A sweet series of interconnected stories that ultimately fails to dazzle.
A series of quests in Tokyo turn out to be related.
It’s after midnight in Tokyo, and something is missing. Mitsuki Sawatari is at the prop warehouse, searching for an obscure artifact to meet a movie director’s exacting specifications. Mitsuki is tasked with tracking down whatever an artist requires, whether it’s out-of-season fruit or potentially nonexistent household appliances, no matter the hour. When the resourceful procurer is out of ideas, she turns to Matsui, a late-night cab driver and her confidante. Amiable and professional, Matsui is loath to divulge the details of his own quest to his customers. Still, when a young man who may or may not be a detective hops into his cab one night, his curiosity is piqued and he’s tempted to ask him for help. He discusses the matter with another customer, Kanako Fuyuki. Kanako’s job at the Tokyo No. 3 Consultation Room has taught her to answer all manner of questions. Though she can counsel a broken heart or find watercolors before daybreak, she too has a person from her past who cannot be found. The cast seems to grow exponentially with each chapter. Every interaction, however cursory, unlocks new pathways, catalyzes relationships, and nudges at fate. To Matsui, those connections happen, not despite the size of Tokyo, but because of it: “When you consider that every person has their own connections, that those networks spread out in a myriad of intricate ways, you realize that the greater the number of people, the greater the rate of the spread, like a contagious disease.” There’s something magical about these late-night fairy-tale interactions, every person unwittingly walking the city with the key to a stranger’s mystery in their pocket. As the coincidences grow in number, though, their impact turns feeble, and the final twists of fate underlying the premise have an air of resignation.
A sweet series of interconnected stories that ultimately fails to dazzle.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9798889660279
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
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
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