Reviewed by Asher Syed for Readers' Favorite

In Lizzie Mac’s Family Secrets, Ben, an American in Brussels who's preparing to relocate to England, meets Nina, a British woman who refuses to share her real name or the details of her work. Intrigued by a sense of recognition, they invent aliases and agree to exchange only limited facts while spending several charged days together across the city. Their conversations move from guarded banter to personal history, yet both remain bound by obligations neither will explain. When they discover they are booked on the same flight to London, the coincidence begins to feel deliberate. Unseen forces seem to be guiding their movements, and fragments of family history hover just out of reach. As private messages and long concealed connections begin to surface, Ben and Nina realize their meeting may not have been accidental, and that whatever brought them together has implications far beyond a fleeting encounter abroad.

Lizzie Mac’s Family Secrets examines how concealing the history of people, even from different continents, will reshape whole identities long after they're formed. Mac has written an extremely thoughtful novel with a lot of moving pieces. Yes, there are all those Clover family secrets, but they rest on the development of humanity. There's a heartbreaking hospital scene with Nina that seriously choked me up, and a public declaration that had me doing fist pumps. The points of view transition between Nina and Ben, so we are in each of their heads throughout. The writing is intelligent and immersive, especially as Mac gives us a little travelogue for an armchair adventure with the pair. The King Charles suite, with its sea view and separate sitting rooms, frames a private reckoning, whereas Juliette’s disordered French house is reflective of a family’s grief. For readers who love a family-centered novel that includes inheritance, secrecy, and romance, this is where to find it!