks at her family: "She cannot remember now if she imagined being a mother when she was a little girl, she could not, surely, have imagined anything like this. The oddness of being in love with people who become less and less known to you each year." Through these memorable characters, Lynch explores the possibilities of forgiveness and growth, both in individuals and in society.

A Family Matter is a gem of a novel, an appreciation of the small moments of connection that last a lifetime. --Jennifer M. Brown

Claire Lynch (photo: Neeq Serene)

Claire Lynch has a doctorate from the University of Oxford and has spent her career as a Professor of English. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post and on BBC Radio, and she is the author of the memoir Small: On Motherhoods (2021). Lynch lives in Windsor, England, with her wife and three daughters. A Family Matter, Lynch's debut novel, will be published by Scribner on June 3, 2025.

Was there one event or concept that served as the genesis for the book?

It started with two characters, Heron and Maggie, a father and daughter who are both incredibly close and extremely closed off all at once. I was interested too in the idea of anticipated grief, the knowledge that pain is on the horizon, while needing to carry on as usual in the meantime. I started out just writing about their dynamic, imagining all the small interactions between them, the habits that have formed over a lifetime. It was only when I started to really ask myself where Maggie's mother had gone that the rest of the story started to emerge.

We've all had that feeling of wanting to escape--to not face what lies ahead. But Heron does escape in the opening scene, at least for a few moments. How did you arrive at that particular escape route?

I secretly suspect that any parent who has wrangled a crying baby through a supermarket has let this idea cross their mind! It seems to me that most of us engage with the most profound moments of our lives in utterly mundane environments. We hear the worst news (and the best) in hospital corridors, in car parks, while sitting at our desks. It's absolutely central to Heron's character that, even when he gets bad news from the doctor, he still goes ahead with his weekly food shop. His moment of escape is really the ultimate refusal to deal with the news and its consequences. Nothing says, "No, not today thank you" quite like hiding in a freezer!

[This scene] establishes Heron's generally cautious personality by showing us his one moment of recklessness. It also allowed me to gently open up the idea that, despite what Maggie thinks, he doesn't always give her the full picture.

There's a related, earlier incident where Heron wanted to escape/freeze--during his divorce hearings, while sitting in the park on a lunch break.

I do see a connection between the two. In both, there's a powerlessness, or perhaps more accurately, a failure to recognise the power he does have. Both moments are an abdication of responsibility in a way, but they might more generously be seen as a freeze response to traumatic experiences. It's revealing that in both of these moments in the novel Heron defers to authority figures, a lawyer and a doctor. I think it's clear that Heron's sense of his place in these power structures has a huge impact on how he behaves.

What prompted you to structure the book this way, 40 years apart?

Give or take a few years, Maggie and I are the same age. I found that hugely useful in terms of shaping some of the practical details of her early childhood, what she likes to eat, or wear, the toys she plays with. The same is true of her as a mother. She's not a version of me in any way, but I do have some sympathy with her when she has to manage ferrying the children to endless sporting events at the same time as quietly managing an identity crisis!

As I started to research the history around these cases, I felt very keenly the shift in social attitudes, as well as the quite different legal realities, across that 40-year period. I thought a lot about how Maggie would have to make sense of this, not as something historical and distanced, but as personally relevant.

Certainly, Heron's prognosis creates a deadline which sets things in motion. I also took real care over the way the news comes out. After all, Heron doesn't actually broach the topic until Maggie finds out the truth on her own. It's left up to the reader to decide if he would have told her himself.

There was something lovely about knowing these characters at two different periods of the family's life. The trickier part was accounting for all the time we don't witness in between. Although people obviously change across that length of time, we had to recognise them all the way through. Heron, Maggie, and Dawn are all 40 years older between one part of the story and the next, but they are still themselves.

Even though readers know the truth of the circumstances surrounding her parents' divorce before Maggie does, you manage to create suspense surrounding how events will unfold.

I think the structure was very helpful on this front, allowing me to cut away from one time frame just as some new aspect is revealed to us. Perhaps this is an indication of my cowardice as a reader, but I really enjoy the kind of suspense where I know essentially what happened, but I can't yet imagine how or why. There's also something about letting readers come to an understanding in the same way Maggie does. There's a chance to mull over things as new information emerges. Time, even, to wonder what we might have done in the same circumstances.

All of your characters are fully formed, and you create readers' sympathy around each--even Heron, who could easily have come off as a villain. Can you say more about why it was important to evoke empathy for Heron?

It was really important to me that there wouldn't be a "bad guy" as such. If it's not too grandiose a claim, I wanted the novel to ask questions about the recent past, to remind us how quickly attitudes can change, in multiple directions. By his own present-day standards, Heron's earlier behaviour is rigid and based on prejudice. But taken in the context of the time and place, his decision is, frankly, unremarkable. He takes the advice of professionals, he acts according to the rules, written and otherwise. None of this is to excuse his actions, by any means. Quite the opposite really. Heron's discussion with Tom is so important because it might even be taken as a guiding principle in the book. It goes without saying that we are all shaped by the time and place in which we live--the point is that the time and the place don't remain constant. Ultimately, I think we have sympathy for Heron because he is able to recognise this, and because he is willing to respond and change. His actions in 1982 are, hard as it is for us to understand now, genuinely well-intentioned, even if the consequences are devastating.

You have a way of capturing a character in just a phrase or the barest observation. Do you write a draft and then pare back and pare back?

I have always been very cynical of writers saying that their characters "speak" to them so you can imagine how annoyed I am to find out that it's true! At the stage when I was most deeply involved in writing the novel, I absolutely felt that I knew them all, what they would think, how they spoke, in a way which was actually quite disarming. Sometimes phrases would come to me as I was driving and I would think, "Ah, yes, that's exactly what Conor would say if he was stuck in this traffic."

You're exactly right about the paring back. I had, for example, written quite a bit about Maggie's job, what she does, who she works with, what the office building is like, all of it. When I re-write and edit, it becomes clear which sections have served a purpose for me but don't now serve the novel. I cut them and hope readers are left with an understanding of how Maggie feels about work, where it fits into her hierarchy of many responsibilities, without being bogged down in a description of her co-workers. Again, to risk a cliché, those deleted layers are somehow still there, holding it all up. --Jennifer M. Brown