After a somewhat decorous launch, the charming characters get themselves a thrilling, moving plot. Crème de la WWII novel.
The dramatically intertwined fates of the residents of a Beaux Arts apartment building in Brussels, 1939-43.
The fiction debut of filmmaker and playwright Austen, this novel opens with a notarized roster of building residents, from the refugee seamstress Masha Balyayeva in the 5th floor maid’s room to the Sauvin and Raphaël families in 4L and 4R, to the building manager and preparer of this list, Jan Everard, on the ground floor. In an impressive display of Austen's storytelling skill, about a dozen of these individuals become point-of-view characters, unfurling an unusually colorful and intelligent, poignant and rich World War II novel, a special treat for the many fans of that genre. “To me, architecture is an idea about how we should live. A good architect creates a system of communication and relationships,” says Francois Sauvin, architect, in conversation with his neighbor, the art dealer Leo Raphaël—an idea that resonates through the novel in many ways. These two are the parents of Charlotte Sauvin, a gifted though colorblind painting student, and Julian Raphaël, aspiring filmmaker doing maths at Cambridge, childhood best friends and would-be lovers, if only Charlotte hadn’t met someone else at art school. In any case, all these lives are about to be derailed by the arrival of the Nazis, and as the novel opens in 1939, the Raphaël family has already disappeared overnight, along with their important painting collection (the mystery of the location of the paintings is one of myriad subplots Austen manages brilliantly). As the novel rotates among its plethora of first-person narrators, each with a distinctive voice, from the wry and cultured Sauvin to the horrible busybody Miss Hobert in 3R, the issue of how to live in terrible times is explored with insight, compassion, and steeliness. Among many ancillary pleasures is the ongoing attempt of the characters to make sense of the philosophy of Wittgenstein, and from his writing arises imagery that gives the novel’s fabric a furbelow of magical realism. Excellent banter also leavens the mix. In an exchange between horrible Hobert and architect Sauvin: “‘If I were you—’ she began. ‘And thank goodness, you’re not. If life has taught me anything, it’s that we need fewer men in this world.’”
After a somewhat decorous launch, the charming characters get themselves a thrilling, moving plot. Crème de la WWII novel.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780802164087
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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