chosen family by madeleine gray

the spectator 27 January 2026

Madeleine Gray’s first novel, Green Dot (2023), was a witty account of a messy office affair, whose fans included Nigella Lawson and Gillian Anderson. Her follow-up, Chosen Family, is an altogether more expansive book. She has described it as

the result of years of thinking obsessively about two things for a long time. First, why is it that every queer person I know (including me) has a story about having an intense friendship breakup in high school that years later they realise was probably their queer root? […] Two, why do more people not choose to have children with their platonic best friends? Surely raising a child with someone you trust implicitly and don’t have sex with makes more sense than the other way round?

The novel is set in Sydney and has a dual timeline, spanning 18 years between the schooldays of Eve and Nell and their becoming parents in adulthood. In 2006, Nell

This review originally appeared in the Spectator