The spark of a story about the challenges of a creative life fails to catch flame.
A young man wrestles with his artistic soul at the retreat of an enigmatic art patron.
In 2017, as he reaches his mid-30s, writer Solomon Fields has abandoned a promising journalistic career for the financial security of a spirit-crushing job in the advertising industry and a relationship with a young woman named Charity whose life is bound up in the striving of materialist culture. He also feels trapped between the clashing worldviews of his maternal grandmother, Lina, a Holocaust survivor and advocate for seizing the pleasures of life and art, as she did after fleeing Berlin for New York City in 1940, and his mother, Charlotte, a Marxist-turned-conservative and passionate defender of Israel. At the invitation of a woman named Plume, he travels to a tropical island where her employer, the mysterious Sebastian Light, has created a haven for artists he calls The Coded Garden. When Sol arrives, he meets people with names like Crystalline and Siddhartha, at first observing and then participating in the retreat’s curious rituals, including one bacchanalian evening in a sweat lodge, all the while fending off persistent questions by the residents about whether he intends to write about them. There are recurring conversations about the meaning of art and frequent flashbacks to moments in Sol’s relationship with Lina, one that’s much closer than his with Charlotte. Though the questions Maksik raises are provocative ones, the novel too often has a static feel as Sol struggles to solve the riddle of whether Light is a sincere patron of aspiring artists, a pretentious charlatan, or something much more sinister. While the portrait of Sol’s colorful and outspoken grandmother is vibrant and entertaining, Light and his acolytes in The Coded Garden too often feel more like devices for advancing competing arguments than fully realized fictional characters.
The spark of a story about the challenges of a creative life fails to catch flame.Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-60945-751-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.
What hasn’t legendary legal eagle Grisham tried yet? How about a thriller about serial kidnapping and international terrorism.
When Paul and Chelsea Tanner disappear during a day trip on their Paris honeymoon, their abductors demand a ransom of $2 million from Chelsea’s wealthy parents, and a few days later the same sum from Paul’s much less well-heeled parents. After orthopedist Lowell Clayburn, Chelsea’s father, ponies up the ransom without breathing a word to the authorities, his daughter is promptly released. But even though Paul’s parents sell their home, liquidate their assets, and borrow money from the Clayburns to meet the kidnappers’ demands, the villains hold on to Paul anyway. Asked whether he’s ever seen such an outcome in a double kidnapping, FBI deputy director Andrew Strong tells Lowell: “No, this is a new one.” But it’s not, as Strong knows all too well; it’s the third such active case, all involving honeymooning couples whose bridegrooms had served in the armed forces. After masterfully drawing readers in with his bare-knuckle account of the Tanners’ abduction and the attempt by their families and the CIA to tell the lies required to keep caring friends and the rapacious press at bay, Grisham effortlessly switches gears to follow CIA agent Rae Claire Russo and Stuart Nash, a former Department of Justice prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay who agrees to marry her so they can serve as bait for the kidnappers, whose motives include justice and revenge as well as cold hard cash. So much for the imprisoned Paul’s wistful reflection that “hopefully, it was only about money.”
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9780385550543
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2026
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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