An informative tale of a dom’s life with an ethnographer’s eye for Swedish culture.
A Soviet-born dominatrix navigates Stockholm’s suburbs in an erotic novel credited to Ana From Sweden.
Anastasia, aka Mistress Ana, is a Soviet-born single mother raising two children in Sweden—packing school lunches, planning dinners around supermarket sales, and excelling as a corporate financial analyst. Every other weekend, when her children visit their father, she drives across greater Stockholm to flog, dildo, and otherwise tend to the needs of a rotating cast of submissive men (and others). Framed as weekly chapters, her “diary” entries cover events in 2022 and ’23. Ana shows herself to be fixated on Gabriel, a handsome, evasive German expatriate who arrives as a submissive and gradually reveals himself as a subtler manipulator than any of her “bottoms.” Their dynamic involves her controlling the sessions and him controlling the emotional temperature between them; their story resolves with a twist that lands with quiet force. Charming, pathetic, and/or disturbing minor figures orbit around Ana’s and Gabriel’s lives, including the emotionally obtuse Sven, and Alpha Tobias, a married Swede who comically overestimates his own dominance. The book’s most moving chapter is a raw account of Ana’s father’s death, which reframes her sense of toughness and profound isolation. The protagonist’s dominance extends from her sex life to meal planning to her refusal to take sick days, as well as her cool contempt for (and partial participation in) her adopted culture’s emotional evasiveness. The novel is illuminating as a story of female dom behavior and grief, and it offers an outsider’s perspective on the peculiarities of her current home. Ana refuses payment on principle but is frank about the overhead cost of her work: how much equipment costs, the mileage accrued in traveling to neutral meeting points, and the logistical gymnastics of scheduling sessions into child-free weekends. The descriptions of the sex itself are relatively restrained; what preoccupies the protagonist is power and refusal. Readers seeking ultra-graphic transgression will be disappointed, but those curious about the delivery of steady desire (budgeted and on schedule) will find some satisfaction.
An informative tale of a dom’s life with an ethnographer’s eye for Swedish culture.Pub Date: May 12, 2026
ISBN: 9798901742082
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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