Family Matters – 27 June 2025

“You know what it’s like. The usual desire to kill…” Miranda writes to her sister, reporting on another exasperating visit to their parents who live somewhere inaccessible in France with two cats, Juno and Hodge, permitted in the house, the Bad Cats who are not and the llamas, Lorenzo and Leonora, who sleep in the kitchen when it’s cold and gather by the tennis court when it isn’t to watch the family’s attempts on the dangerously uneven surface. Lack of glasses or functioning hips notwithstanding.

Prized possession at La Forgerie was once Boswell, the chest freezer which moved from England to France with them, along with its full contents. Leaving a single Sainsbury’s chicken thigh behind would have been wasteful and since the freezer was not opened during its ten-day relocation the food remained edible – food poisoning is a recent invention, Mum insists, handing her daughter an ancient tin of pâté, suitable for their lunch if rejected by the cats. Miranda and Charlotte kindly bought their parents a vertical freezer after years of Boswell’s broken lid being held in place by a breeze block and instructed the men delivering it to remove the yellowing monstrosity. They will never be forgiven the treachery.

The Usual Desire to Kill by Camilla Barnes is pitch-perfect, down to the last broken – or is it simply not switched on? – hearing aid. No one can make a cup of coffee without an explanation of precisely how they have erred. Apparently simple claims that, ‘It’s time to go,’ meet with Quine-inspired philosophical arguments about the verb to be. An unwanted piece of broccoli opens hostilities at dinner. Nothing about this is familiar, I am sure.

The novel is hilarious, touching and a faultless evocation of a family’s constant tussle between stubbornness and pedantry, batting well-rehearsed objections back and forth overlooked by llamas. There is a great plot too but I am really here for the lines about hand-wash only socks.

A Family Matter by Claire Lynch opens as Heron – yes, Heron – breaks with his usually rigid grocery shopping routine and climbs inside a supermarket freezer. He has just received bad news. The manic smiles of frozen potato faces keep him company until a woman searching for petit pois finds him instead and screams. The manager is very good about it. Retail offers varied experiences – one is prepared for everything.

Heron and his daughter Maggie speak on the phone every evening and pop into each other’s houses without needing or wishing for announcement. Their relationship is enviable, kind and ostensibly simple – he never visits without his toolbox, fixing things before Maggie and her husband notice they need it, and he dotes on his grandchildren.

But their contemporary story is interspersed with that of Maggie’s childhood when her mother Dawn met and fell in love with a woman, Hazel. Maggie knows only that her mother left them for someone else when she was young. The truth, of course, is far more complex. Lynch’s research into divorce cases in the eighties and the treatment of lesbian mothers drives a deeply moving novel. It is by turns angry and gentle, full of misunderstanding when people do speak and understanding in the silences.

Pretence, forgeries and family secrets fill the pages of The Original by Nell Stevens, not to mention the Victorian estate of the Inderwicks and the paintings therein.

Grace has grown up in her aunt and uncle’s house, a poor simulacrum of a home, unloved by all except her cousin Charles. In secret she has become a talented copyist, able to recreate the works of great artists and fool the rich who long to own them, though in life she struggles to recognise people, even those she has met often, and is thus an embarrassment to herself and the family.

When a man claiming to be Charles returns after years abroad, the household is divided about his identity while Grace begins to recognise something else in him. Fakes flourish and copies abound – of paintings, of painters, of love, family stories and the Victorian novel. It is great fun, especially when the reader too is duped.

A family matter and two originals combine in the dual biography of Gwen and Augustus John, Artists, Siblings, Visionaries by Judith Mackrell. Mackrell examines the siblings’ art – Augustus the more successful in life, Gwen the more accomplished though not afforded much admiration until after her death, including by her brother – but also their relationship, their characters and their extraordinary history leaving behind a poor and sad childhood in Tenby and finding remarkable acclaim.    

Sibling relationships are at the heart of Terrible Horses by Raymond Antrobus, illustrated by Ken Wilson-Max, a picture book about a brother who admires an elder sister and wants everything of hers to be his too. She does not share this wish. Or her belongings.

Meanwhile, in Running My Own Race by Abena Eyeson, a story for middle-grade readers and anyone learning about when to stand up for themselves, family expectations and hopes for academic success are heaped on Kofi. At his new private school he faces prejudice and rivalry. At home and in church he is told how lucky he is and what he ought to aim for. All he wants is to try out for the athletics team…

Do I take a risk sending this out a day before a family party? If you find me in the Co-op behind the ice lollies, shivering over a copy of Quine’s Word and Object, you’ll know the answer.

May your weekend be full of tennis-loving llamas,
Lizzie