An admirable collection of stories, saturated with acerbic wit and startling empathy.
In Carson’s fifth collection of short stories, Northern Ireland is a place that protects and punishes in equal turn.
The unnamed protagonist of the title story has finally convinced his Spanish girlfriend, with whom he has a tense, confusing relationship, to visit his native Belfast. She has no interest in meeting his family or seeing the places he frequented growing up or even appeasing him. Carson has set this story in an alternate present in which animals seen as obsolete are culled or sent away; what Paola wants to see is the last horse in Britain. The narrator’s daydreams of how lovely it will be to share his hometown with his partner are quickly squashed after they arrive, but he still at one point feels “the gut-twist relief of belonging somewhere specific.” This feeling—at once soothing and nauseating—is present in each of these 16 stories as their characters confront upsetting or deeply frightening obstacles, some absurd, some starkly mundane. In “Grand So,” a couple struggles to keep their jam business afloat. Granda buys a used car for Granny and their granddaughter Ruth to drive around the province, handing out samples, even though “nobody wants to buy luxury jam. This is Northern Ireland. In the eighties. People have other things on their minds.” Ruth discovers that the ghost of the car’s previous owner—a large chain-smoking man she dubs the Backseat Man—is haunting it. Worse, her family is Protestant, and this man is clearly “the other sort of ghost.” “Caravan,” another standout, is told from the point of view of a young girl. Caroline is 10, “almost a grown-up,” and tired of kiddie stuff. Her father promises that if she can fix up the old caravan she and her sister play house in every summer, she can have it as her very own grown-up room. This story’s strengths are in its subtleties, especially its framing of the ways in which the vibrancy of girlhood can lurch, all of a sudden, into the bleak logic of adulthood.
An admirable collection of stories, saturated with acerbic wit and startling empathy.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781668056615
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.
And now for some lessons in poetry and typesetting.
After Lessons in Chemistry (2022), a debut that became one of the most popular books of recent years, Garmus applies her unique comic sensibility to the story of Batter Gray, a man named after a family dog of mythic talents. A poetry maven who was reading Auden as a fourth grader, he was raised by a type-designer mother and historian father who dearly hoped he would choose some more viable profession than poetry. But via an amazing stroke of luck, he lands a job after college at Peck & Peck, an illustrious literary journal located in a beautiful building in New York City. He’s at the very bottom of the complex and dysfunctional totem pole, making copies in the basement, struggling not to run afoul of the cantankerous editor-in-chief, Salton Peck, or his smarmy assistant, Dexter York, both of whom have taken an instant dislike to our hero (and can never get his name right. Few people can). And to be honest, Batter is not without his flaws. The novel bogs down a bit in the middle, with Salton constantly excoriating his staff in ALL CAPS and much ado over the possibility that submissions have been taken outside the building, which is forbidden. Along the way, many, many famous poets are name-checked, as are many typefaces, since Batter has been raised to instantly identify a font in the wild. The best example of this occurs during his brief sojourn in jail: “The thing I kind of admired about Motherfucker II, besides his manners, was this huge tattoo he had on his neck that read I will fuck you up in ITC Bolt. Call me my mother’s son, but whoever inked it nailed the kerning.” The narrative picks up steam toward the end, as bad guys become good guys, mysteries are solved, and Batter throws one hell of a party.
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781668251065
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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