Claire Lynch’s A Family Matter is set to be THE conversation-starting book club read of 2025. At once heart-breaking and hopeful, it asks how we might heal from the wounds of the past, and what we might learn from them. To celebrate publication, we’re delighted to share a powerful letter from Claire about the very real and recent history behind the fiction, and an extract from this unmissable debut.
An extract from A Family Matter
She arrives in Euston to wet-leaf pavements, to the darkness of a November afternoon which might as well be night. She plays the role of a woman looking in a bookshop window, hands deep in pockets, chin tucked into the hiding place of her mohair scarf. If she is seen here she will say, I was just window-shopping. I thought it was just a bookshop. A normal bookshop.
The sign on the glass door panel is turned to closed, but Dawn can see the light in the back room, yellow and glowing. The shapes of women, arranging chairs, passing mugs. Her reflection in the glass is strange, like a statue, like a ghost. She shakes her hair, this weather is a disaster for curls, she stands up straight. She has made an effort, best earrings, newish coat. Armour to keep her safe. Dawn watches the woman walk towards her through the darkness of the closed shop, turning the latch to open the door, letting in the air from the cold street. The woman, tall and smiling, who says, ‘Are you coming in?’ Before she leads Dawn gently by the elbow, past the shelves of other people’s stories.
The room at the back of the bookshop is small and the women sit knee to knee. The first time she joins them Dawn does not speak. She nods her head and holds her herbal tea close to her face, letting the steam warm her cheeks. She tries not to stare at the two women sitting opposite, the quiet way they hold hands, the way they look at each other. The woman beside Dawn is wearing suede boots, dark green, baggy at the ankle, the perfect heel. Dawn has seen them in the window of Russell & Bromley. Her name is Sue, she has two sons. She only went to court, she tells the group, to get the children away from her husband, who turned out to be the type to hold your hand to the kitchen table and use your forearm as an ashtray.
The other women listen, they let her talk, and Dawn wants them to be more surprised. She wants someone to call the police, someone to do something when Sue says, ‘His lawyers said we were dressing them up as girls. Putting ribbons in their hair. The judge didn’t want to hear a word of what he’d done to me.’
/
Dawn comes back to the group the next week and the next. She learns about the never-ending battles with social workers, the cost of solicitors’ letters. She listens to the women who strike deals with husbands, the ones who find a way to make it work. The ones who don’t.
In the gaps between, the women share other scraps of their lives. Melanie, whose son has got into the grammar school. Caroline, who has had her first driving lesson, after all these years. It is just like every other mothers’ group Dawn has been to. Tired women, doing their best. When she listens to them she can’t understand why the courts bother, why all this effort is being used up on these ordinary women. At the end of one evening, Dawn finds Sue stacking up the chairs and asks the question that has bothered her all this time, ‘What harm are they doing to anyone?’ Sue smiles at her, pauses to find the words to break it to this young woman, the world, and what it was really like. ‘They are terrified,’ she says to Dawn, ‘that’s what it is. Think about how it looks to them. Mothers, housewives, shacking up together. We’d bring the whole system down.’
/
A solicitor comes to the group one night, a serious woman in a dark blue suit. ‘There’s more chance of salvaging something,’ she says, ‘if you can prove to the court that you live alone. Persuade the judge it was a one-off, not a lifestyle.’ She admits an out-of-court settlement is usually safest. If you’re willing to play the good girl, you might get as much as every other weekend and half the school holidays, say. If you can persuade your girlfriend to disappear at regular intervals. If you can get your husband to sign up to it, that is.
‘And if he doesn’t?’ they ask.
/
On the bus home Dawn sits next to the window, folding her ticket into a tiny paper aeroplane. All the women in the support group have told her to avoid court if she can. If he’s a reasonable man they should try to come to a private arrangement. But it is already too late. The court date is set. Heron, naturally, wants to do it all by the book. Really, she thinks, he wants someone to blame for all this fuss. Deep down, Dawn knows, her story will be different. She’s sorry for these other women, she really is, but she will explain it all, make it clear. Her love for her daughter is a kind of scientific truth, solid and measurable, anyone can see that. When the women in the group read aloud from their judgments Dawn holds her breath as if warding off their bad luck. These judges who take it all so personally, standing as the last line of defence between innocent mothers and dangerous women who might seduce them in the supermarket. Nothing about being with Hazel feels like a bad influence to Dawn. It feels like electricity.
On brighter days Dawn knows that finding the group has helped, she knows now that she is not the only one. Still, it is a risk. ‘Don’t tell anyone you’ve been here,’ Sue tells her. ‘Not even your solicitor. It will make you seem political. They don’t like political.’ It wouldn’t matter anyway. Heron has sent someone to follow her, or the solicitor has. She’s seen a man, awkward and overdressed, some clerk probably from the office, trying to look like a normal person. She’s noticed him at bus stops and in the phone box near the flat. He must have watched her, surely, going into the bookshop each Thursday and afterwards, turning the key in Hazel’s front door, pulling the curtains. Dawn’s solicitor had warned her not to move in permanently. It might look, he had said, as if she has already made her choice. But where else did they think she could go? Her friends were Heron’s friends; they didn’t want to get involved. She’d tried to stand on her own two feet. When she went to fill in the forms to apply for a flat of her own the man at the council told her to go back to her husband.
/
It had taken a few minutes to make sense of it, that day on the doorstep. Her key sliding into the lock as it always had, in, but not turning. Stiff and useless. Heron and Maggie weren’t home, that much was clear. She’d looked through the window, and the letterbox, seen that Maggie’s coat and welly boots were missing from their place in the porch. The side gate was high but Dawn thought she might be able to climb it if she used the bin for a step up. And then what? A stone through the glass of the back door? Relying on the chance that the kitchen window had been left slightly ajar? The day was already starting, the street filling up with people who would have stopped to stare at a woman breaking into her own house. Dawn had looked around, for help, or witnesses, and seen only teenagers in blazers, men in suits, walking in long strides to the station, a sandwich and a paperback tucked in their coat pockets. It would only add to the scandal if the neighbours saw her battering down the door. Dawn could already feel them watching her, waiting to see what she might do, from the safety of their semi-detached lives. Dawn didn’t huff or puff. Instead, she locked herself inside the car and made a list on the back cover of the road map of Great Britain: all the places she could go, all the people who would understand her. There was only Hazel’s flat on the list. Only Hazel.
/
The journey back from the support group feels much longer than the journey there. Dawn walks from the bus stop and imagines herself, wills herself, already home. The flat will be warm, and Hazel will be there, standing at the hob, sipping at the edge of a wooden spoon to check if the dinner is ready. This is almost it, they say to each other, almost a life. They will get through this part then they will live. They will need to find a bigger place, of course, for the three of them. Space for Maggie’s toys, her little bed.
