A richly textured portrait of a sometimes luminous, sometimes bleak romance.
A blind lawyer embarks on a stormy affair in this novel.
Blind since ninth grade, young attorney Nick Coleman moves to New York City at the start of the Ronald Reagan presidency to work for the Defenders Alliance, a nonprofit, legal-aid group. He handles appeals for indigent convicts—many of whom seem pretty guilty—and harbors an ambition to write fiction. In a writing class, he meets Caroline Sedlak, a sweet, cheerful, 20-something former leotard model who unobtrusively guides him around town and admires his stories as much as he does hers. Their relationship blossoms—they even manage to weather a stressful sojourn in France. But Nick can’t bring himself to commit, in part because of hints of something off-kilter in Caroline: a past relationship with a drug dealer; an imbroglio with a friend who occupies her apartment; a lack of ambition and direction; and sexual kinks, including her spanking fetish and initiation of a three-way that doesn’t go well. Nick and Caroline drift along until she unexpectedly gets pregnant, and their fraying bond spirals into madness and trauma. In this moody, atmospheric novel, Spratt, himself a blind lawyer, presents a remarkable portrayal of the life of a sightless New Yorker as Nick forms friendships with his hired readers, navigates the metropolis with the help of cohorts and strangers, and feels frustration at his exclusion from a world of shared images. (“There came a point that evening when their admiring asides about Central Park to the north and the sweep of the West Side out to the Hudson depressed me….I turned my attention to my plate, making food my external stimulus, and the moment passed without anyone seeming to notice.”) The author also unravels the slow processes by which friends, family members, and lovers change one another, writing in prose that’s psychologically exacting but infused with poetic resonance. (“I was haunted by an image of Caroline’s back as she trudged along dimly lit, endlessly turning passageways, their walls, floors and ceilings hacked out of subterranean rock. I yearned to catch up to her as she walked wearily but steadily away to declare I loved her.”) The result is a searing look at a troubled relationship.
A richly textured portrait of a sometimes luminous, sometimes bleak romance.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-953865-45-8
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Books Fluent
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
