Family Matters: Claire Lynch & Roisín O'Donnell

New from Claire Lynch, A Family Matter (Vintage, 2025) is an emotionally charged novel about a mother following her heart, a father with the law on his side, and a child caught in the middle.

Set amid Dublin’s housing crisis, Roisín O'Donnell’s novel Nesting (Scribner, 2025) is a tense, unflinching story of a mother’s escape from domestic abuse and coercive control.

Join Claire and Roisín in conversation with author Jan Carson about these page-turning novels, tackling themes such as parental love, healing from the past and building a new life.

Claire Lynch is a graduate of the University of Oxford and has spent her career teaching in universities. She is the author of two academic books and several articles focussing on contemporary English and Irish writing. Claire’s personal essays have featured in The Washington Post and on BBC Radio 4. She is the author of a memoir, small: on motherhoods, (Brazen, 2021). Her debut novel, A Family Matter, will be published by Chatto & Windus in the UK and Scribner in the US in 2025. She lives in Windsor, England, with her wife and three daughters.

Roisin O’Donnell is an award-winning Irish author. She won the prize for Short Story of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards in 2018, and was shortlisted for the same prize in 2022. She is the author of the story collection Wild Quiet, which was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and shortlisted for the Kate O’Brien Award. Her short fiction has featured in The Stinging Fly, The Tangerine, The Irish Times and many other places. Other stories have been selected for major anthologies such as The Long Gaze Back, and have featured on RTÉ Radio. Nesting is her first novel.

Jan Carson is a writer based in Belfast. She has published three novels, three short story collections and two micro-fiction collections. Her novel The Fire Starters won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland 2019. Jan’s latest novel, The Raptures was published by Doubleday in early 2022 and was subsequently shortlisted for the An Post Irish Novel of the Year and Kerry Group Novel of the Year. Her short story collection Quickly, While They Still Have Horses was published by Doubleday (UK) in April 2024 and Scribner (US) in July 2024. Her writing has been aired on BBC Radio 3 and 4 and RTE. She is the Seamus Heaney Centre Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast 2025 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her first stage play, an adaptation of the children’s classic, The Velveteen Rabbit, was produced by Replay Theatre Company at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast in 2025. Her next novel, Few and Far Between, is forthcoming in early 2026.