Uneven meditations on aging, regret, and loss.
In search of lost selves.
In three somber novellas, Aciman reprises themes of longing and memory that have informed his previous memoirs and fiction. “The Gentleman From Peru” is Raúl, who befriends eight young Americans at a resort in southern Italy. A healer and prognosticator, he reveals intimate, unsettling details about their lives, and uncanny revelations about himself. All people, he claims, contain multitudes: a shadow-self, a bygone self, a self living elsewhere, a self that beckons to the future. Raúl singles out Margot, the most skeptical of the group, meeting her for lunches, swims, and walks, and taking her to the house where his family spent summers. As Raúl unfurls the mystery of his connection to Margot, though, what might have been a haunting tale is flawed by a convoluted web of coincidence. Similarly, in “Room on the Sea,” a tender encounter between Paul, a retired lawyer, and Catherine, a soon-to-be-retired psychologist, is undermined by stilted interchanges. They meet in New York awaiting jury duty assignments, and over the course of lunches, coffees, walks on the High Line, and visits to art galleries, they confess frustration with their lives. Both in stale marriages, they seem to be, as Paul puts it, “waiting for something unforeseen to come along.” Catherine agrees: “What I find difficult these days,” she admits, “is being who I am, who I want to be, who I could become.” It’s a difficulty shared by the febrile young narrator of “Mariana,” enraged over having been abandoned after an intense, brief affair. She knew her lover was a womanizer, but he awakened in her a newly discovered passion that she does not want to let go. “It’s me I miss,” she writes to him, “the me I didn’t know existed”: a rapturous, ecstatic self.
Uneven meditations on aging, regret, and loss.Pub Date: June 24, 2025
ISBN: 9780374613419
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
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
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.
A struggling writer finds an unexpected muse when a mysterious man shows up at her cabin.
Petra Rose used to pump out a bestselling book every six months, but then the adaptation happened—that is, the disastrous film adaptation of her most famous book. The movie changed the book’s storyline so egregiously that fans couldn’t forgive her, and the ensuing harassment sent Petra into hiding and gave her a serious case of writer’s block. Petra’s one hope is her solo writing retreat at a remote cabin, where she can escape the distractions of real life and focus on her next book, a story about a woman having an affair with a cop. When officer Nathaniel Saint shows up at her cabin door, inspiration comes flooding back. Much like the character from Petra’s book, Saint is married, and he’s willing to be Petra’s muse, helping her get into her characters’ heads. Petra’s book is practically writing itself, but is the game she’s playing a little too dangerous? Does she know when to stop—and, more importantly, is Saint willing to stop? Hoover is no stranger to controversial movie adaptations and internet backlash, but she clarifies in a note to readers that she’s “just a writer writing about a writer” and that no further connections to her own life are contained in these pages—which is a good thing, because the book takes some horrifying twists and turns. Petra finds herself inexplicably attracted to Saint, even as she describes him as “such an asshole,” and her feelings for him veer between love and hate. The novel serves as a meta commentary on the dark romance genre—as Petra puts it, “Even though, as readers, we wouldn’t want to live out some of the fantasies we read about, it doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy reading those things.”
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781662539374
Page Count: -
Publisher: Montlake
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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