When my mother left her first husband at the end of the 1950s, he demanded custody of their two children, aged four and six. She had abandoned the marital home and had an affair; he argued that she wasn’t a fit mother. At that time his argument was considered compelling. He won. It wouldn’t be melodramatic to say that not living with their mother cast a blight over the rest of my half-siblings’ lives. In time both of their own marriages ended in divorce, casting four more children adrift. (Children of divorce are more likely to divorce themselves, although how much likelier is debated.)

The more finger-pointing and blame there is in a separation, the worse it is for the children. Everybody has always known this and in 2022 the law finally caught up. Since then, the UK courts have allowed for no-fault divorce, in which neither party need win their freedom by accusing the other on (often concocted) grounds, such as cruelty or adultery. Where the children are to live is meant to be determined by the children’s best interests. But, as Lara Feigel demonstrates in this fascinating, groundbreaking and often heartbreaking book, best interests can be difficult to fix upon. As well as spending days in the family courts, Feigel has personal experience of how devastating and sometimes unjust custody decisions can be. When she and her husband split up after seventeen years, the courts decreed that her son should live in London with his father. Her (much younger) daughter would reside with her mother, at her new home in Oxfordshire. Was that truly best for the children?

Feigel has previously written (for BBC Radio 4’s Archive on 4) about Doris Lessing, a woman who wanted to be free to write more than she cared to look after her two older children. Throughout her long life, Lessing was vilified for this. For all that no-fault divorce is now