October 2, 2025, by Jessica Bamford for Dreamland Books 

Whenever I hit Anchorage city limits, I immediately tune my car radio to KOOL 97.3. This was the station my whole family listened to on Anchorage trips, and during my childhood, the station played Oldies – the hits of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Now they play mostly ‘80s music, but every once in a while a ‘90s song will creep in and then I feel affronted – “Hey! That’s not an Oldie!” (Of course, the ‘90s was thirty years ago now, and the songs of that decade are at least as old as the ‘60s songs were when I was growing up.) It’s a similar feeling to when I realize that books set during the ‘80s, ‘90s and even early 2000s could be considered by some as historical fiction.

The flipside of that is the shock I feel at realizing that the discriminatory social norms described in the book “A Family Matter” were routinely tearing families apart as recently as the early 1990s. 

This slim little heartbreaker of a novel (240 pages), written by Claire Lynch, opens in 2022 in the U.K. with Heron, an elderly man who has recently received a terminal diagnosis and must face telling his adult daughter, Maggie. This is complicated by the fact that Heron raised Maggie on his own, ever since her mother, Dawn, “abandoned” the family when Maggie was young. In a dual timeline, we flash back to 1982, and it becomes clear that Dawn’s abdication of her parental duties was anything but voluntary. During the 1970s and 1980s, family court judges in the U.K. regularly denied custody to mothers if they were outed as lesbians during divorce proceedings. 

Of course, the ramifications of these punitive rulings were far-reaching for the real-life families involved, and “A Family Matter,” while fiction, gives voice to the very real emotions of those who were impacted by these decisions. The writing is beautiful and thought-provoking, and while I would have enjoyed even more time with the characters, I am impressed that the author was able to pair such a high emotional impact with such a low page count!