Startlingly intimate, nauseatingly effective—a brilliant debut.
An unnamed narrator teaches English literature and searches for her own cathartic resolution at an all-girls boarding school in an East Coast tourist town in the offseason.
Our protagonist is 28 years old and, by her own reckoning, horribly broken. She has never achieved orgasm with a partner, she purges daily, and she has an obsessive crush on a young Josef Stalin (only the first of these three things feels to her like a problem). Her post is temporary, a yearlong replacement for a male teacher on leave for undisclosed but presumably nefarious reasons. Many things have happened for presumably nefarious reasons, the narrator is quick to reassure herself: “Occasionally the thought would enter my mind that the people who had violated me, brought me down, and ruined my life may have done so by accident, without sinister intent or design—but this was the worst thought I had ever had, and each time it emerged I would drag it quickly into the trash file of my brain, because that was my personality.” She’s teaching a course called “The Literature of the City,” the syllabus comprised entirely of Dickens’ Bleak House. In her internal monologue, she ruthlessly profiles her students, while outwardly, she fields their questions with plasticky, erudite, Adderall-fueled cheer. She ruminates on her parents, her mother a Soviet Jew who fled to Israel, her father a white Christian from Texas. She ruminates on pedophilia and ephebophilia, and on the boy who date-raped her in high school. She ruminates on the body, and sex, and the terrifying ramifications of love. Sharp grabs the contemporary fixation on trauma by the horns and rides it to a triumphant and illuminating first-place finish. The narrator’s voice is utterly singular: feverish, gross, assiduously literary, belligerently self-conscious, and, simultaneously, entirely deluded. Spending a few hundred pages with her is like taking a trip in the washing machine on spin cycle.
Startlingly intimate, nauseatingly effective—a brilliant debut.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781662603501
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Astra House
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
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
Great crime fiction.
An apparent suicide threatens to destroy an Irish farm town in the final volume of French’s Cal Hooper trilogy.
In the fictional western Ireland townland of Ardnakelty, “there’s a girl going after missing.” Soon young Rachel Holohan is found dead in the river. Shortly before, she had stopped at Lena Dunne’s home, and nothing had seemed amiss. The medical examiner determines she’d swallowed antifreeze, and he presumes she then fell from a bridge into the water. The medical examiner and the town agree she’d died by suicide. But there is far more to the plot: 16-year-old Trey Reddy thinks Tommy Moynihan murdered Rachel. Moynihan doles out favors and punishments to the local townsfolk, who know it’s best not to cross him. Now rumors spread that Moynihan wants land and has a secret plan to forcibly buy up parcels from the locals. A factory will be built, or a great big data center, or who knows what. If Tommy’s son, Eugene, can get elected to the local council, then compulsory purchase orders for land will follow, and the farms will disappear. Eugene, who’d been romantically involved with Rachel, is wonderfully described as “on the weedy edge of good-looking” and just fine as long as you “don’t have high expectations in the way of chins.” Lena is engaged to the American Cal Hooper, an ex-cop turned woodworker. They are “more or less raising” Trey, and these three core characters are drawn into the mystery of Rachel’s death and may have to face the looming clouds of civilizational change for Ardnakelty. Lena is chastised for “asking your wee questions all round the townland,” and Trey wants to quit school, against Cal’s advice. Finally, the story’s best line: “You can’t go killing people just because they deserve it.”
Great crime fiction.Pub Date: March 31, 2026
ISBN: 9780593493465
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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