This instalment of Piglet Picks is selected by Amy from @inkwells_bookshelf
Some books may be short in length, but long in impact. A Family Matter is one of them.
Told across two timelines - 1982 and 2022 - Claire Lynch’s quiet but powerful debut explores the long shadows cast by decisions made in love, fear, and hope. It’s a beautifully written, deeply sensitive novel about family, identity, and the way choices echo through generations.
What struck me most was the emotional weight packed into so few pages. This isn’t a dramatic or showy story—it’s a rich and complex on what it means to live truthfully, and how the systems and expectations around us can quietly shape, and sometimes derail, the lives we imagine for ourselves.
“You will be so many people in your lifetime that you’ll look back one day and not even recognize some of the people you have been.”
At its heart are characters you’ll want to protect—each navigating grief, belonging, and the messy truths that make up real life. Lynch handles difficult themes with care and clarity, and her prose feels at once elegant and intimate.
It left me heart sore. Sad for everyone involved, really. And quietly furious too—especially when I realized, I hadn’t known about certain legal realities from the 1980s that shaped the course of the novel, a powerful author’s note at the end to really punctuate the importance of progress and how much as a society we stand to lose if that progress in equality is rolled back. It’s a reminder of how close in history injustice can sit, and how the personal and political are always entangled.
A Family Matter is a thoughtful, beautifully crafted novel that asks big questions with grace: What do we owe to the people we love? What do we owe to ourselves? And how do we carry both?
One for your bedside stack if you like your stories moving, layered, and lingering.
