An immersive novel that delivers suspense with style and intelligence.
Five 40-something Harvard alumnae are forced to confront the consequences of the dangerous tradition they started as students.
The Circus is a yearly tag-and-kill game narrator Sara and her former roommates Allie, Bee, Dina, and Wesley began while undergraduates. The game has kept them “tether[ed]” to each other for 20 years, but it’s also kept them connected to the memory of Claudine, the artist roommate who died during their traumatic senior-year playing of the game. When the story begins, Sara sees a woman resembling Claudine on the streets of New York. Haunted by the sighting, she decides to opt out of the 20th anniversary playing of the Circus until the women get together and Wesley tells them about the money—a few thousand dollars they had chipped in decades earlier to be given to the winner of the final contest has grown to nearly $1 million. With consummate skill and acuity, Lee explores the complicated relationships among the five main characters, and all their dreams. Sara, a former banker and struggling photographer, longs for a place in the art world Claudine once dreamed of inhabiting. Her closest friend, Dina, is on the verge of tenure at Harvard after years of unspoken struggle. Bee, a lawyer, seeks political office but is dogged by a smear campaign launched by Claudine’s mother. Wesley, though born to wealth, secretly hates both her controlling father and her profession and leans “on drink and drugs to make her feel sated.” And Allie, a busy working mother of three and the group’s unofficial “peacemaker,” bears a quiet exhaustion she refuses to acknowledge. Each equates Circus prize money with freedom, but when one of them is attacked and nearly killed, secrets begin to emerge that change everything they believed about themselves and the ones they love. Fast paced and tightly plotted, Lee’s novel explores the complexities of female friendships against a quietly unsettling backdrop of privilege and ambition.
An immersive novel that delivers suspense with style and intelligence.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781668094006
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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