Father Material, published in June (2026), is the third book in Alexis Hall’s London Calling trilogy, and going in, I knew it would probably be the last time I got Luc and Oliver as the main event. Fake dating got them together in Boyfriend Material. A wedding that wasn’t tested them in Husband Material. Father Material asks the harder question: what do you do once you’ve already got the life you fought for?
Years into their relationship and thoroughly domestic, Luc and Oliver watch their friends hit milestone after milestone — careers, weddings, babies — while they adopt a dog named Spud and decide, almost by accident, that their hearts and their home have room for something more. That something turns out to be Jasmine, known as Jas, a teenager they take in as foster carers. It is, unmistakably, a book about what it takes to become a parent when biology was never going to be part of the plan.
READ MORE: My review of Boyfriend Material, the book that started it all
READ MORE: My review of Husband Material ahead of the release of Father Material
READ MORE: Rereading ‘10 Things That Never Happened’: the Christmas rom-com I think I’ll read every year
There’s something quietly perfect about Luc, of all people, ending up here. His own father, washed-up rock star Jon Fleming, was barely a presence across three books; Luc spent Boyfriend Material convinced he wasn’t worth loving because of it. Watching him choose, deliberately, to be the steady adult in someone else’s life — the thing he never really had — is the kind of full-circle ending this trilogy earned rather than one it simply reached for.
I loved having the chance to spend time with Luc and Oliver one more time, and I loved that Hall uses that time to show real growth — not just in each of them individually, but in how they operate as a couple. This is a trilogy that started with Luc barely able to admit he wanted to be loved and Oliver too buttoned-up to say he already did. Watching them figure out, together, how to be steady for someone else, after two whole books of learning how to be steady for each other, felt like the only place this story could have ended up.
Small spoiler ahead. Jas arrives as a sulky teenager with walls built up for good reason, and Hall doesn’t rush her past that. I’ve seen the comparison made online that Jas feels a lot like Ellery from Hall’s How to Bang a Billionaire — a similarity I loved the moment I read it, even if I can’t fully vouch for it myself. What I can vouch for is that Jas never feels like a plot device bolted on to give Luc and Oliver a reason to grow up. She feels like a whole person, which is exactly what a foster kid deserves from the book she’s in. Hall is careful to show parenthood in more than one shape here — not a replacement for the family Luc and Oliver might have had “the traditional way”, but its own real thing, with its own clashes and adjustments and unglamorous, fierce love.
And then there’s the joke that had me laughing out loud on a reread: Bridge, Luc’s best friend since book one, giving birth on an actual bridge. It’s such a small, daft, very Hall thing to do — the kind of literal pun he’s been sneaking into this series since he named Luc’s charity CRAPP — and it’s exactly the levity this book needs alongside everything it’s asking of its two leads.
Looking back across all three books, it’s a genuinely satisfying arc to have followed: a fake relationship that becomes real in Boyfriend Material, a wedding that has to fall apart to mean anything in Husband Material, and now a family that looks nothing like the one either of them grew up with, and works precisely because of that. Odile is still around, still chaotic, still one of my favourite characters in fiction; Bridge is still the best friend a disaster like Luc could ask for, bridge births and all.
I cried at the end, saying goodbye to these two. Six years after I first met them in a Sydney lockdown, watching Luc O’Donnell go from certified disaster to someone genuinely, quietly father material undid me a bit. I’m only half joking when I say I’m holding out hope for a future Grandfather Material somewhere down the line. In the meantime, I’m hoping Luc and Oliver turn up as a cameo somewhere in a future Material World book, the way Jonathan Forest did before he got his own. I’d take five pages. I’d take one.
Luc and Oliver forever.