A stirring, engrossing tale.
The story of a fateful night.
On December 7, 1935, two wealthy Tunisian families were torn apart when a young wife and mother was accused of adultery. In Tunisian novelist Ghenim’s captivating narrative, translated by Faiza and McNeill, 11 of the characters involved recall an event that has continued to haunt them for decades, revealing in their confessions and testimonies a tangled web of lies, suspicions, and betrayals, as well as a society pervaded by homophobia, classism, antisemitism, and racism. French colonialism sparked social unrest and political upheaval. Medicine was undermined by superstition; jinns, demons, and ghouls abounded; and the evil eye, it was believed, could be diverted by a Black child’s face. In a rabidly patriarchal society, the accused woman, Zbaida Rassaa, grew up in a relatively progressive family. Rare among Tunisian women, she and her sisters attended a French school, and to supplement their education, their father hired a young man to tutor them in Arabic and the Quran. That tutor, Tahar Haddad, a social reformer, wrote a book criticizing women’s oppression under Islamic law and advocating for women’s rights—a book that proved dangerously incendiary. For years, Zbaida and Tahar had been in love, but when he dared to ask for her hand, her father summarily married her off to Mohsen Ennaifer, the son of a staunchly conservative patriarch. “There’s nothing in this life more harmful to women than trying to imitate men,” Mohsen’s father declared about the folly of educating women. Although the urbane, cosmopolitan Mohsen shared Zbaida’s pleasure in theater and music, her feelings for Tahar were not quashed by marriage and motherhood. But were they ever lovers? Ghenim keeps the reader guessing, as she does her characters, with passion and anguish, disclosing devastating secrets of lives maliciously destroyed.
A stirring, engrossing tale.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9798889660507
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
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
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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