The debut novel by Claire Lynch, which won the Nero Gold prize for fiction last month, unfolds across two timelines as it tells of family secrets and a bitter divorce. The first is set in 2022, when Heron, an older man, gets a terminal cancer diagnosis. He seems to be coping well until he climbs into a freezer at his local supermarket and has to be coaxed out by staff. Heron likes his routine and prefers to keep to himself. But he is also a practical man and so he enlists his only daughter, Maggie, to help him go through his house and sort out any paperwork.
Maggie is close to her dad who raised her alone after her mother, Dawn, deserted the family – or so Maggie has been told. But while sifting through Heron’s papers, she learns the real reason for her mother’s estrangement. The second timeline unfolds in 1982, when young mum Dawn falls in love with a schoolteacher named Hazel. Family court judges took a dim view of homosexuality in the 1980s, working under the belief that children would be damaged by being raised by same-sex parents. And so a devastated Dawn is separated from three-year-old Maggie as Heron is given full custody after their divorce.
The actor Miranda Raison is the narrator who makes deft work of the book’s multiple voices. Lynch reads the author’s note, in which she explains how her story was inspired by the real-life lesbian mothers forcibly separated from their children in the 1980s. She also reflects on the period of change, in attitudes and legislation, that followed, which means that “parenting possibilities can now feature in the imagined futures of LGBTQ+ relationships”.
Available via Vintage Digital, 4hr 41min
Further listening
Even the Good Girls Will Cry
Melissa Auf der Maur, Atlantic Books, 13hr 27min
The former Hole and Smashing Pumpkins bassist looks back at her early life in Montreal, her adventures in 1990s grunge-rock and subsequent career as a songwriter and solo artist. Read by the author.
Homework
Geoff Dyer, Canongate, 10hr 46min
Actor Leighton Pugh narrates this dryly funny memoir about coming of age in England in the 1970s. Set in an end-of-terrace house in Cheltenham, Dyer’s account of his childhood is low in drama yet rich in observation and period detail.