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A Family Matter

A Novel

ebook
0 of 3 copies available
Wait time: About 11 weeks
0 of 3 copies available
Wait time: About 11 weeks
A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK AS FEATURED ON TODAY
  • A Most Anticipated Book of 2025: USA TODAY, Goodreads, and Today.com

    "This quietly heart-scorching novel took me one day to read, and I'll be thinking about it forever." —Barbara Kingsolver

    A young wife following her heart. A husband with the law on his side. Their daughter, caught in the middle. Forty years later, a family secret changes everything in this "perfect" (Elin Hilderbrand) debut novel.
    1982. Dawn is a young mother, still adjusting to life with her husband, when Hazel lights up her world like a torch in the dark. Theirs is the kind of connection that's impossible to resist, and suddenly life is more complicated, and more joyful, than Dawn ever expected. But she has responsibilities and commitments. She has a daughter.

    2022. Heron has just received news from his doctor that turns everything upside down. He's an older man, stuck in the habits of a quiet existence. Telling Maggie, his only child—the person around whom his life has revolved—seems impossible. Heron can't tell her about his diagnosis, just as he can't reveal all the other secrets he's been keeping from her for so many years.

    A Family Matter is a heartbreaking and hopeful exploration of love and loss, intimacy and injustice, custody and care, and whether it is possible to heal from the wounds of the past in the changed world of today.
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    • Accessibility

      The publisher provides the following statement about the accessibility of the EPUB file supplied to OverDrive. Experiences may vary across reading systems. After borrowing the book, you may download the EPUB files to read in another reading system.

      Summary

      A simple complexity publication with images and logos, converted to meet EPUB Accessibility specifications of WCAG-AA level. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images and logos, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order, structural navigation, and semantic structure. Blank pages from print have been removed in this ebook, with related page number spans set on the first following in-spine page. Certain front and back matter pages have been adjusted in the reading order sequence from print, with related page references reordered in the page-list order.

      Ways Of Reading

      • No information about appearance modifiability is available.

      • Not all of the content will be readable as read aloud speech or dynamic braille.

      • Has alternative text descriptions for images.

      Conformance

      • The publication contains a conformance statement that it meets the EPUB Accessibility and WCAG 2 Level AA standard.

      • This publication claims to meet EPUB Accessibility 1.1 WCAG 2.2 Level AA.

      Navigation

      • Table of contents to all chapters of the text via links.

      • Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation.

      Additional Information

      • Page breaks included

      • High contrast between text and background

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    • Reviews

      • Kirkus

        May 1, 2025
        Minds can change over time--but can hearts? Two stories unfold in British author Lynch's debut novel, a straightforward but searching story of family, love, and loss. Heron is a divorced older man who receives a terminal cancer diagnosis and reacts to the news by keeping to his regular routine of grocery shopping--until he deposits himself into the frozen food case of his local supermarket. After being hauled out of the freezer by market employees, Heron continues life in his usual way. He delays sharing his diagnosis with his adult daughter, Maggie, since some things are best "papered over." Interwoven with Heron's story is one from 40 years prior, when a young wife and mother, Dawn, encounters another young woman at a community jumble sale. The growing friendship between Dawn and newcomer Hazel leads to an "earthquake" when the women kiss and begin a physical relationship. That Dawn and Heron were once married is no secret, nor is the fact of their divorce. What is shrouded by years of silence, however, is the reason for Dawn's disappearance from the family's life. As Maggie slowly comes to grips with Heron's condition and helps sort through, literally, the accumulated paperwork and detritus of a life, she is also negotiating her own way though middle age, haunted by a vague feeling that there is more to life than endless chores. Recalling her now-ill father as the parent who stayed with her and raised her post-divorce, Maggie believes she's repaying a debt of love. Lynch subtly untangles the threads--completely severed by 2022--that tied Maggie, Heron, and Dawn together as a family in the 1980s and exposes the forces that cut those ties as she raises thoughtful and heartbreaking questions about what really is in a child's best interest. An affecting exploration of the shelf life of love.

        COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • Booklist

        May 1, 2025
        Heron, whose real name is Henry, has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Stoic, practical, and orderly, he cannot bring himself to tell this to his daughter, Maggie, who is married and has children of her own. He also cannot tell her how he has been divorced for longer than he has been married, and that his ex-wife, Dawn, was deeply in love with another woman. Mostly, he cannot bear to tell Maggie that her mother was taken from her by discriminatory lawyers, social workers, and judges, who saw Dawn's lesbianism as a perversion. In her poignant debut, Lynch explores themes of motherhood, midlife crises, and hiding one's honest self in the face of massive societal obstacles. She writes from several different characters' perspectives and time lines, giving the reader a beautiful story of the struggles families face. In the end, though this book's main conflict is a tragic one, this is a story of hope and healing from a talented writer.

        COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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    Languages

    • English

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