A heartfelt tale of a quest to find meaning in art in a commercial world.
In Rashid’s novel, a young man tours Europe after graduate school as he struggles to choose a path forward.
After finishing his master’s degree in art history at the University of Oxford in 2012, Amir Rahim, originally from California, sets off on a tour of Europe to stave off his anxiety about his future plans—or, rather, his lack thereof. Starting in Milan, he stays in hostels and cheap hotels, spending his days wandering various cities, touring museums, and dining with other tourists he meets. He feels increasingly alienated from his surroundings: He adores classical art, but his former classmates preferred modern art, which left him cold. The people he now meets are spontaneous and carefree in a way that he isn’t. He also shrinks from pursuing his dream of becoming a writer in a culture that he believes won’t appreciate his vision of beauty. Halfway through his trip, he agrees to meet an ex-girlfriend, Lauren, in Barcelona, but things go horribly awry; she’s now a management consultant in New York City, and she’s put off by Amir’s aimlessness, telling him he’s “grown…sad. And bitter.” At his lowest, he despairs of finding beauty anywhere, since “there was no beauty inside me.” Back in London, though, he visits a place where his love for art is reignited. Readers who’ve struggled to create and appreciate art in a consumerist age of instant gratification will find many of Amir’s observations familiar but relatable. Those who don’t share such a view, though, may struggle; ennui, after all, is a tricky thing to depict in writing. It’s difficult to have a narrator ask, “What has been the point of it all?” without potentially leading readers to wonder the same thing. Still, many readers will find it easy to connect with Amir’s passion for creative work, and the author’s lush descriptions of his favorite paintings are sure to spark interest. Rashid also describes the various settings authentically, clearly from the perspective of an engaged traveler.
A heartfelt tale of a quest to find meaning in art in a commercial world.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2026
ISBN: 9798218907280
Page Count: 226
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A classic Green portrait of young love…but here the fault is in our social media.
A relationship between young screen actors is magical, fraught, and relentlessly public in Green’s first novel for adults.
“Every movie romance needs an Obstacle, a reason the characters don’t naturally fall into each other.” In the off-screen romance between actors Juniper Castillo and Kai Laramie, the obstacle is a moving target. Juniper notices early on that as flirty and forward as Kai is, he seems “closed off to a romantic connection”; that turns out to be the tip of a very problematic iceberg. The two meet in the lobby of a Pittsburgh hotel where they will be spending the evening with Matthew Malone, the megastar playing Andy Warhol in a movie they’re about to begin shooting, Andy Warhol Never Gets Old. Kai has been cast as Andy’s intern, Juniper as a journalist who gets in over her head. This is Juniper’s first adult role after a long run as a Nickelodeon child star, and newcomer Kai’s first role of any kind. Green evokes in compelling detail all the phases and aspects of the film project, from the table read to the screening of the rough cut, from the social media fanfare to the public premiere and the press junket, moving back and forth between Juniper’s and Kai’s first-person perspectives. In a meeting with one of the ubiquitous publicists, Kai learns that somehow “the high school stuff” he never talks about—despite their growing inseparability and seemingly profound connection, he hasn’t even brought himself to share it with Juniper—has surfaced. Details emerge slowly, then blow up in the media; the book’s third act focuses on the destructive potential of celebrity culture in a climate that makes Warhol’s milieu look innocent by comparison. After a long break from writing fiction—his last two books were Everything Is Tuberculosis (2025) and The Anthropocene Reviewed (2021)—Green fills this novel with carefully observed details of Hollywood culture and characters, including running jokes about vegan cuisine, media training, and the way Kai’s agent constantly and boorishly consults his young female assistant on points of political correctness. Can he talk about “hot girls”? Can he quote T.S. Eliot? OK to say “dog vomit”?
A classic Green portrait of young love…but here the fault is in our social media.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2026
ISBN: 9780525426073
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2026
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