What were the Ask Penguin team's favourite reads of last year?

Mine would be A Family Matter by Cla Lynch. Um, this one — I picked up not knowing anything about it and in the first couple of pages it's about uh a guy gets into a freezer at a supermarket and I was kind of hooked immediately. Um, but it's actually uh, you'll notice a theme in the books I recommend, quietly devastating, which is I really love to be kind of emotionally devastated by a book. It's about a young woman who discovers something about her sexuality, but she's already married and has a child. And it's about the uh reality of uh a lot of lesbian mothers back in the 60s, I believe. Um and how often they were separated from their children and didn't have rights. And it's uh based on a lot of real things. And there's a court scene where the lines are lifted directly from transcripts. And um — yeah, it was just a very uh emotional novel and it's really beautiful and it was another one that I really didn't feel like it was a debut. I couldn't believe it at the end. It just felt so accomplished. Yeah. So, I'll be keeping an eye out for more books from her for