In a powerful novel that weaves across generations, an English mother in 1982 falls in love with another woman and struggles to maintain a relationship with her daughter as her husband sues for custody. Alternating sections, however, are set 40 years later, and share the story of Heron, an elderly man who has just received news of a cancer diagnosis and struggles to tell his daughter, who is busy raising kids of her own.
The two threads are connected, but to say more would be to reveal spoilers. Know simply that author Claire Lynch’s spare, pitch-perfect prose masterfully illuminates her characters as they move through their lives, each seeking meaning, fulfillment, and connection, but hindered by family secrets, societal strictures, and injustice.
In the U.K. of the 1980s, about 90% of lesbian mothers who came out after starting their families within a different-sex marriage lost custody of their children, says Lynch in an Author’s Note. While the characters are fictional, she adds, the arguments used by the husband’s solicitor and the court about the mother’s “perversion” being a bad influence on her daughter are taken from real cases. woven into the book with devastating impact. As gut-wrenchingly awful as these arguments are, though, Lynch gives the husband nuance. He is not an evil man, but is doing what people in authority have told him he should do. That doesn’t excuse his actions, but shows how pervasive the roots of homophobia are, as they even ensnare this man who is not a zealot. In many ways, too, his unthinking compliance is equally horrifying.
Lynch explores big themes of bias, family, love, and loss, through the lives of rather ordinary people who are caught up in these larger currents. She manages to be both unflinching and compassionate as her characters face opportunities and obstacles that threaten to overwhelm them—and she somehow remarkably instills the book with a sense of hope, however bittersweet. The subject matter is difficult, but Lynch has crafted it into a perceptive and compelling read, making this novel very highly recommended.
All of the characters read as White.
