Début novelist, Claire Lynch, has won the gold prize at the Nero Book Awards for A Family Matter, a novel that was inspired by the true stories of lesbian mothers who lost custody of their children in the 1980s due to their sexuality. The work spans from 1982 to the present day, revealing why a mother has disappeared from her daughter’s life.
The author said she was inspired to write the novel after discovering a statistic staying that up to 90% of lesbian women who were married to and had children with men in the 1980s later lost legal custody of their children in divorce cases. Lynch researched real cases, and used court transcripts and newspaper articles to build her novel. She told BBC Radio 4‘s Woman’s Hour that there was “pressure put upon families to say, the best thing to do in this situation is to remove this source of embarrassment and shame, to take this mother away from the family.
“The intention was, in the best-case scenario, the child would be very young, they would forget, and the family could sort of reform around the scar, if you like, and carry on as if that woman had never been there.”
Nick Hornby, chair of the judges, was one of three judges, alongside BBC journalist Reeta Chakrabarti, and novelist and TV drama Victoria’s creator Daisy Goodwin.
Hornby said: “We admired its wry humour, its deft storytelling, and its love for all its characters, even those who behave in ways we find hard to understand, and who make choices which we would regard as morally questionable.
“It is both readable and intelligent, and it offers hope and consolation.”
Lynch received the Nero Book Awards’ debut fiction accolade in February 2026, and has now been awarded the overall prize for the best book of 2025. A Family Matter is the first debut novel to win the overall prize at the Nero Book Awards since they began in 2024. Their predecessors, the Costa Book Awards, last gave the overall prize to a debut novelist in 2013.
