I was filling in time before meeting a friend for an early supper  at The Palomar. When I’m in the Piccadilly area I always like to allow time to go into Waterstones. Housed in an Art Deco building, it’s the largest bookshop in Europe. It has a fantastic travel section in the basement, where you’ll also find a good cafe. But stepping into the ground floor from Piccadilly, it’s easy to get caught up in browsing the shelves and tables packed with enticing books. I was attracted to A Family Matter by the blurb on the back and seeing that it was shortlisted for the Nero Book Awards in 2025. It’s also quite a short book, almost a novella. It’s not that I’m averse to reading long books, but when I’m busy with my book publishing work, I like to have a short book to delve into for a quick fix of a good read. My work generally provides lots of good reads, but reading something I’ve picked up in a bookstore, chosen and paid for is a different kind of delight.

I’m always intrigued by family set-ups, how they work, different relationships. A Family Matter moves between two times: 1982 and 2022. It opens in the later time and Heron (really Henry but always known as Heron) finds out he has cancer and a limited time to live. He contemplates not only the reality of knowing he will soon meet death, but how his life will now be otherwise changed, and how it will be when he tells his daughter, Maggie. They talk on the phone daily, though Maggie is now a 43-year-old mother of two (Tom, 14, and Olivia, 8) and married to Conor, but for a long time it was just the two of them and the bond holds.

Then the narrative moves back 40 years to Dawn, Maggie’s mother. When Dawn meets Hazel, suddenly her dull and predictable life is filled with exciting possibilities … but there’s no way she can envisage just how this new friendship, this new love, will change her life so dramatically, and the price she’ll have to pay for straying from the ‘norm’ and ‘accepted’ of the 1980s.

Maggie can barely remember her mother. She was only three when Dawn went out of her life; a loss that was never explained to her; a loss that she’s never been able to discuss with her father. But when Heron starts sorting though years of papers and documents, trying to tidy his life before it’s too late, and Maggie helps him, she comes across papers that completely upend the life she’s known. She’s never been able to accept that her mother abandoned her, it’s affected her own mothering, how she is with her kids, how she tries to be everything she wishes she’d had from a mother. And now … now she sees how she’s been deceived and she and her father must negotiate a new path in their relationship before he dies.

Back in the 1980s it was almost impossible for a lesbian mother to gain custody of her child when a marriage to the child’s father ended. Claire Lynch details the law at the time in an Author’s Note at the end of the book and the details of how the mothers were viewed is shocking. There’s a lot to be shocked by in A Family Matter. There is grief, but love too. There is misunderstanding and there is confusion. Both Heron and Conor tell Maggie, they were different times. And indeed they were. But to what extent does this excuse Heron’s behaviour or indeed, Dawn’s – had she tried hard enough to keep contact with Maggie. It’s a complex story of strong emotions but it’s also beautifully written and I found myself completely caught up and could barely put the book down till I’d finished (so perhaps it was a good job it’s quite short!).