A moving drama of trauma and recovery.
When a former soldier in the British Army receives a letter inviting him to testify before a Belfast tribunal about a fatal incident that happened 30 years ago, during his tour of duty in Northern Ireland, the reawakened past threatens to destroy not only his hard-won sobriety, but also his newfound—and equally delicate—reconnection with his adult daughter.
Stephen Rose, at the age of 51, has a precarious hold on a quiet existence in Somerset, England. A recovering alcoholic with a wrecked marriage behind him, he is sustained by the reappearance in his life of his daughter, Maggie; by his doctor; and by the unobtrusive support of his Quaker brethren. Stephen knows, however, “how fragile it all is, how we have nothing under our feet, nothing that can be depended on.” A letter requesting his appearance before a Belfast tribunal investigating crimes committed during the Troubles reminds him of this, prompting him to begin the epistle to Maggie that constitutes this moving and insightful narrative. “My head is so crammed with the past,” he writes, “I sometimes have to hang on to things...to stop myself sliding down into it.” Stephen doesn’t slide; he plummets back into the memory of a summer day in Belfast in 1982 when a house search by the British Army turned deadly. The novel’s evocation of that time and place is cinematically clear, and the narrative revolves around that single dread-filled moment. But Stephen’s daily life, in all its middle-aged dreariness and incidental sweetness, is just as sharply drawn, as is his sojourn in the rehab center that sets him on his unsteady feet again and heading back to Belfast. “For a minute or two time circled,” he observes of his first night there. “I was a fifty-something-year-old lying in the filtered air of the hotel room, and a twenty-something sprawled post-patrol on the black plastic of an army mattress.” This immensely skillful novel suspends the reader, too, in that mysterious midway state.
A moving drama of trauma and recovery.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-60945-800-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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