Book Title: No Matter What
Author: Cara Bastone
Publisher: Dial Press/Headline
Publishing Date: March 2026
In contemporary fiction that leans toward the romance genre, what often sets a story apart is its ability to elevate familiar tropes without making them feel reductive. No Matter What by Cara Bastone does exactly that. It takes well-worn themes — a marriage in turmoil, the ache of miscommunication, and the tender thread of found family — and renders them with startling authenticity. Nothing here feels performative or convenient; every emotional beat feels earned, rooted in how people truly move through grief, love, and repair.
Don’t start at the beginning; it’s no fun!
Bastone’s writing carries a kind of quiet self-awareness, a balance between emotional gravity and restraint that’s rare in this genre. She writes about heavy themes with an almost instinctive sense of rhythm, knowing precisely when to allow a moment of levity to keep the story from collapsing under its own weight. No Matter What follows Roz, her husband Vin, and his brother Raffi (who is also Roz’s best friend) in the aftermath of a devastating accident that has ruptured their lives in visible and invisible ways. Bastone begins not at the origin of their pain but in the thick of it, trusting the reader to excavate the backstory slowly, to piece together the emotional archaeology of what’s been lost.
“Is now a good time to mention that my husband has been leaving me in increments (first the far side of the bed, then the guest room, and now, apparently, his own apartment) and I’m not taking it well?”
It’s a bold narrative choice that mirrors the experience of living through trauma itself: the truth doesn’t arrive all at once; it’s revealed in fragments, through pauses, gestures, and memory. This is where we begin the story. Roz and Vin’s marriage is quietly crumbling. One morning, she finds the lease papers he’s left behind — a wordless declaration that he’s moving out. Whatever fragile hope she’d been holding onto for repair is abruptly, almost cruelly, taken from her. Their interactions are laced with friction, the kind that comes from saying too little and feeling too much. To make things even more complicated, they’ve decided to keep their separation from Raffi — who, as someone also affected by the accident, carries his own invisible wounds. In this silence between the three of them, we begin to see how differently people learn to carry pain.
“He was trying like hell to guess what I wanted and provide it for me.”
This ain’t a miscommunication trope, baby
What Bastone offers in this story, and that merits attention for how warmly she intertwines this, is a deeply humane portrayal of the ways we communicate when language fails us. This may not be obvious immediately, but while there’s a noticeable absence of words in Roz and Vin’s exchanges, there’s no lack of communication. They reach for whatever remnants of connection they can… gestures, routines, shared spaces, the echo of nostalgia. Communication here doesn’t always look like conversation; sometimes it looks like cooking, sometimes like running errands, or accompanying your spouse for a culinary drop-off.
“I could have endured anything, baby, if I knew it was going to get me here.”
These are the saving graces of shared history — and perhaps, of a shared future. Roz’s decision to join a figure drawing class becomes one of those quiet gestures too: a way to externalise what she can’t yet name, to translate grief into form. Whether that act redeems or merely reveals is for the reader to discover, but it’s one of the novel’s most tender through-lines.
“What would it be like to have the chutzpah to just start a new life? To be someone who goes to drawing class on Friday nights with a roomful of strangers? What would it be like to be brave enough to even wonder about life without Vin?”
As the story unfolds, we see that Vin, Roz, and Raffi are all learning how to live with repressed emotions made suddenly visible: how to make sense of a world reordered by catastrophe. When life delivers an event so monumental, we instinctively divide time into “before” and “after.” The real work, Bastone seems to suggest, lies in understanding that the person who existed before isn’t erased by what happened, but transformed by it. Healing, then, becomes an act of integration — not of forgetting or moving on, but of absorbing what broke you into who you are now, and finding a way to keep loving despite the fracture.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an Advanced Review Copy (ARC). All opinions are my own.